So in hindsight, I most certainly did have a religion. When I thought I had none, I had one. A religion is defined by your actions, not your words. Although I thought I was a member of something called “no religion,” it was actually secular humanism. But this is not surprising because the entire public school system was geared toward the religion of humanism and actively steered American children toward it throughout the 1980s and 1990s. What’s strange is that we banned “God” from public schools because it was a religion. But we brought in humanism which is a religion. This religion is one that pretends that it isn’t a religion. The Supreme Court even named it as a religion in 1961 (Torcasso v. Watkins), which is just stating the obvious. There were even humanist churches that sprang up and withered away. Few object to humanism being taught in schools because we pretend it’s not a religion, but it has a manifesto with fifteen principles that sound a lot like commandments that defines the origin of the universe as it’s first item of business.

FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.

This is literally the direct inversion of the three major world religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. If you start with this premise, your worldview flips completely to a pre-Christian, pre-Hebrew mindset. I spent many hours yammering about this in the About Uranus series. If you remove God as the first cause of the universe, who created the universe “out of nothing” (ex nihilo), then you have a lot of explaining to do. In fact, if you start with this first point of humanist manifesto, you are already in the pagan world of Zeus, you just use different terms for it.

The idea of a creator God never came up in public school. In a subtle way, the tenets of humanism are stamped on every American child. Unsurprisingly, I learned much later, after soaking in the bath of this humanist water for some thirty years, that one of the signers of this declaration of independence from religion, this humanist manifesto, was none other than the founder of modern public schools, John Dewey. Like Freud, the father of psychology, Dewey hated religion. Both of these founders saw their purpose as replacing religion with something else.

From the book Atheism for Dummies, Dewey is a described as a kind of hero for doing a bait-and-switch on religion:

Few people can claim a greater influence on American culture than the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up.

Dewey was also a key figure in the rebirth of modern humanism. But his approach was controversial, even among humanists — partly because he wanted to keep using the word God, even though he didn’t believe such a being existed.

Today we are living in a period of time where everyone is scratching their head and wondering why our world and nation is slipping into disarray. The fragility of nations and institutions is being felt across domains. Once you get out of the tub that you have been soaking in and look at the water, it’s no longer confusing to see what has happened. The water is filthy. A billion people are soaking in that tub and not realizing how soggy they’ve become. They can’t understand why they feel like dirty dishwater. They wonder how they can be in a tub and yet not feel clean. We don’t feel clean because we are living a lie.

Thus we have the “strange rites” that occupy so much of our modern life, particularly in sports, entertainment, health, fitness, technology. To quote the blurb from Tara Isabella’s book on this subject, Americans are “embracing a kaleidoscopic panoply of spiritual traditions, rituals, and subcultures -- from astrology and witchcraft to SoulCycle and the alt-right.”

It’s all a substitute for God. All of it. For me it was the pursuit of experiences. Alcohol, woodworking, triathlons, sports, skydiving, military service, career - you name it, I probably tried it. A quote from Joshua Mitchell sums up the state of this constant seeking of meaning through the self:

Homo sapiens is devolving into Selfie Man; and it is therefore to the manner of his falling into illness that we must attend, and to his experience of illness that we must appeal. I cannot prove it, but I suspect this is the path Selfie Man must take to recover an understanding of human nature. The Prodigal Son returns home only after he realizes the husks of corn on which he has been feasting nourish him not (Luke 15:11–32).

The story of our times is one of spiritual crisis, because not only has the word God become taboo, but most people who say the word don’t truly believe in it. How can I be so bold? We need to merely look at where the faithful spend their time. Drive by any gym or baseball field on a Sunday morning, or simply look at how empty the churches are. Their pajama shirts say “Faith” or “Jesus and coffee” and then they turn on Netflix and blithely violate the third Commandment to keep the Lord’s day holy.

How can these faithful be so bold? Easily. It’s because we don’t really believe in the idea of “sacred”. They have been programmed. When nothing is sacred, everything is sacred. When everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. This is why we can believe that laying on a couch and thinking about God for a split second is as good as going to church and spending one hour with God. This is the great flattening that has occurred.

This bait-and-switch that occurred is exactly as Dewey wanted. We say “God” but smirk inside. The pioneers of America who lacked internal combustion engines and lacked Netflix and youth sports, somehow found the energy to saddle up or walk to church. The test of our time - a test that appears to have been failed - is that we have incredible ease in getting to church, yet we choose not to.

The number one reason people hate Christianity today is because of hypocritical Christians. And so do I. What a scandal it is to see a believer who speaks the language of devotion and piety but whose actions suggest otherwise. This is why people roll their eyes at Catholics that sin on Saturday night and go to confession on Sunday morning (actually, few Catholics go to confession now, and therefore should not even be receiving the Eucharist, but that’s for another episode).

The hypocrisy scandalizes and drives people away. We all hate a hypocrite.

So did Jesus.

The problem is that we are all hypocrites, no matter how holy, perceived or otherwise. The hypocrites once drove me away, but I will never let that happen again. Why? Because I’m one of them. And as I frequently like to quote: “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum of saints.” The church and its doctrine and sacraments and liturgy provide the path to remembering this. If I am confused about this, then righteousness or despair will begin to seep into my thoughts and action, and that is precisely when I’ve fallen into the trap, where God is on my lips, but not in my heart.

This was the goal of John Dewey. To keep God in our mouth, but not in our heart. Once you awaken to this fact, you can get out of the soggy tub and pull the plug to let the dirt drain away. Then you can take action, and get God out of storage once and for all.

The great achievement of Dewey and the humanists is the flattening of the sacred. They managed to make all things the same, to make all things sacred, and therefore making nothing sacred. This is the outcome of Unitarianism, which places all religions into the same the psychological basket. There is nothing set apart, nothing sacred, yet we still have the word God on our lips, just as Dewey wanted. And then you live in no-man’s-land, the wasteland of T.S. Eliot, because you are saying the word God but living like a humanist. You speak as if you have ultimate meaning, but you don’t live it out - hence the emptiness of our modern age. You must make your own meaning then, and this manifests out in a thousand ways, and all of them are dead ends. What is lost with God is ultimate meaning, and the vacuum is felt, the void, the onslaught of meaninglessness that drives the pursuit of self-destruction and self-salvation. Why? Because if we cannot find meaning we must either escape the problem or solve the problem. You can go toward nihilism like the French philosophers or you can go toward the will-to-power like the German philosophers. A third option, compliments of Karl Marx, is that you get to become the savior of the world. In all three of these outcomes, you can still say the word “God” and the word can mean absolutely nothing to you while you speak it. That’s the state we are in today. God is everywhere in our speech and nowhere in our actions. By design, most of us live out lives that have nothing to do with Christ. Only when we come close to the edge of a cliff and look down do we look up.

With God put into storage, we will go dust the idea off when feeling nostalgic or lost. When we are in a period of adjustment, between pursuits, we will look to God. But the moment a new distraction or experience or partner or job arrives, God goes back into storage. We only want God when we recognize the need for a real savior. We only want Jesus on the cross when we need forgiveness. Christ is treated like a 401K fund, where we look at the cross like a number of dollars that will save us in our old age, after we are done sinning. The penitent thief on the cross, who is promised entrance to paradise, is our secret wish for ourselves. It’s the get-out-of-jail free card on our death bed, and the card that allows us to live as we wish today, so that we can ignore everything Christ said before that moment on the cross. Most interesting, however, is that I hear self-professed Christians saying, “That doesn’t sit well with me,” regarding the penitent thief’s late change of heart in Luke 22. In reality, those of us with the name of God on our lips but whose actions lack follow-through should be begging and hoping that the salvation of the “Good Thief,” St. Dismas, will be a possibility for us, too. We rack and stack up mortal sin after mortal sin and ignore the sacrament of Confession, and at the same time cast our eyes down at others for their sins. We should be lucky if the same mercy is shown for our own hypocrisy that we ignore.

Any encroachment of traditional religion into the public sphere bothered me. I was wary of any form of Christianity creeping back into my life. In my mind, I thought, “Christians just can’t leave anything alone. They just have to shove it down our throats at every opportunity.” I felt like the Grateful Dead’s song Truckin’, where Jerry Garcia sings about getting busted on Bourbon Street, ratted out by nosey do-gooders who called the police: “They just can’t let you be.” The irony is how the flip has happened, where modernism is shoved down our throats. The old religion of hearing a one-hour Sunday message (plus maybe an hour on Wednesday nights) stood no chance against the full blast 40 hours a week of public schools preaching mainline humanism. We have been indoctrinated, without a doubt. We have been indoctrinated to modernism.

If you want to be free, you have to take the first step in opposition of the current. The new rebel is not the person that embraces sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. It’s the person who embraces chastity, temperance, and silence. The new rebel is the one who un-moderns himself. I suspect as the result of a century of humanist education comes to an end, the next Abraham will be called out of California, the next St. Anthony of Egypt will find his way to the desert, and a new St. Benedict will find his way to a cave, and we will rediscover all that has been lost and lied about. This is the way it happens. It always has happened this way. The world tries to crush God, to remove him from all public spaces, and God seems to go away, and then he returns. Jesus also went to the desert. He also went to a tomb. But he returned. He is returned now. He is as alive as ever, and will once again be the healer that we are looking for.

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I was caught between the lukewarm and the deists and the atheists and the fundamentalists and the humanists. I was half hippy, half redneck, half preppy, half nerd, half metalhead. I say there were many “halves” because what this modernist input and media blast does is make you confused. That is the state of most people today, especially if your main hobby is screen staring.

Jesus cures a demoniac who has this problem of a fragmented identity. The person says, “I am Legion” which means, “We are many.” The story of this Legion dude in the Bible never made sense until I started examining my own thoughts and worldview once I got out of the fog of modernism. Then I realized, “I was Legion.” No wonder I was so off-centered. Legion is a story about someone who has too many forces struggling for control in his head. It’s actually shocking to read the two lines of dialogue from Legion in light of my own life, because I had a similar reaction of anger and revolt when someone approached me about making Jesus my personal savior. I didn’t use the same words, but pretty close.

“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me!”

Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.” (Mark 5:1-20)

This is exactly the same condition of our heads today drowning in media. Anyone that has a visceral reaction of anger to the name of Jesus is in this state. The funny thing is that Jesus heals. Savior means “healer”. And he does heal. He heals people of mental problems and anxiety issues a million times a day. But the modernist teaching cannot admit that. In fact, psychology, which is intended to heal, purposefully avoids any talk of Jesus. Western medicine in general has the same allergic reaction to the name Jesus. I can’t help but wonder if the updated translation of Modernism is Legion.

There are all kinds of external voices from TV and TikTok leasing space in our head. They are Legion. And if the media is sponsored and paid for, you can bet it is not borrowing ideas from Christ. You can tell if a show is Christian, because the production quality is usually bad and nearly unwatchable. This is not surprising because fireworks and glamor is the polar opposite of Jesus. Well, on TV anyway. Once you meet him, then it flips completely. But the goal of any image or sound the emits from your radio, television, or internet is to keep you distracted, to keep you divided, and to keep you watching. The more you watch, the more ideas are planted into your head. If only you could track this history of grooming your thoughts that’s been done for you, compliments of Hollywood writers. It’s not unreasonable to say that the idea that abortion is not killing a human probably came from an episode of Felicity that you watched college.

In my first attempt to escape the madness of the crowd, I leaned secular because I felt that those were the non-hypocrites. Only the religious people were crazy. That’s what I told myself.

Upon further review, like an instant replay in football, which took twenty years, I have come to understand with glaring clarity that I leaned secular because of eighteen years of heavy schooling on the humanist doctrine. I was drinking from that vine, like every other public school child, like the pods in the Matrix. We were being kept alive in a vat of sugar water with re-runs of The Cosby Show and Night Court. (Through those two shows alone we learned a valuable lesson: we thought Bill Cosby was the upstanding citizen and John Larroquette was the pervert, only to wake up twenty years later and find out it was the opposite. But let me leave that path into the woods right there, before I get lost.)

