I've listened to half of the interview by now on video. Interesting discussion between the two of you. Here are my reactions thus far--
Psychotherapy is definitely NOT scientific. I have a BS in Psych and an MA in Counseling, and no one ever accused us therapists of being scientists. Scientists are the rat testers, the operant conditioners, the measurers of this and that, often involving electric shocks and little bits of food. The therapists are not in the least bit scientific. They are usually more akin to skilled artists or priests, depending on their therapeutic modality and innate sensitivities.
Regarding mystical experiences as a valid form of sensing the presence of God or Christ--I'm assuming that direct mystical experience counts for something around here? If only as corroborating anecdotal evidence? If so, then there are an awful lot of people who call themselves "Born Again Christians Baptized in the Holy Spirit" who have had countless mystical experiences, myself included. I wouldn't be so quick to discount the validity of their mystical encounters in this world of open-minded consciousness researchers. (read a nice little article I wrote about a vision of Jesus and the between place:
https://asimpleexplanation.blogspot.com/2011/02/personal-note-childhood-dream-of-god.html )
Is it possible for the Christian mythos to be in any way truthful and factual? Sure. But I'd say the Christian mythos that most closely resembles reality as we know it would be the Gnostic mythos, and it was weeded out of the canonical Bible and thrown away in 300 AD. I used to think the Pope and Emperor weeded it out for the good of the faithful, but now I realize they weeded it out for their own power to reign supreme. Yes, they left a lot of good mythos in, as Jim Smith points out above, charity arises in humankind through Judaism and Christianity, at least as I understand it, but they weeded out the logos that makes the religion reasonable. So no wonder it looks superstitious and shallow. Thank God the Gnostic truths were buried out in the Nag Hammadi desert and resurrected during WW2. Ha--spoken like a true believer; listen to me say, my superstition is not shallow--ha.
I've been chewing this particular Gnosis over for about 50 years. See if this intrinsically coherent Gnostic Christian narrative is more satisfying to the Skeptik than the Orthodox view. I think it is, but it is no less Theistic, so if that's your quibble, I can't help you there. Here goes:
According to the Tripartite Tractate Nag Hammadi book, we start with an underlying matrix of consciousness. (So, right off the bat, this ancient book acknowledges transcendent, undifferentiated consciousness.) This illimitable consciousness thought of a particularity, which became a fractal representation of the illimitable. This first fractal is called The Son. The Son immediately fanned out like rays from a light into an infinite number of particularities. The moment the particularities became conscious, because they, too, were fractals of the illimitable consciousness, they named themselves in order to know themselves. This naming had the effect of sorting themselves into a hierarchy of names, stations, ranks, positions, and powers. These are the Aeons, also known as the Pre-existent Church and the Elect, also called the First Order of Powers. The Aeons live in a place called the Pleroma, or the ALL, or the Fullness. Altogether, the Aeons of the Fullness represent the infinity of potentialities. They are of one accord, being simply the names of the qualities of their Father, who is called the Son of the originating One. This is the entire sum of the hidden knowledge of Gnosis that so frightened the Emperor and the Pope. We can catch glimpses of this cosmology, the Father, the Son, and the Aeons, in the canonical Bible, but not enough was left intact to make sense of it. Now we know.
The Aeons of the Fullness dream one dream that they ALL share. This is the dream of Paradise, which was the original Thought that set the whole ball rolling. The Aeons dream exactly as we dream, except they all share the same dream. This is a place we are also familiar with, we humans in our dreams. It is the foretaste of Heaven. It is the fragrance of Utopia. It is the place where we can fly. We all know it, according to the Tripartite Tractate.
Then various things happen, an Aeon overreaches and wisdom becomes presumptuous thought. The Aeon Falls from the perfection of the Fullness. The Aeon breaks apart and little pieces of it become the seed of our material universe. The Aeons above in the Fullness dream up a Second Order of Powers that carry their Aeonic traits into this material plane. All archaea of our planet are Second Order Powers. It was decided that all of the Aeons would come to earth to clean up the mess and restore perfection to this creation that occurred because of the Fall. Every thing on earth contains innumerable Aeons instantiating consciousness into the mud. Our fables and Bible stories tell fractal stories of all lives; the same stories over and over and over again. They are real and they are metaphors. We are the children of angels; we are angels. We are all Fallen and need redemption.
The Christ Consciousness, according to the Tripartite Tractate, is the Third Order of Powers. The Christ Consciousness was designed to be the correcting algorithm for the Second Order Powers who'd been ensnared in the deception of the material delusion, also called the Imitation. Imitation of what? Imitation of the Paradise dreamed by the Aeons of the Fullness. The Christ is like a computer clean-up code that must be inserted in order to do its work of Redemption. Every soul needs to remember their eternal heritage in order to shake off this material plane and return to the Fullness.
Here's where Jesus of Nazareth comes in--this was a human who carried the perfected Third Order Power of Christ into our material plane, and co-existed with the human genome donated from the mother. Fully God. Fully Human. First Adam perfectly incarnated. In this manner, all of the infinity of the ALL was at last incarnated, completing the cycle of coming one-by-one to our material plane. It wasn't so much Christ's sacrifice on the cross that took away the sins of the world, but his incarnation as a human and his personal Aeonic experience of separation, despair, and death. I think the emphasis is on the cross as a shape of top-to-bottom/spirit-to-mud and side-to-side/ALL inclusive.
And what it means to be Redeemed by Christ as a pre-requisite to going to Heaven, well, yes, the Christ incarnated for the salvation of the ALL, and that includes us, but also the dogs and cats, and the trees and grasses. You name it. Jesus saves.
So, how does this strike you? Too much for one post? You can read a much more detailed and coherent account (fully illustrated) in my own book called "The Gnostic Gospel Illuminated". It's all there.