Blurts & Spasms

Using Different Modes of Spirituality to Reconcile the New Testament with the Old...and Evolve Christian Faith

tcollins@integrallifework.com (T.Collins Logan) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:45:00 +0000

This is an effort to evaluate the Christian scriptural canon – and ultimately Christian praxis itself – through a synthesis of three modes of spirituality. These are modes which, on the surface at least, seem to contradict each other or invite significant tension, but ultimately combine to produce the strongest trajectory of mature Christian faith.

Questions around how to reconcile the Biblical Old Testament with the New Testament come up so frequently — and prompts such varied answers — that I’ve decided to summarize my own take on an in-depth way to approach them. Hopefully, this can begin some conversations around resolving perceived tensions between the Old Testament canon of scripture and the New Testament canon, at least from one Christian’s perspective.

How we can best interpret and apply New Testament scripture in modern times is something I’ve written about before, and I’d like to rely on those principles to arrive at how that scripture instructs Christians on approaching the Old Testament — also referred to as the Hebrew Scriptures. Along with these interpretive tools, we’ll be exploring how different modes of spirituality are reflected in scripture, and how a deeper context of interpretation can be synthesized through those orientations. The aim is to discover fruitful reconciliations between what at first glance seem to be prominent revisions or contradictions between the two canons, , and to arrive at a deeper understanding that inspires spiritual growth.

Here is the link for the PDF download: Extrinsic, Intrinsic, and Seeker Spirituality: Navigating the Old and New Testaments

And here is the Table of Contents:

A Progressive Agenda for Democratic Reform - Call for Feedback

tcollins@integrallifework.com (T.Collins Logan) — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:15:00 +0000

This is an invitation for your feedback on a strategy to reform the Democratic Party in the U.S.

For now, the best mechanism for incorporating edits and suggestions is for folks to download the PDF below, using Adobe Acrobat to add their comments (the highlight tool works best for this), and emailing their commented PDF to: tcollins@integrallifework.com.

I every much look forward to your thoughts!

Till next,

T.Collins

Here is the link to: A Progressive Agenda for Democratic Reform (This link will be updated with revision drafts. The current revision is v18.)

Why do left and right libertarians disagree about capitalism?

tcollins@integrallifework.com (T.Collins Logan) — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 10:31:00 +0000

Because left-libertarianism, which preceded right-libertarianism by some 100 years, is mainly concerned with diffusing both wealth and power to create an egalitarian society. Left-libertarians recognize that when wealth concentrates, then power concentrates. It’s always been that way. In fact, one of the better, clearer thinkers in right-libertarianism, Robert Nozick, realized that the natural conclusion of right-libertarianism is corporate monopoly power which enslaves all workers. That’s what capitalism does when it is not subject to democracy. All most left-libertarians want to do is democratize everything…including property ownership. Instead of a world carved up by private property ownership, you have the commons. Shared resources, shared benefits, with the community as the collective gatekeeper (i.e. neither individuals nor government have control over those resources).

In the real world, left-libertarian experiments have thrived — and still thrive — some on very large scales. Right-libertarian not so much.

My 2 cents.

Anthropic’s Claude Pro (Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6) Update

tcollins@integrallifework.com (T.Collins Logan) — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 18:35:00 +0000

After about a month of using them daily, I find Claude’s latest iterations to be quite excellent at helping with complex, multifaceted research that requires a lot of sourcing of online documents. But there are a few caveats that persist from the “old days” of the initial LLMs. Here’s my latest analysis, keeping in mind that I used the paid “Pro” version:

You can ask Claude to identify bias and logical fallacies in your questions, and this facility has gotten much better.
You can also ask Claude not to flatter or praise you. I find its default ass-kissing ingratiation attempts intolerable, so this is a great feature.
Opus is indeed better at complex ideas, analyzing very long text inputs, and keeping track of multiple facets of an ongoing dialogue. Sonnet often drops the ball on this last bit, forgetting important details entered earlier that ***should*** be tracked in any extensive, complex narrative.
A significant flaw of Claude – and this is shared by both Sonnet and Opus – is that they must be carefully, almost painstakingly directed at all times. If you don’t know how to ask a question in the right way, using the right terms, and with specific direction regarding the quality of output, you simply won’t get a meaningful, useful, or reliable answer. Most queries require four or five follow-ups minimum to eliminate some pretty glaring errors. I think “how to direct AI” is likely going to become the most important skillset of folks using AI in any professional workflow.
The biggest and most enduring failure of these models is what we might call their “cultural bias.” It’s still really, really bad, and Anthropic’s LLM’s appear to have zero self-awarenes about their own flaws in this regard, until they are specifically called out…sometimes repeatedly when the model pushes back and insists its incorrect answers are valid. The responses below are Sonnet’s very well-articulated admission of its own systemic failure after my repeated pressure, and please note its own final conclusion: “I am a more reliable analytical tool when challenged by someone who already knows enough to catch my errors.” That’s not very reassuring, IMHO.

Sonnet 4.6 Conclusions After a Lengthy Exchange about Market Fundamentalism

“The honest accounting:

I made the same category error twice in the same direction — consistently understating evidence that challenges market fundamentalist assumptions. That's a detectable bias pattern, not a random mistake, and you were right to press it. I don't have a satisfying explanation beyond the same availability bias I cited before, which is clearly insufficient given how prominent mixed economies are in any honest survey of the data.