All the while, the truth of Christ was there for the finding, but it was buried under hours upon hours of youth sports and late-night math assignments and writing reports, which all boiled down to despair, in the form of party-til-you-puke. The message of Christ barely stood a chance, and yet somehow it still emerged. His light is the one thing that cannot be extinguished. Somehow it finds a way to reach people, despite massive attempts to stifle and kill it off. He finds us when we aren’t even looking for him.

The end result of this anti-spiritual education was to slowly but surely kill off God in our lives. This isn’t hidden or a conspiracy, it’s plainly stated in the writings and manifestos of the founders of modern education.

The problem is that if you do try to kill God, you don’t kill God. You wound the child. How? If you tell a child there is no God, he has no meaning for existence. So he must invent one. Kids recognize this meaninglessness early on. They are more aware of this loss than adults are, and you can observe when the light is going dim in middle-school age children. Unless the child has a hobby or goal or sport or some kind of self-invented worth, the loss of God will be felt early and often. For those that have some kind of meaning without God, it will soon fade and need a replacement. Sports and Pokemon will turn into the pursuit of money or sex or mental escape. The search begins, and it never ends. With the onslaught of tech and screens distracting the mind, the searching starts even earlier now, as non-believing indoctrinated parents don’t even have a badly formed concept of God to offer their children, but even that is better than nothing.

The promise of a utopia through social justice sounds great and is a worthy goal, but there is a flaw with this as a standalone solution for finding meaning in life. The problem is that it doesn’t strike the heart or address anything related to the needs of the soul. If you deny the soul, you can never get over these issues with the ultimate questions. That is the whole problem with humanism and socialism; these are philosophies that can score some points for finding meaning, but they are shooting the ball at the wrong basket.

This is the whole reason why Jesus continues to win hearts and minds. With Jesus there is a plan for all things, and authority, and a reason, and it allows for suffering to make sense, at least to some degree. But these other philosophies that lack God are a team with no coach and no plan, other than a constant “progress.” It leads to chaos, because an endless search means you are always lost. Even if you hit a goal, you immediately need a new goal. Why? Because the heart and soul are restless and aimless without God. Ships need both a rudder and a sail. The attempt to indoctrinate us away from God may seem to work for a while but eventually leads us directly back to God. “The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for.” (CCC 27)

The spiritual death that these education reformers aimed for succeeded in my life, but they failed to bring about the utopia, unless a massive problem of broken homes, drug abuse, isolation, and identity crises is what they had in mind. If it was, then mission accomplished. The greatest period of wealth generation and higher education in human history has already happened, yet the utopia is nowhere near. Yes, we need to work for a better world, but with the soul denied and God excluded from our lives, that better world will never arrive because we have to invent new enemies and problems to solve. We cannot be satisfied.

I was fully won over to the side of Dewey and the other educators that sought my spiritual death. I even wanted to see the spiritual death happen in everyone else, which is what you want in disciples. You want dedication so that they too will convert others. This is the essence of evangelization. It’s a kind of sales. First you get the person to trust, to believe in your goodness and authority, then once they are interested and seeking, you set the hook. It’s fishing. This is why the metaphor of St. Peter being “fishers of men” makes so much sense. Communists and Fascists and Humanists also go fishing for men, but they do it through public schools instead of the pulpit.

When something encroached on the culture of secular humanism, I reacted exactly like Christians or Muslims or Jews reacted when a film or book blatantly mocked their religion. Apparently, I considered movies and literature of modern culture sacred in some way. It’s the great flattening of our age, where there is confusion about what is sacred and what is not. This is the “spiritual but not religious” era where you’ll hear “everything is sacred” and as soon as you hear that, you know that nothing is sacred. If everything is sacred, nothing can be set apart as sacred, hence the flattening. This is the same problem with treating every news story as a conflagration. Sooner or later you realize that none of the bated-breath urgency of the internet people matters at all and that they are merely hysterical and addicted to news. If every news story is earth-shattering, no news story is earth-shattering. In the same way, the claim that all places are sacred rots the floor out and collapses everything into the profane, because when everything is sacred, there is nothing sacred. It’s a neverending string of days with a vanilla cone, eaten by oneself, with artificial sweetener. What the “spiritual but not religious” crowd fails to understand is that that the reason altars and churches were ever built was to create places that are set apart from the rest of the world, to celebrate what is sacred, together with others.

The religion of individualism demands flatness and the collapse of the spiritual into the material. The spiritual is reduced to nature, and is therefore no longer spiritual, because the true meaning of spiritual means beyond nature, beyond this universe, beyond the senses. Humanism cannot allow for that transcendence, otherwise its own dogma falls apart.

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

The “born this way” argument doesn’t help you to resolve anything but just affirms your problem. If your “nature” is to drink or look at dirty websites, then that makes you helpless in combating it. If there is no stopping or altering this behavior because you were born a certain way, then you either accept the problem as final or pursue a science-based solution, like pharmaceuticals or a technique, to deal with the issue.

What you will not try, if this is your worldview, is prayer or divine assistance. Why not? Because prayer appeals to magical nonsense that you don’t believe in, and to engage in such an act would be admitting that a spiritual realm may exist, which is for gullible simpletons. I know this feeling well.

The denial of the spirit or soul actually blocks you from accessing a treasure of knowledge that the mind and heart are capable of reaching, but not if you don’t believe it.

If we come to believe in the soul, or in something beyond ourselves, we open up a new possibility, and we can access something that hardly makes sense. In that worldview, you can have both free-will and rational thought and faith in mysteries, because in that worldview you are allowed the full range of mind, body, and soul. It’s like a buy-one-get-two-free offer. If you allow belief in the soul or God, you automatically receive the other. If you allow an eternal soul, it can commune with a God who knows all outcomes. But the key twist here is that while God knows all the outcomes, we do not. We still have to make decisions here.

This is an incredibly weird thing about human beings. To believe or not to believe makes a world of difference in how you live, and this is why the battleground for indoctrination spends so much time on this spiritual space, denying it or confirming it.

The whole reason the various religions and “varieties of religious experience” exist is because we can access a kind of knowledge that science cannot explain, and never will explain. Spirits cannot be put into beakers or centrifuges or equations, so scientific papers about spirits cannot be submitted to journals for peer review without the submitting author sounding like a lunatic to other scientists. Any undergraduate student knows that science cannot co-mingle with any kind of mysticism.

But mysticism can co-mingle with science. You can study the brain all you want and still retain mysticism, because science will help explain the physical processes and properties of what happens in the neurons during thought, but will never explain where thoughts come from, or what truly happens in prayer. No matter how many CAT Scans are done or electrodes placed on the forehead, this spirit world is impenetrable by nature, because it is not part of nature. Supernatural means beyond nature.

Thus, whether thoughts are generated or received is answered by which side of this fence you sit upon. If spirits do not exist, then you internally create your thoughts. If spirits do exist, then your thoughts can be created externally. For the most part, the idea of thoughts being created in you can be proven, while the idea of yourself creating thoughts cannot be proven. Suggestion is a simple way to illustrate this.

The power of suggestion is well-known by parents guiding children, or teachers guiding students, or salespeople working leads. One example of this is a salesperson planting a high price in your thoughts and then offering a discount shortly thereafter. Planting the high price first in the mind makes the second price after the discount believe you are getting a good deal, even though the salesperson was targeting the discount price the whole time. Another example is the loss leader, where a free item, say a box of delicious Cinnamon Toast Crunch cereal, is offered to get you to spend much more on a whole shopping cart full of other items. In both cases, the idea of saving money is planted in your brain, which brings about the action of commerce. Whether this planting of thoughts is done by a salesperson or by an advertisement doesn’t really matter, because you receive these thought from external sources, via the portal of the ears or the eyes, and the decision is made in your head and heart on whether to buy or ignore the thought.

This same power of suggestion happens continually in our day, in every waking hour, as you cannot drive down a highway without a bombardment of messaging and offerings from road signs, from billboards, from businesses, from your radio, from bumper stickers, and even from other drivers. Driving from home to work will result in hundreds of planted thoughts which you either choose to allow or reject. This sorting is so common that we do it unconsciously and in rapid succession. But we do not conjure the idea of a billboard. We receive an image through sight, and that image enters our mind. Then we have to determine what to do with the image, and quickly decide: What does a personal injury attorney have to do with me? Do I need a Coors Light? Do I like the candidate on that bumper sticker? Did that person just cut me off?

Some images turn into sticky thoughts while others are discarded, and some that we think are discarded come back later, which is what the Coors Light company and attorneys are counting on. They are planting seeds for when the time is right, when thirst arrives or that fender bender happens. Planting “thought seeds” is the entire point of advertising so that when desire or need is perceived, you load the image from storage for re-processing.

What’s interesting about all of this is that you don’t create these images, they are created in you by external inputs. The thought of a lawyer or a beer is just like any other thought, and just like advertisers and salespeople, ideologies and religions use the same power of suggestion to attract believers by telling and selling messages that mostly come through the ears and eyes. Jesus even speaks of a mustard seed as a metaphor for planting faith in minds, which is quite a different thought than planting seeds to sell beer or acquire clients, because the mustard seed grows into something glorious. The beer will get you drunk and the lawyer may get you rich. Faith, on the other hand, will likely make you sober and it certainly won’t make you rich, yet it somehow appeals to billions of us. (Quick reminder here: I loathe the Prosperity Gospel.)

This concept of where your thoughts come from is fundamental to understanding how your “personal” set of beliefs came into formation, as the formation did not come from yourself but from various influences, like teachers, parents, writers, coaches, actors, celebrities, pastors, preachers, siblings, friends, salespeople, admirers, heroes, and advertisers. Then there is the greatest source of modern thought planting: shows, books, billboards, ads, commercials, songs, podcasts, news, blogs, videos, and video games.

All the things that come through screens present thoughts and at a far more rapid rate than say, looking at a tree, although a tree may provide much deeper and more meaningful thoughts. Examining even a single blade of grass may take you to far broader and deeper thoughts than anything on your phone, because the grass is simple, true, and real.

The thoughts you hold are not as “personal” as you think, but is rather a confluence of thoughts received from your experiences, and from sounds poured into your ears, and from images painted before your eyes. These can be from natural sources in the world or from artificial sources on screens. Obviously, smell, touch, and taste factor in as well, but all of these feed thoughts to our minds. We don’t create the thoughts ourselves.

What we think of as thoughts generated from within are actually received from outside. We filter and interpret them, but we don’t generate thoughts ourselves. This is where you can get to the high-minded places of the idea of Platonic forms or meditation or transcendentalism or the Holy Spirit or bad spirits. Since this could be a rabbit-hole that can never be fully explored, I’m going to steer away from it and focus on the idea that thoughts are either received or generated, and I am of the belief that they are received.

Although our conscience somehow knows right and wrong, we do begin life as a mostly blank slate, like an empty apartment, where outside influences move a lot of furniture and knick-knacks into the space between our ears. Eventually, every few years or so, we have to clean house because it starts looking like an episode of Hoarders. Confusion reigns when conflicting doctrines and thoughts co-exist, to the point of it being a fire hazard. When you reach this point, you have to throw out certain “junk” thoughts and what you decide is junk are the thoughts that you were indoctrinated to dislike. They are the thoughts that go against what you were successfully indoctrinated into accepting. However, there are times along the path of life where you will look at the furniture you kept in the apartment and realize that you kept the wrong things, and that is when a potential flip of accepted doctrines can happen.

This is one of the key elements that separates the various doctrines, and I use the word doctrine because to be indoctrinated there must be specific doctrines that are taught to you. For some doctrines, you must accept that thoughts are generated from within, and that there are no such thing as spirits. To believe these doctrines, you have to deny all things spiritual. This is a requirement, but moving all of the spiritual furniture out of the apartment is very difficult to do, if not impossible, so the doctrines that require spiritual denial must go to great efforts in order to stifle it. Some of this furniture is permanent, or can’t fit through the doorway, so it has to stay in the apartment. It can only be removed if the apartment is destroyed. Because of this, indoctrination processes require covering this spiritual furniture up by burying it under piles of dirty laundry or using stacks of books to make it less obvious.

