Free Republic

In a game of Russian roulette with a standard Colt revolver, the chances of instant death are one-in-six. Terrifyingly, that’s the same as the odds of humanity being wiped out within 75 years – everyone dead in a cataclysmic and total breakdown of civilisation, according to Oxford University futurologist Toby Ord, an expert on the threat of artificial intelligence. Does it sound impossibly bleak? His colleague Nick Bostrom is more pessimistic still. He rates the possibility of human extinction by the next century as one in four. Pulitzer prize-winning writer Jared Diamond is even less hopeful, predicting our species’ chances...

n the Gnostic myth, the Cosmic Mind for example, is a completely perfect therefore alien and mysterious Divine One Substance, an “immeasurable light which is pure, holy and immaculate.” (Apocryphon of John) In addition to this supreme god of nature there are other, lesser divine beings in the Pleroma, a heavenly astral dimension of the universe. (2)One of the lesser beings is an evil, malformed, ignorant deity sometimes called Yaldabaoth who mistakenly believes he is the only god. Gnostics identify Yaldabaoth as the Holy Creator God of the Old Testament who created the world, life, consciousness, angels and ensouled human...