Mythologizing the Bible

Our brains evolved for small tribes, but our problems are global. Social mastery means deliberately expanding our moral circle beyond our natural one.

Paul’s statement in our reading from Romans this week, that “none of us lives for oneself”, is something that sounds almost tailor-made for the modern world. Climate change, pandemics, global supply chains, economic inequality, migration, war… we now have overwhelming evidence that what happens to people thousands of miles away can eventually affect people sitting at our own kitchen tables. For perhaps the first time in human history, we can actually see just how interconnected we are.

There’s just one problem: our brains weren’t built for this world. Human social cognition developed in relatively small communities where cooperation meant dealing with people we actually knew, while outsiders were a lot easier to distrust or ignore. Today, we’re asking those same brains to care about eight billion people, and then we’re surprised when we retreat into political tribes, national borders, and online echo chambers. What if becoming a genuinely global citizen isn’t something that comes naturally at all but a skill we have to deliberately learn and practice?

So, let’s dive into that… in this BONUS episode of Afterthoughts!

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If forgiveness is motivated by fear of divine punishment, is it really moral maturity? The Gospels complicate the modern image of a purely loving Jesus.

There’s a version of Jesus that almost everyone seems to know, including people who’ve never opened a Bible. He’s the gentle moral teacher who tells us to love our enemies, turn the other cheek, forgive endlessly, and replace the wrath and violence of the Old Testament with compassion and grace. I’ll admit… that’s a very appealing picture of Jesus and there’s certainly material in the Gospels to support it.

But there’s other material you don’t tend to see on inspirational posters or coffee mugs. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus also threatens people with Gehenna, fire, outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and—in the passage from Matthew that we read in this week’s main episode—being handed over to torturers.

What happens to the “Gospel of Love” when we stop cherry-picking the comforting passages and read the threats alongside them? And more importantly, if we’re trying to develop genuine moral mastery, can fear of divine punishment ever really get us there?

So, let’s dive into that… in this episode of Afterthoughts!

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Mastery isn’t perfection. It’s learning to govern ourselves, recognize our impact on others, and deliberately practice the person we want to become.

Have you ever thought about what it actually means to master something? We usually associate mastery with expertise; becoming exceptionally good at a skill, reaching the top of our field, or accomplishing something difficult. But what if some of the most important things we can master aren’t external skills at all? What if excellence is also about learning to manage our anger, recognizing how our choices affect other people, and deliberately practicing the values we’ve chosen even when resentment and scorekeeping would be easier?

As we reflect on the readings for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we’ll explore how mastery begins with managing our emotions, grows when we recognize that excellence is bigger than ourselves, and develops through deliberate practice rather than perfection.

In this episode, we’re asking an important question: What does it actually mean to practice mastery? Together we’ll explore why emotional control doesn’t require suppressing our emotions, why personal excellence carries responsibilities beyond ourselves, and why becoming the person we’ve chosen to be requires practice rather than scorekeeping!

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What if Jesus never gave the church its rules? Matthew 18 reveals something more human: communities adapting old traditions to meet new problems.

There’s a phrase in Matthew’s Gospel that probably doesn’t sound strange at all to modern Christians: “Tell it to the church.” Jesus is supposedly explaining how believers should resolve conflicts, and involving the church seems perfectly reasonable. Except there’s a problem. When Jesus was alive, there was no Christian Church as a separate institution. So why is Matthew’s Jesus giving instructions about how such a church should operate?

That little historical wrinkle opens a much bigger conversation about how Scripture was actually created. What if Matthew wasn’t recording a timeless rule handed down from heaven? What if he was preserving a solution developed by Christians decades later as they struggled to hold their own community together? If so, the passage doesn’t show us God delivering a finished moral blueprint. It shows us human beings seeking, adapting, and creating new rules when the old answers weren’t enough. And if they had permission to do that, maybe we do too.

So, let’s dive into that… in this episode of Afterthoughts!

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Seeking means looking beyond what we already know by paying attention, questioning inherited answers, and staying curious enough to ask, “What am I missing?”

Have you ever wondered how much of what you believe is actually true and how much simply feels true because you’ve believed it for so long? We inherit assumptions from our families, religions, cultures, political tribes, and communities, and then naturally gravitate toward information that confirms those assumptions. But genuine seeking asks something much harder of us: What if we’re willing to look beyond what we think we already know, question the answers we’ve inherited, and remain curious enough to discover that we might be wrong?

As we reflect on the readings for the 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, we’ll explore how seeking begins by paying attention, challenges us to question inherited answers, and grows through genuine dialogue with other people.

In this episode, we’re asking a deceptively simple question: How willing are we to discover what we don’t already know? Together we’ll explore why seeking requires us to look beyond our own assumptions, why changing our minds can be a sign of intellectual strength rather than weakness, and why some of our most important discoveries happen when we listen to perspectives different from our own!

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Honor may require sacrifice, but suffering isn’t automatically virtuous. True honor protects life, strengthens others, and gives us something worth living for.