My post-high school set of beliefs aligned incredibly well to the tenets of the Humanist Manifesto. This was the set of beliefs adopted by many people involved in education strategy of the 20th century, most notably, John Dewey, the philosopher who spent a lifetime writing about how to do a takedown of religion through the education system and replace it with secular humanism. “In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up.” (from Atheism for Dummies)

To understand that I was indeed indoctrinated was a difficult thing to realize and even admit. But then that’s the idea of indoctrination; the intention is to perform a total eclipse of the mind so that you don’t realize that it’s happening. While I was under the impression that I grew up with faith, I was actively being conditioned to recoil at all things religious and see God as something oppressive that I needed to shake off. The soul itself was excused from my worldview. Since ghosts were not real, neither was the soul. This conclusion was arrived at by design. The system was guiding me to this end.

This isn’t even hidden from us, although if the voting public actually knew about it, they would have objected and never voted for such a scheme. Those who fought against it were mocked and set aside as crackpots. But the plan was exactly to kill off God from public and private life, and as far back as the 1930s this was openly mentioned as part of the plan. Charles Francis Potter said, “Education is the most powerful ally of Humanism, and every American public school is a school of Humanism. What can the theistic Sunday Schools, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teaching.” (from Humanism: A New Religion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1930), p. 128.)

The deck was stacked, and the funny thing is that many of us who were indoctrinated toward humanism, now point back at religion and that one hour a week we spent learning about Jesus as the malicious indoctrination program.

In other words, this is very well-done indoctrination because we blame what did not successfully indoctrinate us as the thing that indoctrinated us. It’s so rich in irony I can hardly stand it. But until the scales fall from you eyes, you can’t see this. The bait-and-switch is performed on children and parents in an underhanded way, so that neither parent nor child realizes it has happened, and you blame the lamb as the lion. We blame the Church for an indoctrination that never even happened.

This is also why so many fallen away Catholics have absolutely no idea what Catholicism even is, let alone teaches. But you will hear people blaming the Church for all of their adult maladies and mental issues. Cradle Catholics have long been considered clueless by converts to the faith, and we are. I was living proof. Most of us just get through Baptism, Reconciliation, First Communion, and Confirmation, and know next to nothing, especially in terms of doctrine, and head for the exits.

That is not successful indoctrination. It’s the opposite.

How you live your life is how you are indoctrinated. You can find out easily. Just compare whether you are living your life more closely to the Ten Commandments or to the Fifteen Principles of the Humanist Manifesto. I would be willing to bet that if you are an American living today, and you honestly examine your conscience, you cannot get through the first three commandments. However, I bet you can nod blindly along through all of the Humanist principles because that is the dogma you actually live by. That is how we live, as we have been indoctrinated to live.

The greatest bait and switch is how we came to blame the Church and parents for indoctrinating us when most fallen away Catholics had no concept of anything the Church stood for or against, but we were quick to name our “Catholic Guilt” as the cause of our depression and self-hatred, even though it was manufactured. Anyone that uses the phrase “Catholic Guilt” is guilty of never taking time to read the Catechism to realize that this is a concept that never had existed for two thousand years, but is rather the idea of a campaign to shudder the church as the enemy of the state. I challenge anyone to read the Catechism and find that idea. The label of Catholic Guilt is a lazy way to anoint oneself as a victim, and it is a direct outcome of brainwashing by the media and the public school system, not of the Church itself. Today, as always, the biggest threat to worldly power is Jesus Christ, as it was then, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, until He comes again.

Now when I hear someone mention how they hate organized religion, I nod along because I was once programmed that way, in that same headspace of humanist indoctrination. The fact that I had any knowledge of the Bible is actually quite amazing given I was growing up in a Christian-in-name-only nation and taking part in the humanist public school curriculum of the 1980s and 1990s. The reality is that aside from my occasional experience of witnessing a devout person in active prayer at church, I had never lived a single day in a truly Christian culture. Nor had most Americans, as we had been nudged along a path to atheism, through sports and news and money and self-worship, while keeping God on our lips with no understanding of the word.

We were craftily spun around to face away from God but taught to keep saying the word God. This explains the intense confusion in people today. We are trying to reconcile two worldviews that cannot be reconciled, ever. This is like fire and water trying to repeatedly burn and douse the same material over and over. You either have to pick one or the other, because to try and balance both is insane. What we do then, to maintain sanity, is to choose whatever suits our wants and desires at the time, and only turn to God when he will seem to satisfy our needs. Even then we pray for our will to be done, not God’s will to be done.

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

Do you ever get the feeling that you have been indoctrinated?

If you answer “yes,” you are correct. You have been indoctrinated.

If you answer “no,” then you have been successfully indoctrinated.

The interesting thing about this is as a child you don’t seem to get much of a choice in the matter. But as an adult you do. However, it can take years to realize that you have been indoctrinated, and even if you realize it, you may misunderstand unto what you were trained like a dog to like and dislike.

The power of indoctrination looms large over every decision. There is a strong chance that you will come to believe you were indoctrinated by something other than what has actually indoctrinated you. This is the most well-done type of indoctrination. This is the type that plants a deep-rooted worldview that is difficult to cut out, like an oak stump, because the mantras and slogans and ideas are sown when you are young. Once you have done the care and feeding of certain ideas over a lifetime, starting over with a new doctrine may feel far more difficult than just remaining under the shade of whatever oak you watered, even if you sense it’s not quite right.

One thing is certain: when there are multiple doctrines doing battle, you will have confusion, and whatever indoctrination took full root will at some point choke out the other one. You will know which indoctrination won when the crisis points and moments of decision arrive.

There is a wrestling match happening in your head. Thoughts and ideas are elbowing for space in your mind, and it happens throughout your life. Much of the indoctrination programming of our world goes to great effort to convince you that there is only one kind of knowledge, that of the material world and the laws of nature. The aim is to deny that there is a knowledge that is born into you, a spiritual knowledge that transcends human knowledge or the laws of nature. This argument about the spiritual realm is one of the main battles of indoctrination that each individual faces, in a larger war for the hearts and minds of all people. To deny or accept that there is knowledge that goes beyond the intellect, that there is a knowledge that can sense and experience a higher power at work in the world - this is a critical fortress for all sides to claim, as much of the remaining arguments rest upon winning this fundamental battle.

So I grew up thinking that I had been indoctrinated into a Christian mindset and worldview. I was convinced that this was the case. Upon further review, this was not the case. In fact, I didn’t realize for some fifteen years that I was so successfully indoctrinated that my programming led me to believe that I was indoctrinated by a different set of beliefs. This is like the movie Inception, where dreams and sub-dreams plant seeds to convince the sleeping person of an idea. This is depth level 3 on the dream-bubble-up theory of the movie. In the movie, ideas are planted deep in the subconscious mind, so that you assume ideas came from you, but they didn’t. This is what makes the movie interesting. If thoughts do not come from ourselves, then where do they come from? Inception is playing around with the idea of where thoughts come from. Do they come from us? Or do we receive them? Thoughts come from somewhere, and I am going to argue that they come from outside, through the ears and the eyes.

Consider that whatever noun I say will conjure a thought of that item or idea in your mind. If I just say “beach ball” or “umbrella” you will briefly think of that object. When I say “Beach Ball,” you say “Umbrella.”

Beach ball.

Umbrella.

Beach ball.

Umbrella.

Thoughts of beach ball and umbrella in this case did not come from you, but came from sound or sight, prompted by me. You can read the words of hear them, but in either case the thought arrived in your mind from somewhere else. Maybe the combination of beach ball and umbrella brought forth some image of a beach, since they tend to go together. Or maybe it brought out some other scene from your variety of life experiences where beach balls and umbrellas made a connection. Maybe it caused terror for you if some clown carried both of these things, like Stephen King’s IT and the red balloon. Whatever the case, the thought came from outside of you and combined with past thoughts that also came from outside of you, mixing a cocktail of memories and thoughts. This same idea is a billion dollar industry, as billboards for Coors Light and Personal Injury Attorneys rely upon this imagery and perception to trigger your thinking about the desire for a beer or lawyering-up after a fender bender.

We spend a lifetime of receiving images and sounds, starting from the moment we enter the world. Thoughts are driven into our minds through the senses, but some thoughts we imagine as starting from within our own head. But perhaps we don’t create thoughts on our own. Perhaps we receive them - all of them. This is something I had not considered until I started peeling the onion on my belief system. Once I started doing a post-mortem autopsy of my spiritual death, I began to realize that the thoughts I carried and adhered to were things that I didn’t come up with on my own.

There are thoughts of tangible or visible things which we can explain through sensory perception, like the beach ball. But then there are things that are not tangible, like to go up or to go down, to go left or to go right, to be or not to be, which go into a different space that we can’t see or hear. These things also have mutually exclusive options, as we cannot go both down and up or both left and right. We must choose.

We cannot take a shot of whiskey and also decline the offer. We must choose to drink or not to drink. The thought to go down or to go up may be presented to us by situations, such as an escalator. The presentation of an escalator prompts the thought, “Which way?” and a decision must happen to take action. The decision to take action is a critical point of inflection as to your worldview, because for these thoughts that become questions, where you can do one thing but not another, you must decide that there is either free will as the driving force or that your actions are pre-determined and unavoidable. Thoughts, wherever they may come from, result in the need to choose or take action.

“The devil made me do it” is often mocked as old-time religious nonsense. If you agree that it’s religious nonsense from the dark ages, this is in itself an interesting thought, because if you find the devil to be absurd, you may already know which side has won the indoctrination battle. If you don’t believe in the soul or spirits, then of course you don’t believe in the devil or spirits guiding you to make decisions. If souls don’t exist, then by definition thoughts must come from the material world, from your brain itself, which interacts with the senses.

If no mysterious spirit is at play in the world, then we are reduced to the laws that govern nature. This worldview means truncating or slicing all possibility of the transcendent or divine from being the generator of thoughts. No angelic or demonic guides can be said to be helping make decisions. You are then the only thing responsible because you generate your own thoughts and make decisions without any nudge or assistance from outside. The cheese stands alone, so to speak.

These are two opposing worldviews: one that denies spirits and one that believes in spirits. For those acknowledging a soul and spirits, thoughts are received and decisions may be guided, but the final choice must be selected in order to take action. For those denying a soul and spirits, thoughts are generated and decisions are unavoidable because of genetics and/or circumstances. Free will must become a casualty of pure materialism. There is also an extreme spiritual worldview that can kill free will, where all outcomes are God’s will and no human choice is needed, to the point that even the slightest decision is pre-determined by God’s will.

A purely material human with no soul would perform actions and decisions because he was “born this way.” But a purely material human would then be a robot. In this worldview, all decisions are not so much decisions as pre-determined results based on biology and physics. If all is scientifically explained, then outcomes cannot be altered, and then you get the luxury of justification for any action that happens where you can say, “Not my fault. I was born this way.” Take for example, if you spent last night scrolling through porn websites before bed, it was not a choice but just the way you are. It was bound to happen.

But few would go that far. On the other side there is the spiritual person who declares that all outcomes were God’s will with no human input at all, to the point that selecting Parmesan Garlic or Asian Zing sauce for chicken wings becomes a manifestation of God’s will. This is a kind of predestined spiritual robot with no actual choice in matters.

We have a mushy middle where we deny the soul for the most part, but still want to cling to free-will, especially when someone commits a crime. The odd thing is that if you believe in free-will but reject the idea of “the devil made me do it” then you still have to explain decisions where people choose to do evil instead of good. The irony of believing that you did something because you were “born this way” is the exact opposite of saying “the devil made me do it.” In both cases, it’s not your fault personally, but something beyond you.

The usual villain for those holding this view of free-will without spirits is that the choice to do evil happened because of circumstances or other people. In other words, something exterior to the person caused the bad act. In all cases, evil must be explained, and explained away, because it’s here in the world and not going away, at least not yet. The problem with “Born this way” is that there is no fixing the problem, while at least with the argument, “The devil made me do it” there is a way to battle that problem.

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

Some of life’s tests may have already passed you by, but another will come, and even if you responded poorly in past tests, you can react differently in the future. You can change. Lady Gaga is wrong: she was not “Born this Way.” She was not born wearing a meat suit and starved for fame; she chose that path. She was born with an amazing talent, yes, and I enjoy her songs. But the meat suit did not form on Lady Gaga in the womb, that was a bolt-on after-market addition.