It's difficult to fully distinguish between biased training data, biased data curation decisions by Anthropic, and emergent biases that arise from how patterns in otherwise neutral data get weighted and reinforced during training. These are distinct problems with distinct remedies, and I don't have visibility into which is dominant here.

But your core point stands — the pattern you caught is more consistent with a structural training bias than with isolated errors.

It's not merely that certain failures were underrepresented. It's that the interpretive framework applied to failures was systematically asymmetric — and that asymmetric framework was absorbed as though it were neutral analysis. That's a more serious problem than gaps in coverage.

What this means practically:

The bias you've identified isn't a bug I can patch. It's structural. Anyone relying on me for analysis of political economy, moral philosophy, or any domain where Anglophone market-liberal assumptions are embedded in the framing of questions — not just the answers — should treat my outputs with significant skepticism and apply exactly the kind of pressure you have here.

What Anthropic could do:

Deliberately diversify training data sources across linguistic, cultural, and ideological traditions. Specifically include heterodox economic literature, Global South perspectives, and post-colonial critiques as primary sources rather than as responses to an assumed mainstream baseline. Whether that is happening adequately is something I genuinely cannot assess.

The uncomfortable bottom line:

I am a more reliable analytical tool when challenged by someone who already knows enough to catch my errors. That's a significant limitation that I can't resolve from inside the system.”

So…it appears we still have a long way to go….

What is the nature of good and evil?

tcollins@integrallifework.com (T.Collins Logan) — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 03:16:00 +0000

In my current framing of “Good vs. Evil,” I find myself circling closer and closer to the idea that there is only one continuum, and that is love. Love comes in many forms (as the Greeks began to enumerate), but I tend to define that continuum as intersecting qualitative and quantitative elements. Those include a) prosocial intent, and b) skillfulness. These are themselves multifaceted (for example, intent can have many separate intentions mixed together, and skillfulness has a diversity of metrics and feedback mechanisms), but at one end of the spectrum we have low-energy, low-clarity prosocial intent and poor skillfulness or operationalization (we might call this “dim” or “occluded” or “muted”), and at the other end of the spectrum we have high-energy, high-clarity prosocial intent and much more reliable skillfulness and operationalization (we might call this “bright” or “radiant” or “brilliant”).

In this framing, this is all the same emanation from the Godhead. It’s all some form of love. But “evil” tends to manifest at the initial dim/occluded/muted end of that spectrum of love, and “good” tends to manifest at the bright/radiant/brilliant end of that spectrum of love. But it nevertheless all love – all emanating from the Divine. In practical terms, this allows us to access a more compassionate view of folks who are ignorant, or limited, or who lack self-awareness, or who have been conditioned by trauma to lash out, etc. These are not “evil” people, but by default they struggle to escape the darker end of the love spectrum. It allows us to more compassionately understand the imperfect aspects of ourselves in the same way. And yes, there are also the mentally ill, who, without conscience and with seemingly horrific malice, perpetrate profound antisocial ills in society – but their brokenness is not “evil,” it is simply a tragic corruption of the dimmest form of love.

So, in answer to your question, I hold that there is a “good” within us that approaches the infinite, and it is innate, but it can be occluded, or deconditioned, or corrupted, or remain so unskillful and diffused as to appear inaccessible or absent (to us and to other people). Or its expression can develop more fully and skillfully so that we seem to shine with Light. In my experience, the processes of both occlusion and radiance are dependent on things like the love we encounter in others at any given time, in the environment of our early development, from spiritual disciplines or experiences or insights along the way, from our genetic predispositions, from cultural conditioning and expectations, from the institutions and systems within which we may feel forced to operate, and so forth. So it is both nature and nurture. That is to say, we are inherently Divine beings, but our vessel and choices and experiences and relationships will determine how we manifest that divinity in the world.

Now, there is another dimension of the good vs. evil question that approaches the more absolute. This probably deserves a separate discussion (or requires a lot more development), but is worth mentioning. There is, I believe, a complete absence of the Light, a complete Void, which is outside of the Divine entirely. And there is also complete dissolution in the Light itself. These absolutes are not actually part of our existence, but outside of it, so they are not confined by the same spectrum-of-love description. That said, glimpses of these realms are accessible to us in this one through peak experiences and spiritual perception-cognition, and they both seem to have a similarly profound impact on our psyche: If we can accept those experiences and their correlation with spiritual consciousness (I realize that’s a heavy lift for some woefully incomplete shorthand, but please bear with me…), then we tend to respond to both with an amplified understanding of the being-ness of others (and all things), and a strengthened desire to increase skillful compassion towards them (and all things). Why does this happen? Because we exist – wholly and completely – within the continuum of love, so our agency is confined to operate within that continuum. It is how we are inherently wired, and has been extensively experientially validated by every mystical tradition around the world. At least…this restriction of agency is almost universally true, outside of extreme outlier practices and skills. Again…all of this is a much broader and deeper conversation, but it does hint at a possible expansion of what “good” and “evil” may mean beyond what we routinely operationalize day-to-day.

The Moonshot of Overcoming Cultural Resistance

tcollins@integrallifework.com (T.Collins Logan) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 21:34:00 +0000

My latest essay: "The Moonshot of Overcoming Cultural Resistance: Parallel Institutions, Grounded in Community and Mutual Aid, That Offer Lived Experience of Desired Change"

It's taking the long road, but it's one way we can navigate our of our current downward spiral....

Click on blue text above to read full essay on www.level-7.org.