If you don’t believe in heaven, then you have to try to find it here on earth.

And you won’t. But you will spend a lifetime looking for it.

You may think you found it for a minute, but it’s fleeting. There is no metaphor used more often as an illustration of heaven than sex, and there is no more apt metaphor for the illusion of an earthly heaven as well, because no matter how much sex you have, you still have most of the day where you are not doing it. After the ecstasy, the march of hours awaits. You might even say this is the difference between Pop music and the Blues, where Pop suggests that good feelings set you free, and the Blues (and Country) confirm the aftermath. Belinda Carlisle sings “You make heaven a place on earth” and Bill Withers reports from Act II of life, after you’ve made a lover your idol and she fails to live up to it, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone.”

What we substitute for God is the definition of an idol, and sex is the #1 greatest hit substitution of all time. It’s not the only thing. There are others: there is the next big thing, the exotic, the new, the sensory high, the perfect partner, the perfect society, the flawless family, a career, a new spouse, a life where we are never offended or hurt, or sports teams, or cars and boats. But all of these substitutes prove to be empty trophies in the long run. Why? Because they are substitutes, like Splenda or Equal instead of real cane sugar. They taste similar but they are artificial replacements that lack nourishment.

All of our substitutes for God are attempts to arrange the world in a way that we want it, in a struggle with how God set this world up for us to live in. Like it or not, we are here, and even the mystics and mindful have to come back to earth to eat and go to the bathroom. There is no substitute for the needs of both the body and the soul. This is why our relationship to God must be personal for the good of the soul, and our relationship to food, drink, sex, and all of creation must be personal for the good of the body.

You will never arrive at heaven here in this world. Good feelings do not equal heaven. I don’t care how hot she is; I don’t care how delicious the cake is; I don’t care how high the drug takes you: you will never find peace in any of those things. Billions have tried it. And billions have come down that mountain empty-handed. The illusions fade. The high wears off. Youth, beauty, power, and wealth fades. In the 21st century, nowhere is this illusion more obvious than in these areas: sports, careers, relationships, and entertainment. Everyone is squabbling over these scraps as if they bring eternal life.

So no, you will never arrive at heaven here in this world. But you can get a peek of it. It’s just not via the ways that the world promises, and the media today, most of all, from Disney to Victoria’s Secret to OnlyFans, pretends that sex is the key to unlocking heaven here on earth, but it’s a mirage in the desert that offers no living water to those who pursue it.

You need something more substantial, steady, rock-solid, and unchanging to provide the food for your life, your hope, and your peace. That food is from the Bread of Life, both divine and human. That peace comes through a relationship in prayer, in humility before God. Any other angle or technique and it’s not going to happen. As long as you try to be the potter instead of being the pot, as long as you try to shape everything into the shape you want instead of conforming your will to God’s, you will be searching for something that did not exist in the beginning, is not now, and never will be. There is only one that was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever.

I know many, many people, including myself, that have tried to find it the quick and easy way, and didn’t get what they wanted. Worse, many have got what they wanted and found that it wasn’t really what they were looking for. It’s interesting to watch people get what they want and then start chasing the next thing. I did this, repeatedly, for many years, until I finally landed on the one thing that fulfills all desire.

What’s interesting is that sex became a centerpiece of what we think of as “fulfillment” and chastity has become the dirty word. That which dare not speak its name is not not adultery or homosexuality or pornography. No.

It’s chastity.

Is anyone surprised by this? I can recall watching a thousand TV shows, from Doogie Howser to Desperate Housewives to Game of Thrones, and hearing a thousand songs, from Led Zeppelin to Snoop Dogg to Rihanna, that suggested that virginity and chastity were not something to celebrate but something to be mocked. Virginity was to be removed, as quickly as possible, like a malignant tumor.

That is the environment and message that anyone growing up with a TV in the last fifty years had to experience. Most men have a story of the first Playboy centerfold they witnessed, or other magazine, that opened the door to artificial concepts of women and sex. Upon sight, those images were embossed into the memory, seared like a steak on a blazing hot grill. You cannot unsee pornography. Millions of men are stuck in that rut forever after, because women have become objects of pleasure and nothing more. Today, thanks to science and technology, billions of children who are raised on iPhones have this capability to discover what cannot be unseen, and they can see it whenever they wish.

Here is my thesis on all of this.

Men have failed women.

More precisely, men have failed to grow up and take responsibility. We tend to think of education and career as signs of maturity, but these are false signals. A career is not “growing up.” Nice possessions do not indicate maturity. A mortgage does not make a man. A laundry list of experiences do not lead to wisdom. All of these things have been promoted as giving purpose to life, and none of them do that. These are all selfish things, which are not bad by themselves, but when placed as the highest thing lead to the abandonment and rejection of women, who become just another object to obtain, use, and discard.