Likewise, you were not born a drunk or sex obsessed or not-good-enough or quick to anger or food-crazed. You allowed all that to happen. You chose those patterns, just like I did. God did not make you surf porn or drink Jack Daniels or post mean comments online. We are being guided to that idea, however, that we are “born” in these states, which is the greatest lie our world today is selling, with massive reach and power through media.

While you may have done bad things in the past, and yes, we are fallen creatures, we also have free will. If you are convinced that you can’t change, that you can’t control what thoughts enter your mind, then you have lost what it means to be human.

We are the gatekeepers of our thoughts. While we are born with the instinct to do the wrong thing, we don’t have to do the wrong thing. We choose it, and we do so because someone or something is suggesting and inviting us into temptation. That is the job of modern marketing, in case you were unaware. The notion to pick up your phone and go to a porn site is a thought that you allow to enter your consciousness. Because you are convinced that it’s harmless, that it doesn’t hurt anyone, and that it’s natural instinct, you have walked your free will right into the trap. The choice is made, but a different choice could have been made. There is nothing “natural” about picking up a phone and looking at nude people having sex. There is nothing so objectifying and cheapening to human beings than to see them as nothing more than gyrating pleasure monkeys who can titillate your base desires. And there is nothing so damaging to your existing relationships than to satisfy your need for interaction with images on a screen, while real people who want love and respect sit in another room, occupying the same house or apartment as you do.

We can rip out the old thoughts and plant a garden of good thoughts that lead us to Christ. But first you have to choose it. What you have been told is that you were “born this way” because the entertainment and advertising worlds transmit that thought to you constantly, because you are a consumer, a customer. You are not a person to them. Convincing you that you do not have free will is a full-time job. You are a data point, a row in a database, an object. They will never try to remind you that you were made in the image and likeness of God and that you have free will. They will never tell you that what you are searching for is rest, for peace, for something to fill the emptiness you feel on Sunday nights. If they tell you that, you will likely stop pursuing the accumulation of goods and services and achievements. They want you walled in with your fear and pride, because then you receive their transmissions. What you receive, what you allow to enter your thoughts, becomes what you believe. If you doubt this, sit quietly in a room with no sound, no phone, no book, no TV, and see what thoughts enter your mind. What enters your mind will be telling: a song, an insult, an idea, a political issues, an issue at your kid’s school, a grudge, a product, a TV show, a news story that irritated you. Distractions will come because the thoughts you allow in are what your mind and soul are gnawing on.

To be free today, to be the curator of your own thoughts, you must take action. It requires effort. Believe it or not, a lifetime of pop-culture and subliminal messages can be boxed up and moved out. But you have to take action.

The best way to break free is to start now. Say and repeat the Jesus prayer, constantly: “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Say it now.

“Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

Say it again.

Pause your reading or listening, and say it fives times slowly.

Ok, welcome back.

Make that prayer the default thought in your head, a rolling meditation, and it will be like Jesus is in your mind, cleaning up your soul. When you say that prayer, he is flipping tables in your temple. He’s like ServPro restoring a house after a fire. That little prayer alone can chase out the cattle, shame the money-changers, and soon, you will be sweeping a tidy floor. All of the garbage begins to leave when that prayer becomes the song you hear at all times. And for God’s sake, literally, for God, put down the damn phone. Leave it behind.

You have to keep doing this practice. Just like any shop floor or school hallway, there is a lot of traffic in your temple. You must be sweeping every day. Like with fitness, you don’t get fit in a single day. You don’t get saved one day and never have to think about it again. If someone believes they were saved five years ago and he needs no work today, that is like someone who ran a half-marathon five years ago and tells you that he’s still fit, but you can see his beer-gut hanging over his pants. There is work to be done. Always. Humility and conversion and working on salvation is an active, daily task. Don’t be fooled, because that is how you slide backward. Thinking you are done is how the cattle and money-changers re-enter the temple. Pick your metaphor. You must weed the garden. You must stay fit. You must sweep the floor daily. You were not born to sin. You choose to do so, and you’ll do it again as soon as you become complacent.

Humility is a derivative word of humiliation. Humility sounds better, but the full experience is humiliation and no one wants that. That sounds really bad. It feels really bad. Why would anyone want that? We don’t, but we get to experience it whether we want to or not.

This is why this is so hard for Nicodemus and the characters in Jumanji, because no one in their right mind wants to be humiliated. No one seeks to become helpless, despised, ill, cast out, hated, diseased, beat up, kicked, laughed at, mocked, or excluded. Nicodemus is none of these things. As a Pharisee he is admired, wealthy, even healthy. In terms of today, he has it all. A job that is respected, status in the community, a fine education, good prospects for the future, and like many of us today, because of all this he will never be born in the spirit.

Who will be? The prostitutes and the tax collectors. Jesus is inviting Nicodemus to change, but he’s not sending back the RSVP. Nicodemus could take up his cross, but he won’t. He could reject his status and power, but it’s not registering and probably not the least bit inviting. He believes in his own righteousness too much, just like the Israelites before the snakebite, just like the Jumanji characters before the game begins.

What the story of the bronze serpent “raised up” and the story of Jesus “raised up” on the cross have in common becomes apparent after you compare the two stories. I find that it helps to think of both of these images. This is why I don’t like bare wooden crosses, ones that lack the body of Christ. The risen Jesus was never hanging on the cross. You’ll see these images of a Jesus with his arms out, rising up, kind of hovering outward from the cross. I understand the artist’s vision, or I think I do. They want to merge the death with the resurrection. The symbol of torture becomes the symbol of hope. Yes, I’m totally with that. I get it. There’s no way to heaven except through the cross. There is no resurrection without the death. I get it, the artist wants to merge the pain and suffering with the hope and glory. I don’t mean to imply these are bad. Bring on the scared art! There are so many amazing portrayals of Christ. Yes…it’s great - these are beautiful statues. But…to see the purpose of his death, I think we are meant to see that death.

The crucifix with the crucified Jesus, with the nails in his hands and feet, with his sagging body, with the crown of thorns, with the spear gash in his side, with the whip marks on his legs and back, with the emaciated and dehydrated body, with all of that suffering and pain - that is what sin looks like. As I’ve mentioned before, you can imagine the writhing and squirming that happened on that cross for three hours. The image almost becomes like a serpent if you meditate on it, because the ugliness of it is undeniable. It is a sickening image to press into, but that is where we have to go, into that suffering and pain. That’s three hours, 180 minutes, of brutal pain and mockery and thirst before getting to the words, “It is finished.”

That is what we must see, it’s what we have to look at, and witness. Like the Israelites looking up at the cause of their pain, so must we look up at the cause of our pain. Did Christ cause our pain? No. Sin caused your pain. God did not cause your pain; our sin, yours and mine, caused it. We are all in this together. We are all made in the image and likeness of God, and we are all fallen. It’s incorrect to say that my sins only affect me, or that I don’t do anything to hurt anyone else. We all hurt each other. There is a popular saying going around today that goes like this: “Hurt people, hurt people.” And it’s true. It’s accurate. The only problem is that we’ve all been hurt. We usually trot out this line to explain someone else’s behavior, to project a reason onto their apparent flawed actions. But all of us have been hurt. All of us hurt others. The great mistake we are making today is to pretend that our actions are sinless and that we have no flaws. We like to act like Nicodemus and the Israelites before the snakebite.

To make sense of this need to see our flaws, we must look up and accept our shortcomings and defects and weaknesses, because what we thought was strength was weakness.

If we acknowledge our weaknesses and sins, we must stare up at them. To feel them staring back at us is a good start. On that cross with the body of Jesus we can see what has bitten us. What is it? What’s bitten us? Sin. The serpent is sin. The body of Jesus shows us our sin.

What has brought us pain and suffering? What is the cause of our struggle? We are never too concerned about God when our strengths are getting us what we want, but we are quick to blame God, and we become desperate for a solution from God when our usual fixes and band-aids stop working. To be re-born, you must look upon the weaknesses and you must nod in agreement. True self-knowledge is this: you are not perfect. You will never be perfect. More importantly, the day is coming when you cannot save yourself and no one around you can save you either. That coach was lying about how strong you are. That advertisement about you being flawless was just selling product to hit a quarterly goal. That song about the fierceness and the fight in you didn’t account for your weakness. But life will raise them up for you to see, someday, somehow, somewhere along the way.

The instrument of torture that the Romans used is a piece of wood, but what was raised up and put on the cross is the embodiment of our sins. God came to us here in the form of Jesus, and he allowed us to see what sin does, what it looks like, how vulgar and ugly it is. We were able to see true goodness in the life of Jesus, in the holy family. Then we were shown the wretchedness of what our sin does, through his passion and death. God came here to make clear what we cannot easily see. In the Catholic church we believe that the Sacraments make what is invisible, visible. Jesus on the cross makes the invisibility of our sins fully visible. When we deny that we have sin, we deny God. God doesn’t disappear when we deny him or deny that sin exists. No, he’s still there. We go down the path of self-harm, thinking we have no flaws. Then the flaws flourish and lead us directly to the place where we have to acknowledge what we attempted to flee or ignore.

The funny thing is that we can talk about God all day, like Nicodemus, but if we deny that we have weaknesses, then we cannot know God. That is what God came here to show us, because the other signs and metaphors and prophecies weren’t getting through. The pain and suffering of Jesus, who is God, must be witnessed, because he was everything that was good, true, and beautiful. And we killed him. And we’d do it again. Except we won’t get a second chance because the second arrival will be like lightning across the sky, with no time to react or respond. We cannot fathom how the second coming will be, just as no one, aside from the prophets, could have imagined how the first coming would happen.

God walked among us, and in our sins we rejected him, just like we do every day, and to be healed we must look upon our error and admit it. Without this admittance, we cannot be healed, we cannot be born in the spirit. We’re like Nicodemus looking at God like he’s our little brother instead of Our Father. We want to pat him on the head. We think we are in charge, but we’re not. In order to love God and to love one another we have to see our own failures and weaknesses in their fullness. Believing requires that we admit our flaws. This is why Jesus tells the Pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors will enter the kingdom before anyone else. The ones who are in open rebellion against God and despised by the world, are dangerously close to hitting bottom, to reaching the state of helplessness that is required to be born in the spirit. Today the prostitutes and the drunks and the mentally ill are still the ones that find the kingdom, and many of those people that you hate today will find the kingdom before you, because they are, like Dante, heading all the way down to the bottom, all the way, and as long as they don’t get stuck on one of the rings of hell and stay there, they will make it. The mistake most of us make is to cling to one of those rings of hell and think we’ve made it to the bottom, and so we just remain in hell without falling to feel the full impact of helplessness, which is what we really want and need, because once in that state, you will pop out the other side. You cannot get to the mountain of Purgatory without going all the way down into the Inferno, just like you cannot get to heaven without going through the cross.

That is what the end of the movie Jumanji shows in the transformation of the characters. They entered detention as mostly unlikable people. They went down into the Inferno. Through the ordeal, the characters have all been re-born into the world. They are changed. They will never be the same. Why? Because they went all the way down, all the way to the bottom, and saw their hideous flaws in the light of their vulnerability. All of them died in the game and received a second chance. They experienced the fear of death, came to understand loss. Through that journey of pain and suffering and rebirth, they came to believe. In their helplessness, they found the jewel of faith. They believed in the mystery and the miracle and they made it back. When someone says they don’t believe in God because of the pain and suffering in the world, you can assure them that no one ever comes to believe in God until they have suffered. The faith of a child becomes lost in adulthood, and only through pain and suffering can we return to that childlike faith and be reborn in the spirit. Spiritual birth comes by pain just like physical birth. That is how you are set free. That is how you come to know God. That is the only way that anyone is ever set free.

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

The reason Jesus tells this to Nicodemus is because poor Nic doesn’t know that his perceived strength is his weakness. Nicodemus in the Gospel is like the “Fridge” in Jumanji. He lives in a position of power and status in the world. The Pharisees cannot “enter the kingdom” of God, they cannot put the jewel in the mountain and yell Jumanji! because they believe they have no weaknesses. You can’t be healed unless you understand your limitations, your weaknesses, your failures. No one with the snakebites in the desert with Moses can be healed until they know that they cannot save themselves. No one in the desert knows how pathetically weak they are unless a snake has bitten them. No one knows that they cannot save themselves unless they reach a level of suffering and pain that has no solution beyond that of a savior beyond understanding.

