What Have We Lost? with James Tunney

Summary

Barrister, author and artist James Tunney joins Jeffrey Mishlove to argue that while the West has advanced technologically, it has regressed spiritually by discarding the medieval Catholic worldview of soul, spirit and a participatory cosmos. He traces this loss through Marxism, the X Club's 'imperial' scientism, modern psychology, and the Protestant Reformation, which he says closed off belief in purgatory, prayer for the dead and spirit interaction. Tunney suggests that near-death experiences and a Gen Z return to religion may signal a post-secular rebalancing, even as AI developers try to create a new god.

Key takeaways

• 1Tunney claims Geoffrey Hinton gratuitously asserts humans are not special and there is no God, revealing a materialist bias at the root of AI technoscience.
• 2The X Club, linked to Thomas Huxley in mid-19th-century Britain, is described as an 'entryist' organization that deliberately set out to abolish the soul from public discourse, anticipating H.G. Wells and the New World Order.
• 3Mishlove recalls that a past APA president, possibly Nicholas Cummings, said modern psychology's role was to eliminate all religions.
• 4Tunney cites Erwin Panofsky's 'Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism', C.S. Lewis's 'The Discarded Image', Eamon Duffy's 'The Stripping of the Altars', and Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 'Knowledge and the Sacred'.
• 5He argues that Freemasons' claims to have secretly encoded alchemical symbols in Catholic cathedrals are 'nonsense', and notes Trotsky said Masons reproduce Catholic ritual.
• 6Charles Murray's 2025 book 'Taking Religion Seriously' is cited as an atheist's turn toward belief in survival of the soul, prompted by near-death experiences and parapsychology; the Garabandal 'illumination of conscience' prophecy is linked to rising NDE reports.

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

There was a particular constellation of ideas that came from the Western admixture of its indigenous base, the Hebraic base, the Hellenistic base, and other ones as well, the Hermetic base as well that came in through Catholic Italy. And that admixture, with the Roman base as well, that admixture was taken in structural terms and philosophical terms and in theological terms and united in a worldview, which was not an elitist worldview. It wasn't an esoteric worldview. It was a worldview that was made available in the architecture, in the paintings, in the daily life, in the structure of towns in Europe. It was an ordering of the universe in which people participated. They were not mere observers. So there was a whole view. Keep watching to learn more. The New Thinking Allowed Magazine Issue 10 on UFOs and UAP is now ready for free download, and you can also order beautiful printed copies. Go to newthinkingallowed.org. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here, we are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at cihs.edu. Book 4 in the new Thinking Allowed Dialogue Series is Charles T. Tartt, Seventy Years of Exploring, Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to explore what we in the Western world have lost over time. ...

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Oct 23, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.