Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox Telos

In this conversation, Stewart Alsop sits down with Ken Lowry to explore a wide sweep of themes running through Christianity, Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox traditions, the nature of spirits and telos, theosis and enlightenment, information technology, identity, privacy, sexuality, the New Age “Rainbow Bridge,” paganism, Buddhism, Vedanta, and the unfolding meaning crisis; listeners who want to follow more of Ken’s work can find him on his YouTube channel Climbing Mount Sophia and on Twitter under KenLowry8.

Check out this GPT we trained on the conversation

Timestamps

00:00 Christianity’s tangled history surfaces as Stewart Alsop and Ken Lowry unpack Luther, indulgences, mediation, and the printing-press information shift.
05:00 Luther’s encounters with the devil lead into talk of perception, hallucination, and spiritual influence on “main-character” lives.
10:00 Protestant vs. Catholic vs. Orthodox worship styles highlight telos, Eucharist, liturgy, embodiment, and teaching as information.
15:00 The Church as a living spirit emerges, tied to hierarchy, purpose, and Michael Levin’s bioelectric patterns shaping form.
20:00 Spirits, goals, Dodgers-as-spirit, and Christ as the highest ordering spirit frame meaning and participation.
25:00 Identity, self, soul, privacy, intimacy, and the internet’s collapse of boundaries reshape inner life.
30:00 New Age, Rainbow Bridge, Hawkins’ calibration, truth-testing, and spiritual discernment enter the story.
35:00 Stewart’s path back to Christianity opens discussion of enlightenment, Protestant legalism, Orthodox theosis, and healing.
40:00 Emptiness, relationality, Trinity, and personhood bridge Buddhism and mystical Christianity.
45:00 Suffering, desire, higher spirits, and orientation toward the real sharpen the contrast between simulation and reality.
50:00 Technology, bodies, AI, and simulated worlds raise questions of telos, meaning, and modern escape.
55:00 Neo-paganism, Hindu hierarchy of gods, Vedanta, and the need for a personal God lead toward Jesus as historical revelation.
01:00:00 Buddha, enlightenment, theosis, the post-1945 world, Hitler as negative pole, and goodness as purpose close the inquiry.

Key Insights

1. Mediation and information shape the Church. Ken Lowry highlights how the printing press didn’t just spread ideas—it restructured Christian life by shifting mediation. Once information became accessible, individuals became the “interface” with Christ, fundamentally changing Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox trajectories and the modern crisis of religious choice.
2. The Protestant–Catholic–Orthodox split hinges on telos. Protestantism orients the service around teaching and information, while Catholic and Orthodox traditions culminate in the Eucharist, embodiment, and liturgy. This difference expresses two visions of what humans are doing in church: receiving ideas or participating in a transformative ritual that shapes the whole person.
3. Spirits, telos, and hierarchy offer a map of reality. Ken frames spirits as real intelligible goals that pull people into coordinated action—seen as clearly in a baseball team as in a nation. Christ is the highest spirit because aiming toward Him properly orders all lower goals, giving a coherent vertical structure to meaning.
4. Identity, privacy, and intimacy have transformed under the internet. The shift from soul → self → identity tracks changes in information technology. The internet collapses boundaries, creating unprecedented exposure while weakening the inherent privacy of intimate realities such as genuine lovemaking, which Ken argues can’t be made public without destroying its nature.
5. New Age influences and Hawkins’ calibration reflect a search for truth. Stewart’s encounters with the Rainbow Bridge world, David Hawkins’ muscle-testing epistemology, and the escape from scientistic secularism reveal a cultural hunger for spiritual discernment in the absence of shared metaphysical grounding.
6. Enlightenment and theosis may be the same mountain. Ken suggests that Buddhist enlightenment and Orthodox theosis aim at the same transformative reality: full communion with what is most real. The difference lies in Jesus as the concrete, personal revelation of God, offering a relational path rather than pure negation or emptiness.
7. Secularism is shaped by powerfully negative telos. Ken argues that the modern world orients itself not toward the Good revealed in Christ but away from the Evil revealed in Hitler. Moving away from evil as a primary aim produces confusion, because only a positive vision of the Good can order desires, technology, suffering, and the overwhelming power of modern simulations.