Jesus says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.” (Jn 3:13)

The Israelites’ snakebite can be seen as literal or a metaphor - take it however you like. Either way it works. Because I didn’t find my weaknesses, not really, until I felt helpless. I would’t even admit weakness until I reached a point where a savior was needed, where my own efforts and outside human help couldn’t provide any comfort or healing. This is strange contradiction, the one that you see in the desert, in the conversation with Nicodemus, and yes, even in Jumanji. This realization happens in hospitals and in churches and in recovery meetings around the world every day. Unfortunately, this light doesn’t come unless we suffer, unless we have pain.

We are going to have pain either way. But you can ride it out to the end, to the last breath, never admitting weakness. It’s a choice that you make. The suffering, we think, is to be blamed on God, but when we are successful or comfortable, we never once think to thank God. We only want a God that makes life easy. That’s not how it works. God wants to draw us toward him. Signs and clues and breadcrumbs are everywhere once you start to look, but for me, it took the full snakebite treatment. Because without it, I would not have turned. I would not have looked at the bronze serpent on the pole unless I felt desperate for help. I would never have asked for help. I would never had believed that strength was my weakness, and I never would have come to the light.

“For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” (Jn 3:20)

For context, this quote is near the end of the Jesus’ discussion around with Nicodemus being “reborn.” I’ve gone into that at some length in other episodes, but there’s a side of this discussion that fits here, that goes with the strange scene in the desert with the snakes.

Creation is painful. You cannot make new wine without cutting the vines and crushing the grapes. Birth is painful. There is no question that birth is an ordeal for both mother and child. Anyone who has even been bedside at a birth knows this is a fact, that the pain and suffering of childbirth is second to none, and yet…and yet the moment a baby is born there is so often the onset of uninhibited love. I realize there can be more suffering, medically and mentally, but when a healthy baby and mother unite, there is a joy that cannot be hidden or recreated. This is the type of joy that nothing else in life can match, or even come close to in comparison. Creating a new life takes immense pain to break through to joy. New life cannot come forward without pain.

This is what Jesus is telling Nicodemus, and it’s what is happening in the desert, and of course Jesus is talking about the spiritual birth, not physical. He says multiple times that you must be born in the spirit. This seems like some cryptic stuff here, but you need the secret decoder ring, and you don’t get to send in box tops for this ring. You have to live it. To be born of the spirit requires getting bitten by the snake. Likewise, Fridge has to go into Jumanji as Mouse and lose all his physical advantages. To be helpless is to be bitten by the snakes. While there can be physical pain that we experience, there can be mental or spiritual suffering that matches or even exceeds pain in the muscles, bones, and nerves. All who are born physically must be born “of the spirit,” which may come easily for some, but for many can only come through pain and suffering like that of childbirth. This is why the metaphor of “being born” and “coming to the light” makes sense to those of us born to this world. Babies must come “to the light” and the spiritually dead and blind must come “to the light.”

Jesus answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” (Jn 3:5)

We are body and soul, not one or the other. We are this merger of both, fully enmeshed together, and although from Descartes onward we’ve tried to separate them, they cannot be separated. If we attempt to separate them, then we lose half of our being, we deny our fullness. The body and soul go together, but each must be born in different ways. All of the characters in Jumanji were physically born, but they were not spiritually born until they entered the spirit world of the video game and did combat with their weaknesses. They had to wrestle and suffer with life after losing all that they believed made them strong. They had to look up at their weaknesses, to see their flaws raised up before them (literally, as Mouse’s character traits are raised up on a virtual billboard or card for him to see). Before entering the game they were puffed up with pride hiding behind protective shields, and thrusting swords out at the world. But those shields and swords led them to prison. They all ended up in the same place and their only redemption came from being rendered helpless, recognizing their flaws, seeing true value in every face, and ultimately believing in something greater than them could set them free.

All of the Israelites writhing in the desert were physically born already, but they were not spiritually born until they were bitten and weak. In their confidence, they rejected God, using their own words and strength as swords and shields. They didn’t need God, since they felt strong. Then came the bites, the fiery snakes, and the pain and suffering, for which no cure or medical treatment could solve. Once helpless they had to look up at the image of what bit them, what caused their helplessness. They had to look up at the serpent on the pole? Why a serpent? Because that was the cause of their weakness. And what does the serpent represent in the Bible? Sin. A snake or serpent or slippery, shiny tempter that bites is always and undeniably the representative symbol of badness in the Bible. The bitten, the fallen, had to look up at what caused their weakness and acknowledge that fact. The thing that caused their weakness was the snake, which is to say sin. And only then, in the desert, when they awakened to that truth were they healed. Then they “lived,” they were healed, they were re-born in the spirit. Only by looking at the mysterious pole that held up what ailed them were they restored to health and good order. Why did they have to look up at the serpent? Why does this matter?

They had to admit their sins. They had to pass through the fire to be burned of their imperfections. Interestingly, they are said to be “fiery snakes” that bit them. This is critical to understand about this weird story in the desert. The Hebrews have to stop denying that they have weaknesses, that they have sins, in order to be repaired. To deny that we have weaknesses and sin is to reject God. It’s really that simple. The denial of sin is the rejection of God. That is the story in the Garden, where the first people are tempted away from God, persuaded that they will become “like gods,” only to find out it was a lie, and that they can never become God by taking the easy path. Like Adam and Eve, the bitten Hebrews cannot elevate themselves to be God without humility. This is one of the odd contradictions of Christian wisdom that you hear over and over, where to go up, you must first go down, and “the last will be first,” and “he who exalts himself will be humbled.” It’s not like trying to find Waldo, this message is all over the Bible. The second son is chosen over the first, the poor receive the spirit before the wealthy, the uneducated understand more than the teachers, and the suffering servant is the king.

To return to God requires admitting our weaknesses and letting down our guard. Then you will begin to move toward the light. To not admit weakness is to stay hidden behind the wall you have built. The wall that you believe is protecting you, this strong front you put up, is not made of brick. It’s paper. It’s just paper that you imagine is brick. And it needs to be punched through. The funny thing is that we build up this wall with diplomas and cars and careers and fitness and fashion and we think others admire us for these things, but they can see the paper thin veneer we’re wrapped inside. We just can’t see it ourselves because it’s hard to admit we don’t have everything all figured out.

I think I read this “bronze serpent” story years ago and considered this to be some kind of magic or voodoo going on, and felt that it was odd for Judaism and Christianity to say that the Canaanite fertility rites were bad magic while this bronze serpent story was healing by God. But was this some kind of magic healing by the bronze serpent?

No. Here’s the difference and it’s so critical to understanding the Bible and reading it. They are not healed by the statue of the bronze serpent. They are healed by their humility and their belief. The statue is just an object. It has no power. God is the only one with power. But those who believe, are healed. Those who get relief, do so by belief. Belief enters when they admit their faults. The door to faith opens up when you surrender. The magic rites of other faiths believe that the statue, the object, or the incantation has power. The sacrifice to false Gods is making a transaction. The one God doesn’t play that game. Moses is calling the bitten people to repent, to turn back to God, in order to be healed. How will it heal them? By their surrender to God they will be healed. The statue is as dumb as the rock its made from. But the surrender to God changes people from the inside out. Surrender must happen in order for the medicine, the Holy Spirit, to take in your soul. Faith is the submission of the will and the intellect to God, and if you are only trying to make a deal with God, you aren’t submitting, you are wheeling and dealing.

This is why Nicodemus doesn’t understand what Jesus is saying. The idea of surrender may bounce around in his mind, but he doesn’t do it, or he doesn’t understand it, or maybe he can’t understand it. I think that’s it. He can’t understand it. Why not? Because he doesn’t believe he has a weakness. Pride is can seem a nearly immovable block, and it takes the unstoppable force of the Holy Spirit to dissolve it. Or if you’re lucky, you just get the experience of St. Paul, knocked off a horse by a bright light and it’s all taken care of in a flash. But that’s not how it usually works. Nicodemus did not see the light, despite sitting right in front of it.

His righteousness blinds him. So he cannot be born in the spirit. Sadly, his education, wealth, and deep knowledge of scripture will never produce the pain and suffering that will lead him to admit that he has weakness. Like Fridge in Jumanji, his weakness is his strength, or his strength is his weakness. You can say it either way. Nicodemus just doesn’t know it yet.

His pride will never allow him to be humble, even though both may attempt to act humble in public. Humility usually comes by pain and suffering. You can’t force it. You can try to get it by self-denial, by fasting or forgoing sweets and TV and soda, but it’s not the same thing. Denying yourself food and entertainment will help, and should be done for practice, but it will not likely produce the full effect. Mortification has its purposes and can most certainly draw you closer to God. But self-denial alone to achieve humility is like using a flight simulator versus flying a real jet. The former has no real consequences when the plane crashes, and the latter one kills you (and perhaps many others). To use another example, using self-denial to achieve humility like using virtual reality to “walk” through New York City on a summer day compared to feeling the heat of the sidewalk on your shoes, smelling the garbage, and hearing the traffic noise. Virtual reality is no substitute for reality.

Don’t let me mislead anyone here: self-denial is worthwhile. Self-denial is training for the real thing. If you want to kickstart your prayer life and spiritual awakening, there are tools and events that can ignite the fire. Exodus 90, silent retreats, Ignatian spirituality: go and do these things, as the spiritual fruit is real. These things are not replacements for the tests in life, but they prepare you and guide you when the tests show up at your door, and rest assured the test or tests are approaching.

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

I’m going to do something annoying. Or rather, I’m going to do something that I found annoying when I was fallen away from belief. This won’t be annoying to those who have faith, but it will to those who don’t. I am going to take a non-Christian movie and talk about it in terms of Christian redemption and rebirth. That’s the annoying thing I’m going to do.

As I said, this won’t irritate everyone, only some. Those in the choir won’t mind, but those outside the church will find it irritating.

While I was cavorting in the fields of unbelief, after falling away from faith, if I heard someone interpret a movie as a Christian film or explain how a character was a “type” of Jesus figure, I cringed. During that time, I felt that the Christians encroached on pop culture by twisting characters and plots into parallels that didn’t actually exist. I felt the Christians were desperately trying to remain relevant in a culture that had moved on. Furthermore, I felt that the pop culture should not be interfered with in this way. Now I see irony in this reaction. When I believed that I had no religion, I was offended that the art and film of secular culture was being somehow attacked.

Every hit movie that came out would soon result in some Christian “zealot” interpreting the story as a suffering and redemption plot that explained why we needed a savior. (Notice how we only call religious people zealots, but we reserve the term for when they observe their actual beliefs? We never call secular people zealots, even though they follow their set of beliefs openly and browbeat others who don’t as wrong. This may also have to be a topic for future episodes.)

In particular, I recall this interpretation happening with the movie, The Matrix. As soon as Christians watched this movie, articles about the parallels between Neo and Christ emerged. The Christians seized upon it, borrowing the movie’s success for use in evangelizing sci-fi fans.

This irritated me a great deal, mostly because the parallels were obvious, but I didn’t want to admit it. Let’s look at the high points, without going too far into it. The name Neo is a scrambling of the word “One.” Neo is the savior of the world. His sidekick girlfriend is named Trinity. The place they are trying to get to is called Zion. The ship is named Nebuchadnezzar. There’s a small band of believers, a betrayal, and an evil force. There are demonic agents that can appear and disappear. There is a death and even a resurrection. There are so many other Biblical references that it doesn’t take a genius or even a stretch of the brain muscle to map the Matrix movie to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

Christian writers have always looked for signs of Christ in works of art, and will always do so, just as atheist and humanist and scientist and communist writers will try to do the same for their worldview. For every author that supports Christianity, there is another trying to tear it down. All is fair in love and war, but also in ideology and propaganda, as every side will have defenders that cross lines of decency and employ every logical fallacy and stoke fears like a furnace. Not every debate is as charitable and honest as say, Jimmy Akin vs. Bart Ehrman, where we get to see the best of the defenders sparring in kindness and putting forth their best argument.