If you read the history of the sexual revolution, it was not driven by women. This is probably the greatest myth of our era, more damaging than the UFO mythology, and less fun as well. The sexual revolution was driven by men, by so many Peter Pans who weren’t stuck in innocent childhood but were stuck in perpetual adultolescence, playing adult while acting like college sophomores forever after.

Here’s something you need to consider and examine very seriously to understand and de-program yourself from what you’ve been sold:

The birth control movement was not about women.

The abortion movement was not about women.

Neither of those movements was for the benefit of women.

It was always about men.

It was about men getting away with treating women like objects, like single-use throwaway humans, and taking no responsibility for the sex that they wanted to have without acting as fathers and husbands. That’s the dirty secret of the whole sexual revolution. It wasn’t about freedom for women. It was about freedom for men.

The fact that everyone bought into it doesn’t justify it any more than slavery was justified by bad-faith interpreters. No, the argument of “Fifty million Elvis fans can’t be wrong” doesn’t hold up, especially when it comes to issues of faith and morals. The fact that Americans and Europeans buy the modern identity lies just illustrates how well the sales pitch and demonstration was, but we are now all witness to the real world application and the disaster it has brought over the past fifty or seventy years. As I’ve mentioned in this series, there are three parts to a sale: the pitch, the demonstration, and the real world application. The pitch and demo looked good, but now we see the fruit of buying a bad product. And this should be where the second sale fails. It should fail, because the product and idea that was sold didn’t work.

When the first sale had a good pitch and initial demonstration, but the product is a flop in the real world, the second sale should never happen unless the buyer is a sucker. We will find out in the Generation after Z if the suckers are really suckers, or if the world turns back to the truth. One thing is certain, written about from Plato’s Republic to the Book of Judges to The Fall of Ancient Rome to 20th Century Nationalism: calamity must come from a bad idea that has taken hold of a people before they are awakened to repentance. There is spiritual combat on a personal level and a group level, and of course the only way to win on both levels is to fight the spiritual warfare starting with oneself.

Now, a good salesperson can ram that second sale through. They often do. I’ve watched them do it to customers who should absolutely ditch a software product. But eventually, with a bad product, the employees, buyers, and users revolt. No, let me rephrase that. They don’t so much revolt as simply withdraw support. Employees leave the company, buyers write bad reviews, and users find a new method of doing their work. In other words, in seeking the good, people go elsewhere when bad ideas are selected and insisted upon. You can see this today in public schools and police forces, where bad ideas have been selected by the governors and administrators. It is rare to talk to a teacher or police officer who is not praying for the day they reach twenty years of service so that they can lock in their pension, and then quit, or find a new way to increase their years in government service. They are withdrawing. As we are made in the image and likeness of God, we act in ways that mimic God without even knowing it - in some things. In choosing sin, we do not act like God, but in pursuing the good, true, and beautiful, we do act like God, and why is this? Because what we are really pursuing is God himself. Heaven. To be with God - that’s the whole point of all of our actions, we just don’t usually realize it.

For those who think God “causes” bad things to happen, he does not. He acts just like employees, buyers, and users of a bad product. He simply withdraws and allows the chaos to re-enter. Recall how the Bible opens, where God stretches his hand out over the “watery chaos.” We are never that far from chaos, and all that keeps us from it is God’s hand. The universe could be snapped out of existence now if God merely tweaked the gravitational constant by a hundredth. Many do not understand what the Great Flood story is about, because we don’t teach it properly to children, so we just think it’s some folklore about animals and a localized flood in the middle east. But it’s not about that, not at the deeper level.

God does not send the flood, he simply withdraws his protection over sinful people, because they have adopted a substitute for God, and since they refuse to turn back to him, he simply stops holding the chaos back. The deluge happens on its own as he no longer graces creation with order. He allows the full disorder to occur again - the watery chaos. I didn’t understand what “watery chaos” meant until my near-drowning in the Ironman race, but once I was floating in a stormy lake, the penny dropped on the meaning. This withdrawing of God also happens at the Tower of Babel story, where God withdraws from sinful people and scatters them. He doesn’t send us sin, we create it, and then he lets it play out, like the loving father in the Prodigal Son. God says, “Yes, I’ve given you free-will, so if you want to drink and w***e around, you can, but you can’t do it with my blessing, so you’re on your own.” Notice that the father in the Prodigal Son gives the wild child his money and the child leaves - he doesn’t bring the prostitutes into his father’s house. God remains perfect, and we go chasing foolish substitutes. So you could say that either we withdraw from God, or he withdraws from us, but either way, he is good and loving and the choice of rejection via substitution is always, always one that we make.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com