The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast · Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, Rose de Castellane, Gregory Mill

Episode 141, 'Deadly Sins' with Elizabeth Oldfield (Part I - Fully Alive)

March 23, 2025·37 min·3 clips

Elizabeth Oldfield recounts a teenage prayer that led to an inexplicable encounter she compares to a psychedelic trip.

The starting point is old-fashioned moral vocabulary. Pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth are not handled as private flaws or leftover religious baggage. The live question is flourishing. The host asks whether these old categories still help describe lives bent by disconnection, distraction, and damaged ways of loving. Elizabeth brings a rescue attempt. Her book Fully Alive uses the sins to examine practices and principles, not to run a condemnation machine. That difference keeps the conversation theological without turning it into scolding, and philosophical without treating human habits like tidy classroom examples. Then belief starts to wobble. Elizabeth says she was a bad atheist because unbelief never quite stuck. Meaning kept showing up in too many places. The Bible becomes the problem. She knew the comforting passages from evangelical settings, then found a stranger, sharper shelf while working on a BBC program. Joshua, Judges, Chronicles, and Kings shift the whole feel of the book. War, possible genocide, tribal bloodshed, rape, and material nobody markets as cheerful inspiration all come crashing in. So the deconversion is Bible based. The book she had been handed stopped making sense, and the authority she had attached to it seemed to fall apart. Her response is almost funny: God is not really there, she does not need God, and maybe irony and cynicism can carry the weight. The conversation keeps poking at extremes. Near the end, reason is not thrown out, but it does start to look risky when it is the only authority allowed in the room. An unnamed intellectual hero sits in the background, and the hosts turn that into a guessing game about dice, calculation, and what gets lost when reason excludes everything else.

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