Let’s get started. In the next few episodes, I’m going to talk about the movie Jumanji! (the 2017 version) and the character named “Mouse” Finbar, and somehow I’m going to tie that over to Moses and Nicodemus.

Anyone annoyed yet? I hope not. I have a long ways to go. Let’s get going.

In the movie, Jumanji!, four high school kids of different cliques are magically brought into a video game where they must survive by collaboration to escape. Jumanji (2017 version) is where The Breakfast Club meets The Hunger Games. In fact, it’s worth pausing here to mention that if you want to write a hit book or movie, you might do well to combine several prior hits in a new way, but you must use high school age kids or no one will buy it or read it. Jumanji did a nice job of this, as did The Hunger Games, which to me seemed to be a remix of The Most Dangerous Game and The Lottery. High school age kids make more interesting characters than middle-aged men and women, because everyone has their own coming of age story, whereas not everyone has their own mid-life crisis story (yet).

I’m going to focus on Kevin Hart's character. In the video game, Kevin Hart’s character “Mouse” is upset to learn that “strength is his weakness.” This comment is tossed off as a comic one-liner in the movie, but I would like to suggest that this is what the whole movie is about.

Kevin Hart's character in the video game is the opposite of his real world self. In the real world, the actor Ser'Darius Blain plays Anthony "Fridge" Johnson, who is a high school football stud. He's handsome, he's got youth, he’s got looks, and most of all, he is strong. Even his name and nickname sound powerful, and he only selects his video game character because he misread the nickname as “Moose,” only to learn that the actual name of the character is Franklin “Mouse” Finbar. A pixelated TV screen made the word difficult to read, causing him to misread Mouse as Moose.

Once inside the video game, Fridge is in disbelief upon discovering his character's skills and weapons. One of his weaknesses is “strength.” He says, “Strength is my weakness. Hey, can I...quick question. How is strength my weakness? Somebody explain that to me.”

The whole movie goes on to explain that to Fridge, so that when he returns to the world, he understands that line better than he ever dreamed. He’s changed. He’s not the same person. It’s like he has been re-born.

We’ve heard this story before.

That is what the movie is about. The movie is explaining this to all of us. While we laugh at Kevin Hart's perfect timing and way of telling jokes, the message of how strength can be your greatest weakness is being broadcast and decoded to us through body humor.

Strength is his weakness. Why? Because in the "Fridge" character we see a high school life where he uses his strength as a hammer to get what he wants, to have his way. He has a weakling do his homework for him. He is above the crowd because of his athletic prowess. All four characters in the movie have something similar happening, but Fridge is my focus here, even though I can relate to any of them. The story is a process of purgation of the high schoolers’ flawed thinking.

Jumanji is a story about recognizing our weaknesses and coming to live with them, to embrace our inadequacies, to be at peace with our flaws without celebrating our flaws. In religious terms, this is called sin. Yes, we’re already going there. The movie is explaining to us why we need redemption, why we need salvation. Sorry, I had to go there - to the “s” word - sin. But if you’ve listened to any of this series, you know the “s” word is going to come up every time.

We don't like the word "sin" today, but whatever euphemism is used, the best word to describe our weaknesses and flaws is sin. Why is that? Because these weaknesses all drive the behavior of the high school students to do things that they don't want to do. They are all hiding behind some smokescreen to tell themselves and the world that they have no weakness. None are being honest and open, none want to be exposed, and these weaknesses bring all of them to after-school detention, which is a metaphor for how we put ourselves in our own prisons through our identity lies. We choose to live in hell because of what we cannot give up, or refuse to admit. Jumanji is similar to Dante’s experience in the Inferno. The characters must go all the way down, all the way to the bottom of self-knowledge, in order to get to the mountain. They cannot discover their weakness, their flaw, their fig leaf, unless they experience humiliation and learn that what they have been gripping so tightly is a handle attached to nothing.

Finally, I can get to the Jesus part, because obviously I’ve been leading up to it for some time. Yes, Jumanji and Jesus. We’ve arrived.

There are two scenes that I’m going to tie together where the question of “how is strength my weakness?” is answered. The first is with Moses in the desert, the second is with Jesus and Nicodemus.

In his clandestine meeting with Nicodemus, Jesus explains what he is here on earth to accomplish. This is the conversation which surrounds the famous verse known as John 3:16, perhaps the only Bible verse that many American football fans have memorized or are at least aware of by chapter and verse. Keith Urban also has a song quoting this verse, titled John Cougar, John Deere, John 3:16, so it’s the kind of Bible verse that both cafeteria Christians and diehard Biblical scholars can chat about together. It’s good common ground. The Moses story is less well-known, but it goes directly along with the conversation with Nicodemus.

In this conversation, Jesus drops a reference to a scene from the Old Testament book of Numbers. The story is one where the people of Israel have rejected God, and God has sent fiery snakes to bite them as punishment. So we’re off to a good plot right away because we have whining, rejection, anger, conflict, betrayal, complaining, and writhing pain. The Israelites in the desert have similarities to the video game exiles in Jumanji.

Since Nicodemus is a well-read Pharisee, he knows the story. Jesus just has to mention this snaky scene and he knows what the reference means. But we need to go into it a bit, since it’s not as well known today. This snake biting story in Numbers has everything that makes for a good HBO series, but it’s much better because all of this happens in about five to ten sentences. Also, there are only three characters, so we don’t have to waste twenty hours of our lives getting through a three year slow-burning series that could have been one episode. I think that’s what I like about the Bible more and more. So much is said in terse, short verses, because the ancient sacred writers didn’t have endless paper or scrolling screens to waste words on. The sacred writers had to be concise, unlike me.

In their suffering, the bitten people ask Moses for help. The snake bites are killing them. Moses is instructed by God to put a bronze statue of a “fiery serpent” onto a “pole,” and the pole is lifted up for all to see, and those who look upon the statue will live. Now a pole in ancient times had to be wood, since they didn’t have steel or aluminum, so yes, it’s a piece of wood….like…the cross. But I won’t go there. Let’s just leave that part alone for now. Moving on.

Lifting a bronze serpent on a wood pole, hmm…this seems strange. This feels like an idol of some kind. We have a statue lifted up on a pole. The people look to a statue, and it’s a statue of a snake, and they are healed. We’re all quite familiar with what snakes tend to represent in the Bible. A serpent is the evil one in the Garden of Eden, although I’ve read that a better translation might be “shiny one.” Whatever animal talked to Eve, the best representation of it seems to be a snake or a serpent. And now Moses is telling people to…look at a snake to be healed?

This scene in Numbers was very confusing to me. But when read along with the conversation of Nicodemus in John 3, I can start to understand the layers of meaning in both of these stories. I’ll probably spend far too long (as usual) linking Jumanji to Nicodemus to Moses, but here we are, and now I have to keep going.

First, what is happening in the desert with Moses and these fiery serpents? (Numbers 21:4-9)

The fiery serpents bite and kill many of the Israelites in the desert, who were complaining about God, and were wondering (once again) why Moses has brought them to the desert in the first place. This is like the leitmotif of the Old Testament, like a background song on a long movie, singing, “Why God? Why Moses? Why didn’t we just stay in Egypt and eat and drink and remain slaves?”

The people forget quickly, like they always do, because the draw of comfort and ease makes them angry at God. Whenever any difficulty arises, they reject God or they blame God for their troubles. However, some of the people appeal to Moses for help, because these snakebites are killing them. It’s really bad. But they appeal to Moses in an important way. God shows mercy, and tells Moses to construct a serpent out of bronze and raise it up on a pole. Those who were bitten by snakes are to look up at the pole, and they will be healed.

What? Come again?

This is one of the strangest Old Testament stories of all to me. This was one of those bizarre stories that eroded my faith because in about two paragraphs, this story seems to toss out a lot of magical, confusing, weird, and conflicting messages. Its seemed as stable as Uranium-239. I just could never make sense of this bronze serpent story.

This “serpent-on-pole” is often depicted in art as a cross with a snake draped over it. This could make sense. To hold the serpent on a pole, if it was just set on the pole, it would need a kind of crossbar to hold it, or obviously it would just fall to the ground. However, it's not clear because the text says, "set it on a pole." This could mean literally a long stick that the serpent is wrapped around, but could also mean a cross shape. Obviously, in my bias, I would prefer to think of this image as a cross with the serpent hung upon it, but I'm not sure that the book of Numbers says that. In any case, I don't think it matters, because the meaning of what the story is about dovetails with what Jesus talks about with Nicodemus. That is what's important.

The shape of the pole is speculation and not necessary for me to dwell on. This is a common danger for me, to start interpreting things when I have no language background and not enough Biblical knowledge. Sometimes I can get drawn into symbols more than I should, because digging into the religious truth is where the Eureka! moment usually happens. These discoveries of meaning in the text are more important than certain details. I enjoy the allegory and historical and literal reading, because all are necessary to read the Bible, but to me those often are arrows and clues to the timeless religious truths, and perhaps most importantly as the pointers to Jesus, and our ultimate need for a savior.

When the Israelites are bitten by the poisonous snakes, they suffer. Many of them die. In pain, they cry out for help. The venom is in them, causing fever or swelling or some kind of medical emergency. They are stuck in a kind of hell that has no escape and no cure.

The snakes were sent as a punishment from God, which modern people always loathe to read because it seems like the petty punishing God, and not the merciful magnanimous God. What I love about these stories is the movement along the slider bar of justice and mercy, where we can see both in play. We want the God who tells us, “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.” Of course we do! Who doesn’t want that? I remember eating a freezy-pop as a kid before asking if I could have one. Or I would have a cookie halfway eaten, and then stand near a hall corner to ask for permission to eat a cookie, holding the cookie behind my back like crossed fingers. Plus, I was going to eat the rest of it regardless of whether or not I had permission to do so.

However the situation came to be for the Israelites, there is suffering and they are desperate for relief. Let’s just focus on that. There is pain. There is suffering, and this is just like the world that we live in. We can relate to this pain, even if ours did not come from a snakebite. We are in the situation of suffering and pain. We all experience this, we feel it. We wish things were otherwise. Some pain is more acute, some is more chronic, but we all have it.

The question is: what do we do about it?

There is no escape, there is no free pass, and there is pain enough for all. This is what the characters in Jumanji come to realize, very quickly, once the game is eating them. They can’t escape, they can’t hide behind their muscles, or phones, or education, or uniqueness. They can’t hide at all. To do nothing is to die. They first learn that their instinct for survival is strong.

Of course, this problem of pain is the number one argument against believing in a loving God, which is the same today as when the Israelites were bitten in the desert by the fiery snakes. This has not changed. Suffering makes us question a loving, creator God just as much today as it did 3,000 years ago. So what happens with the snakes?

The snakes bite the people and there is much suffering. The people go to Moses and they ask him for help. What's important is to realize how they ask for help. They say, "We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord." In other words, they ask with humility. Recognizing their error, is the most important step here. The suffering in the desert has shown their weakness in faith for God. So that is the first weakness. But the snakes have given them far more pain, and renders them desperate. They are weaker than they ever realized. When they were in comfort, they were able to be bold and bossy. When they felt strong, they rejected God. That’s what we tend to do. When we have success, we congratulate ourselves on our good deeds and skills. When there is some discomfort, we lose patience and blame God. But when the real pain begins, we realize how small and helpless we are. When the surgery fails, we need help beyond human hands. When the plane is about to crash, we need a savior. When our best laid plans fall to pieces, we realize that our former struggles were like mosquito bites compared to the deadly snake venom. What seemed difficult before appears minor in hindsight. The hardships in the desert were discomforts. The snake bites are death. We reject God when we feel strong enough to carry on by ourselves, but we run to God when we have nowhere else to turn.

In the desert, it is their perceived strength that causes them to reject God, but oddly enough, it is the awareness of their weakness that draws them to the truth, to the light. Knowledge of our weaknesses can become our greatest strength and, unfortunately, suffering is sometimes the only way to become alerted to the illusion of strength.