Religious martyrs die for their faith. Soldiers die for their country. Activists die for their cause. We tell their stories because extraordinary sacrifice can reveal extraordinary courage. But somewhere along the way, we’ve blurred an important distinction: sacrificing yourself to accomplish something worthwhile isn’t the same as believing the sacrifice itself makes you honorable.

Nature gives us a fascinating way to think about the difference. Cooperation and even self-sacrificing behavior existed long before humans invented religions, nations, or political ideologies. Evolution taught social animals (including us) that sometimes accepting a personal cost helps everyone survive. But humans learned to transform that cooperative instinct into something much stranger: suffering for abstract ideas, promised rewards in another world, or simply to prove how deeply committed we are. So how do we separate honorable sacrifice from the glorification of suffering? Honor may require sacrifice. It should never worship sacrifice.

So, let’s dive into that… in this episode of Afterthoughts!

CODA Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Honor means living by values we’ve consciously chosen, especially when they cost us comfort, approval, or belonging. But first, we must know what we value.

Have you ever stopped to ask where your values actually came from? We talk about having integrity, standing by our principles, and staying true to ourselves… but true to what? If we’ve never consciously examined what we believe or decided which values genuinely deserve our loyalty, how can we know whether we’re living with honor or simply following the expectations we inherited from everyone around us?

As we reflect on the readings for the 22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time, we’ll explore how honor asks us to hold firm under pressure, choose conviction over conformity, and recognize that living according to our values will sometimes cost us something.

In this episode, we’re asking a fundamental question: What does it actually mean to live with honor? Together we’ll discover why honor isn’t stubbornly refusing to change our minds, why belonging shouldn’t do our thinking for us, and why our values aren’t really tested until following them becomes inconvenient. But before we can defend our principles, there’s an even more basic challenge: we need to consciously decide which principles deserve our loyalty in the first place!

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Resilience helps us recover from adversity. But when broken systems depend on our endless endurance, maybe it's the system, not the person, that needs fixing.

We’re constantly being told to become more resilient. Burned out at work? Build resilience. Struggling financially? Become more adaptable. Your community gets hammered by another crisis? Look how resilient everyone is! And resilience really is valuable. We need the ability to recover from grief, failure, uncertainty, and all the adversity that life inevitably throws our way. But somewhere along the line, we turned a healthy capacity to recover into an expectation that people should simply keep absorbing damage.

Let’s call this the Resilience Myth: when systemic failures get redefined as personal deficiencies, and instead of fixing the conditions that are hurting people, we teach people how to endure them more efficiently. Sometimes resilience really does mean bouncing back. But sometimes it means refusing to keep bouncing off the same damn wall. How do we know the difference? And what would happen if we stopped trying to make people unbreakable and started building systems that didn’t keep breaking them in the first place?

So, let’s dive into that… in this episode of Afterthoughts!

CODA Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Resilience isn’t about handling everything alone. It grows through strong foundations, flexible thinking, and relationships we can depend on.

Have you ever noticed how often we confuse resilience with toughness? We admire the person who handles everything alone, never asks for help, and somehow keeps going no matter how hard life gets. But what if that isn’t resilience at all? What if our ability to recover depends less on becoming unbreakable and more on building strong foundations, learning when to bend, and creating relationships sturdy enough to hold us when our own strength isn’t enough?

As we reflect on the readings for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, we’ll explore how genuine resilience grows from dependable foundations, intellectual flexibility, and the human solidarity that allows us to support one another through adversity.

In this episode, we’re asking a challenging question: What exactly is resilience and is it something we can build? Together we’ll discover why resilience doesn’t mean having all the answers, why needing other people isn’t a failure of independence, and why the strongest communities aren’t filled with people who never need help, but with people willing to both give and receive it. And before we’re finished, I’ll leave you with one simple question that may challenge the way you think about strength itself.

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Your attention is your most valuable asset. Discover why mindfulness is the radical practice of choosing what truly deserves your focus.

Every generation has to decide what deserves its attention. Today, that choice is becoming increasingly difficult because our attention has become one of the world’s most valuable commodities. In this episode, we’re exploring why mindfulness isn’t just about reducing stress or finding inner peace, it’s about reclaiming ownership of your own mind. We’ll look at how the modern attention economy shapes what we think, what we value, and even who we become, and why protecting your attention may be one of the most important acts of personal and civic responsibility in this digital age.

French philosopher Simone Weil said that, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” That’s a beautiful thought, but it also raises an uncomfortable question. If attention really is one of the greatest gifts we can give another human being, why do we spend so much of our attention on notifications, endless scrolling, algorithmically curated outrage, and companies whose business model depends on keeping us distracted? Somewhere along the way, our attention stopped being something we intentionally offered and became something that was quietly harvested.

Maybe that’s because we’ve been thinking about mindfulness all wrong. We’ve turned it into breathing exercises, meditation apps, and a way to relax after another stressful day. But what if mindfulness is something far more radical? What if it’s the daily practice of deciding who and what deserves the focus of your thoughts? And what if that simple decision ultimately shapes the kind of person—and the kind of society—we become?

So, let’s dive into that… in this episode of Afterthoughts!

CODA Project is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.