All of the characters in Jumanji must become opened to their shortcomings. They must shed their idea of personal salvation, of their illusory faith in pure individualism. I would go so far as to say it dives into the problem of an old heresy called Pelagianism, because what the characters learn in the game is that they were hiding in the real world. They believed their imagined comfort was protecting them, but it was really a kind of prison. They thought their strengths were guarding them but they were shackling them. What they valued in the real world of high school was perfectly useless in the video game. They learned that they cannot save themselves. They are suffering…but they are not suffering alone. They are together. Each person finds that his worldly strength is suddenly his biggest weakness. This is what happens to the Israelites who are bitten by the snakes in the desert. They cannot save themselves from suffering. No one can do that.

How can they be saved? First, they have to believe that the game is real. They have to have a faith that this is life and death at stake. They have to realize that this game doesn't require registration and fees. No, this game will eat them if they don't play. They are in the pit and the dragon is real. So by the threat of losing their lives, they begin to play, particularly once they learn there is only a few do-overs. There is mercy, but only three times. They have three lives before they are stuck there forever, or dead and gone completely. 

Second, they need to work together to be saved. There are several turning points in the movie where instead of trying to dominate each other, they submit to one another. This is where they stop hating each other and start to slowly love one another.

But there is a third thing, something beyond their own willpower and skills. There is something beyond their cooperation. Even as a group they cannot leave the game without some mysterious force to grant them their exit.

Jumanji is not only about self-discovery of flaws. It's not only about loving one another. The key element that is less obvious is that there is a mystery. There is something higher and unexplained in the movie. Even when they are able to restore the jewel to the sacred mountain, they can't save themselves. In fact, it's not even really clear how the magic works that brought them into the game. There is something else at work.

Yes, they have to perform heroic actions to escape, but more importantly they must believe that the actions will save them, that the steps they follow will return them to their high school real-world lives. They cannot get out of this hell without faith in whatever created the game. They must believe in some power that is never fully known or shown in the movie. They must truly believe that they cannot reach home again unless they get a sacred jewel to a religious shrine on a mountain. Once this single jewel is in its rightful place, its proper place, then they have to shout a sacred word. They have to believe it, do it, and only then will they be saved. The game is the same as life and we cannot be our own saviors, neither by ourselves, nor in a group. There must be something higher to save us. But we’ll never know that unless we experience suffering. Without pain, we never see the way, never understand the problem.

Jesus tells Nicodemus: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”

Could this statement not also be swapped with “fiery snakes”? Because in the desert, God sent the fiery snakes - it explicitly says that God sent the snakes to bite the people, to cause them to suffer. Why? Because otherwise they would never understand that their imagined strength was their biggest weakness. They must be weak, and know it in their bones, in order to believe, in order to escape the pain. This is what is so hard to accept today, but it was just as hard to accept back then.

God sent the snakes, which seems kind of cruel. But then he tried a more direct method. He came down here himself, not to bite us but to show us. He came to save us. The painful snakebite method worked, but we so quickly forgot that he had to keep sending signs and prophets, and still we failed to understand. He tried telling us through various efforts and signs. The snakes in the desert is just one of his attempts to reach us, but we always choose to reject him as soon as things settle down. The fear model works, but was not effective for the long term.

The plan all along was love. He showed us the way, and it was intended to reach everyone on earth. He sent his Son to show love and mercy. Instead of him biting us, he allowed us to bite him. And bite we did. He came to us in love, like the loving father running out to meet the Prodigal Son. We learned that it’s far easier to understand this message through seeing Jesus on the cross than through trying to understand snakebites in the desert. But instead of embracing God when he came to us, like an angry mob, we arrested and tortured and killed him, only to realize that whether he bites us, or we bite him, he loses no power. He cannot be defeated. Whether he is the biter or the one bitten, in either direction, God is always the healer, the redeemer, the savior, and the answer to everything we are searching for.

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

Abandoning the idea of one God leads to the invention of other gods, because the invention of meaning must happen. And if you can invent gods and meaning, then you can invent anything. This slope becomes slippery fast, like a Minnesota sidewalk on the first autumn sleet when the temperature hovers around 30 degrees: you may be falling down soon.

Once you reject a singular God and make a golden statue or animal or mascot into a god, then it's no longer something to be taken seriously. Why? Because a statue or animal is ridiculous as an object of power. Yes, an eagle or cougar or lion is cool because they are strong and wild, but that doesn’t give them divine powers. It just means they are good hunters for fish and rabbits and wildebeasts and it’s fascinating for us to watch them. They cannot ponder ideas like justice or mercy or the best way to organize an economy.

The idea of God as something contained in this world is too small and not worthy of worship. It's a completely different concept of God from the idea of “being itself” or the creator of the universe. This is why when Moses asks what is God’s name, he gets the answer, "I AM WHO I AM." God is. He is existence itself. I guess the Bible translators like to put that in all capital letters, because without him nothing else exists. There is nothing before God. We are only because he said so, and he can unsay so whenever he wants, too.

We don’t believe that Zeus really exists. We just wink and repeat the tale because it's a fun story. But Zeus is more like a mascot, because he doesn’t demand anything from his “followers.” In fact, Artemis in Ephesus is basically like the modern day worship of the Bulls in Chicago or the Giants in New York. It’s funny that many of the modern team mascots can be mapped to old world idols or myths. These small gods are much like the sports teams of the ancient world, or you could say our sports teams are much like the idolatry of the ancient world. Sports fans today give as much time and energy to their animals and icons as the old world did to lower case gods. I’ll probably do a future episode on this because sports teams and mascots match up too well to old city-state idolatry. We even have statues and clothing and rituals for our worship of these sports franchises and teams that represent our cities and schools.

The problem with these small gods is this: if you can make a statue into a god, then a trophy or a diploma or a team or a house or a woman or a drug can just as easily become the object of worship, the giver of meaning. Many say that Catholics worship statues, so I should point to a correction here. We don't worship statues, we have sacred art and pray for intercession, but rather than get derailed, here's a good article about statues in Catholic churches. The point of all sacred art is to elevate the one true God, the Trinity. The object has no power or force or spirit, but aids in worship.

What about spirits? What about the attacks and spiritual combat and all that jazz? Isn't this just about monotheism versus polytheism? If there is only one God, then what's with the spirits and demons and angels?

It's not just a word game if the one true God is real. Both the Apostle's Creed and Nicene Creed begin with words about believing in God, which means it is the most important statement of faith, as it leads the charge for the remainder of the creeds.

Since the cultures surrounding Israel tell the tales of other gods, its like there are warring propaganda campaigns happening. Just as the the Bible argues for the one god, the Egyptians and Greeks and others argue for the many.

It is critical that the Israelites protect and worship the correct God, otherwise they will fall into the trap of those cultures around them. And that’s exactly what happens whenever they fall for idols; once in the trap, they tumble into disorder. The story of Noah is about falling into mayhem, sin, and disorder. The Golden Calf incident happens when the people abandon the one God. The book of Judges is full of these cycles of order, disorder, and re-order as the people believe, then rebel, and then return to the one God. It's the story of the Prodigal Son on repeat, but instead of one man it's a nation.

The whole story of the Bible is a re-assertion of the proper order where the Most High God, the one God, rules over the people and all creation.

The story of Jesus is the story of the one true God, the one power of the universe, coming back to reclaim his creation from the lesser gods, to steer the whole thing back to the start, to the simple beginning.

The "turning away" from God reached all nations. The city-states and tribes believed that this was the proper state of affairs. For example, the Greeks had statues of Athena in Athens, as she was the patron goddess of the city. As should come as no surprise, Athens saw itself as wise and strong, like Athena. The city modeled itself after its selected gods. Athens and Athena do a spiritual mirroring, just as the 115th Psalm explains to us how idols work. The creator of the idol becomes like the idol. “Their makers will be like them, and anyone who trusts in them.” (Ps 115:4-8)

Corinth, a sea-port city, venerated Poseidon. Not exactly a shock, since a port city hugs the sea. Rhodes had it's famous giant named Colossus and worshiped Helios, the sun god. A more interesting story around the old world of patron gods is Ephesus, a city that is in modern Turkey.

Ephesus held Artemis as the goddess. St. Paul shows up and causes a riot when he starts converting people to Christ, away from Artemis. Interestingly, the local silversmith is upset because he will no longer be able to sell trinkets and worship material if everyone becomes a Christian, so the riot is more about money than devotion. (The silversmiths probably didn't realize they could start selling all kinds of new souvenirs, as people today like to buy and sell Christian souvenirs, and I’m not going to dive into that question right now, but I will say I am all-in on sacred art.) The riot upsets the balance of the city, as there is a perceived order around the goddess Artemis. Introducing a new centerpiece of faith and culture scares the people because they are already settled into their existing structure. Where there is order, any hint of disorder will cause worry, and when the riots begin the disorder has arrived. When the anchors for our life are in place and the wind is calm, we don't want to pull up anchor and move. In the case of Ephesus, the city was comfortable in its undemanding idolatry.

You can see this happening today. A power struggle between those who believe in one God is underway. There is a third column in the battle with those of no god, but they were certainly present in the past as well. The gods of modernity are not as obvious to us, but they are there.

This is the story of human history. You can read about it in the mythology of peoples, just like you can read an allegorical unfolding of it in the novel, Lord of the Flies. The first humans, when we first stood up in the Africa savanna, in that first garden, we became aware of our difference from the other animals. We had to discover how to live, how to act, and how to rule. Eventually, we had to figure out what to worship. We had to spend a lot of time mulling over the idea of origins. Most importantly, we had to decide if there were no gods, many gods, or one God, because only one of those things could be true. We have tried all three options. In thirty thousand years of human drama, the experiments surely happened more than once and maybe several hundred times. The story of the Bible is the story of a nation that has cast their vote for the one God, while the story of the Greeks, Romans, and Babylonians is the story of nations that followed many gods.

Surely the claim sounds dramatic. To say that every nation but one has fallen prey to the devil or spirits makes the claim extreme. But that is exactly the claim. That is what the story of the Tower of Babel describes, as the scattering of the peoples of the world led to the invention of strange gods. The reason the Tower of Babel is the last story before Abraham’s entrance in the next scene is because the scattering explains the world that Abraham is born into, which is the pagan world of many gods.

In the Tower of Babel story, God withdrew from people when they attempted to pull him down to earth, which is just a way of saying that they tried to become God. They wanted to become god or make a deal with God. When neither of those plans worked, they turned from god and the nations were born. With the nations came the lesser gods. That is how the first half of Genesis concludes, which leads to Abraham. This is where things start to get interesting, if the ancient language and lists of names don’t make your eyes glaze over. I can quickly lose focus when I dive into the begat, begat, begat paragraphs and miss the gold in them “begats.”

I’ll do a brief and possibly bad retelling of Abraham’s life, hitting only the important points that may help me tie this together with Uranus.

Abraham lived in a place called Haran, named after one of his own relatives. Haran is believed to have been a place of a moon-cult, meaning Abraham’s family likely worshiped a god of the Mesopotamian or Sumerian pantheon. In other words, Abraham is born in a world that is fully pagan and worships many gods. His people are not believers in the one true God. No, his people are like everyone else. They have rejected the one true God. That is why Abraham’s story is so important in the Bible. When Abraham is born, Uranus and Osiris and all of the other primary pantheon gods have been overthrown by child gods. There are god and goddesses and idols all over the place. The rebellion has already occurred and the one true God is not in the ballgame. Abraham is living in the age where mythology is everywhere. These events occur somewhere around 1800 or 1600 B.C.

The story of Abraham begins when he is called by God to venture out from his home, leaving his relatives, his country, and his father’s house, which includes leaving the old familiar moon-god behind, too. When called, he goes without questioning the call, in a kind of “drop the nets” move like that of Peter and Andrew when the call from Jesus happens, or like Mary’s Fiat when the angel Gabriel visits her.

This break from Abraham’s family starts a new life for him, one of total trust in the one God that he hears speaking to him. This is a radical change from the human pride that happened just one chapter earlier in the Tower of Babel story. Without a doubt, this marks a turning point of Act I of the Bible. Since the word repent means to “turn” you might say that this the point of repentance, the return to the one God. There is much to go into on that, but I only want to go into one more thing here about Abraham.

The reason why Abraham is the Patriarch, the big P, is because he represents the return of worship to the one true God. No one else is doing this. It’s not cool or trendy at all.

So God promises Abraham land, descendants, and fame. Abraham sojourns in Canaan, Egypt, and Bethel. After various adventures and material success, he gets caught up in a local war. We learn that he has some money and a small army by now, as he takes his soldiers into battle to save his nephew. With only 318 men, he defeats four local kings.

Victorious, Abraham returns from the war with all kinds of loot, not to mention glory. Local kings come to meet him. A mysterious king arrives, the king of Salem. Now wait a minute, I’ve heard of Salem before. Where have I heard this? There is Salem, the setting for Days of Our Lives, the soap opera, where Bo and Hope live. Then there is Salem, Massachusetts where the famous witch trials happened and the setting of Henry Miller’s play, the Crucible. But wait, no, I’ve heard of Salem in another place before, but part of a larger word: Jerusalem.

Not only do we have the one God coming back into the game of human life, but we have the city of Jerusalem being introduced. Oh, and what’s this? He’s brought food and something to drink. But he hasn’t brought the usual barbecue pot-luck goat or bull, he’s brought something different to this celebration. He has brought bread and wine. Yes, bread and wine. Now we have Abraham in Jerusalem with a king that brought bread and wine and it’s starting to feel eery and weird because we know all of these elements from the life of Christ, but that happens nearly 2,000 years after this event.

Then it gets weirder and more eery. This king lived in the time when a king was also a priest. Those job titles were one and the same, so even more interesting, he comes to meet with Abraham and offer this bread and wine as a sacrifice. (This might begin to raise the hairs on your neck at this point if you haven’t heard this before.)

But that’s not all that’s interesting about this dude with the long name of Melchizedek. He is not just a priestly king, he is a priestly-king of the “God Most High.” This is important. He is not a priest of a moon-god, no, he is said to be a priest of the one God, the true God, the only God, which is referred to in the passage as the '“Most High God” or “God Most High.”

And if that were not enough, there is more to this little verse, something that my blind eyes passed right over every time I saw this passage, is that this God Most High is directly referred to as the “creator of heaven and earth.” In other words, this ain’t Uranus. This isn’t Osiris. This isn’t Odin, or the moon-cult, or Hawaiian Pele, or the Spirit Horse, or the Great Pumpkin. This isn’t any of the primary gods of any pantheon. This is clearly a reference to the God of Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 1. This guy came to Salem with bread and wine and he wants to praise the one God.

This priest-king of Salem just shows up out of the blue, and he is either one of the last people on planet earth along with Abraham that speaks of the “Most High God,” or, perhaps he is God himself visiting Abraham. I don’t know what to make of it, but that is one option for interpretation. Some people believe this is a theophany, an event where God reveals himself, like in the burning bush or in the Transfiguration. I’m not sure about that so I’ll leave it to the experts and many centuries of more well-versed thinkers. Either way, whether Melchizedek is an ordinary man or a manifestation of the God Most High, this is the moment where Abraham is blessed and where Jerusalem becomes the sacred site of the chosen people. (Note: he’s still called Abram at this point, not yet Abraham)

Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine. He was a priest of God Most High. He blessed Abram with these words:

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High,

the creator of heaven and earth;

And blessed be God Most High,

who delivered your foes into your hand.” (Gen 14:18)

This is huge. I know it probably doesn’t seem like it, but this is huge. This is the moment where Jerusalem becomes tied into everything to follow, where bread and wine become important for future references regarding sacrifice, and where we hear this interesting term, God Most High.

There’s more here too. There’s always more.

Briefly, I need to point out this last line where Melchizedek blesses Abraham and praises God, saying he “delivered your foes into your hand.” This battle that took place is the compelling event that brings Melchizedek to make this blessing. Interestingly, the battle was a rescue mission. Abraham’s nephew is Lot, who lives near the infamous cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, which have not yet been destroyed. Earlier on in chapter 13, Lot and Abraham went separate ways. The buddy movie ended when Lot moved to the fertile Jordan Valley, which is the best land, and Abraham takes Canaan. But later, the local tribes invade Lot’s land and he is captured. This is the first of three times that Lot finds himself in deep water.

Abraham’s entry into the war is for the purpose of saving Lot and his people, which he does. After saving the people and goods of Lot and Sodom, Abraham refuses to receive a reward, having sworn to the “Lord God Most High, maker of heaven and earth” that he will not profit from this war, and instead Abraham gives ten percent of his property to God. This means that Abraham went to war, won the war, received nothing, and ended up giving away his own property. Immediately after Melchizedek brings out the bread and wine and makes the blessing, Abraham becomes generous and magnanimous. When Melchizedek states that it was God that delivered the foes, Abraham seems to be changed because generosity flows from him.

I’m just going to leave this episode with this thought: Lot chooses the easier path and ends up suffering for it. The land he chose was fertile and lush, but it leads him to a hard life and eventually his own kidnapping. All that glistens is not gold, it seems. Abraham must save him, but only wins the battle with God’s help. The cities that Lot occupies return to corruption and lawlessness, as does he. Abraham pleads with God for another rescue, for mercy, but this time God obliterates the people and the cities. This is the angry God, the hellfire God. The rescue mission for the sinners of Lot’s world happens only once. Mercy has already been shown with the rescue mission, and in the second round comes judgement. That is food for thought.

The hard thing about reading the Bible is that you can so easily pass over something like a phrase, “God Most High” because we’re thinking in the 21st century instead of 1600 B.C. That little phrase refers to the God that was first and foremost and came before anything that existed, including Uranus. This is the one God, before Uranus or anyone or anything else. Nothing exists without this God speaking up and saying so. (Literally, God spoke and made all things.)

Reading mythology can get confusing real fast. Each ancient storyteller has a slightly different take on the tale, along with different motives. The mythologies of the ancient past can lead into endless caves of exploration because it becomes complicated, as the family trees and interactions cross into one another. Then there is war and culture clash, which leads to re-writing and re-purposing conquered gods and neighboring heroes into the dominant myth, and of course the dominant myths of the ancient world were Greek and Roman and Egyptian, but even those mythologies are extremely complicated. There is a overarching theme of might makes right, of the powerless overthrowing the powerful, like a food chain or pecking order that keeps changing and squirming around.

This leads me to a point that I’ve taken far to long to arrive at, but it’s a quote by a famous physicist named Richard Feynman, which goes like this:

You can recognize truth by its beauty and simplicity. When you get it right, it is obvious that it is right—at least if you have any experience—because usually what happens is that more comes out than goes in.... The inexperienced, the crackpots, and people like that, make guesses that are simple, but you can immediately see that they are wrong, so that does not count. Others, the inexperienced students, make guesses that are very complicated, and it sort of looks as if it is all right, but I know it is not true because the truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.

This is exactly how it feels to discover, or re-discover, the “one God” theory. The one God makes sense, while the mess and tangle and overcomplicated tales of mythological systems lead to confusion and endless searching. There is a restlessness, like that of Odysseus, a constant searching and changing and shape-shifting.

If you go down the rabbit-hole of mythology, you can spend a lifetime digging for the truth and be as confused in the end as when you started. I’m not saying myths are bad, because they exist as stories because we like stories. We are all people defined by stories. There is a story and a myth for everyone. We each have one that fits us. However, the myth that suits us will change over the five act play that makes up our life. The myth that describes you in your childhood will not be the same myth that describes your teens, and the myth that fits will shift again in your twenties. This happens with every decade of life, as the view changes when you change roles. But these stories we use to explain ourselves are still only stories. They are explanations but they are not the truth. The truth is always simple and pure and beautiful. That is what the one God provides. The creator of heaven and earth is simple and beautiful and gives you rest.

Why?

Because the one God is the only explanation that can cut through all the decades and give focus. What we lack is focus, which is a central point, a point of concentration where all rays of light meet. We need something simple and beautiful to look through, something clear of cobwebs and dust and grime. The myths are confusing and changing. The one God cleans up and gives meaning to all of creation and all of time, because only the one God is the God that can make sense no matter what part of the five act play you are in. A child, a teenager, a twenty-something, a worker, a father or mother, a grandparent, a retiree, and especially someone on their deathbed: all of these stages of life can understand what the idea of one God means.

You cannot do that with Uranus.

Simplicity and beauty: Einstein and Feynman knew that the truth had those qualities, and these were scientists, some of the finest ever. The Big Bang Theory is oddly simple. More odd still is that the Big Bang Theory was discovered by an astronomer who was also a priest (of all people). Oddest of all, what really takes the cake here, is that this same theory supports the universe being “created,” and by that, I mean it points to the universe having a beginning which fits with the cosmology of Genesis. When you consider the Big Bang Theory versus the complicated instructions that come along with string theory or the multiverse, it’s clear that the Big Bang is far more simple and beautiful. After awhile those other explanations begin to look like Uranus’ family tree.

Yes, we are small and finite and cannot know the mind of God, nor fully understand, I get that. But we can recognize beauty and truth and goodness. We can see those things in a baby, in a tree, in a bird nest, in Einstein’s equations, in Shakespeare sonnets, or in the simple and humble carpenter who showed up two thousand years ago and offered us some bread and wine. (Kind of like Melchizedek, huh? Right? Right? Who’s with me?!)

The thing about our minds is that we fall. We fall. We hide. We lie. We cheat. We do all of the things that go against what is simple, true, and beautiful when we serve our selves. Our default setting is to sin, to turn away from the one God and the truth. What the simple stories of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel are trying to convey is how we find ourselves always returning to a state of sin. That’s it. What the rest of the Bible is attempting to tell us is how to get out of the muck.

The good news is that the devil always overplays his hand, because he has to bluff. He has no real power over God, so the spirits try to destroy God’s creation, which means us. The humbling reality is that we are children taken hostage in a larger battle, or like pawns in a cosmic game of chess. We are attacked by temptations and face spiritual combat all the time. Spirits seek our attention in many ways, with strategies and tactics. They can steer us at any time toward the wrong choice, as free will gives us ample opportunity to stray.

You can see this happen in the chosen people, where the nation declares its position of fidelity to God, but individuals stray and often the whole nation wanders. Even leaders cannot uphold the belief when tested, such as Solomon who builds temples for his pagan wives. Yes, Solomon, the wisest king, even makes the classic blunder. But there is always the remnant who remain, who believe, and who follow the Commandments.

To declare belief in one true God is easy, but to live out that statement of faith is difficult. This is exactly why people leave the one God, because sticking with the demands of God is difficult. Why did Adam and Eve turn away? Because the fun things drew them away, tempted them. They wanted to be like gods, as advertised by the shiny one.

Most of the “fun” things are not allowed, but the problem is not the rules but what you consider to be “fun.” The problem is in the heart. Jesus could not be more clear about this, but everyone skips over these parts where he forbids something to get to the “fun” part of “judge not” where he appears to affirm the exact sins he denies. We really want the hippy Jesus because that version is more like Zeus and Dionysus and Eros. Obviously Jesus teaches forgiveness, but he most certainly does not say, “Boys will be boys!” or “Here’s some money for beer, have fun” or “A little pornography never hurt anyone” or “Ignore those Puritans, sex is no big deal.” We want the undemanding version of Christianity, we don’t want the actual Christianity that has difficult requirements. The reality is that we all turn from God because we have favorite sins. It’s going to happen, it will happen, and anyone who pretends it hasn’t happened or that they have risen above it are spewing pride like the Bellagio dancing fountains in Vegas. We all decide somewhere in life, often daily, that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission, because Jesus does not grant permission. He knows this, knowing that we would rather reign in hell than serve in heaven. He knows our hearts have a problem and he even lists the problems out for us.

“From within people, from their hearts, come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly. All these evils come from within and they defile.” (Mk 7:18-23)

Perhaps it has always been this way, but America in the 21st century chooses to ignore these difficult sayings of Jesus. It’s pretty safe in most groups to bring up the cool version of Jesus. But mention quotes like this and you may get the stink-eye. People don’t want the hard sayings, because that’s where the going gets tough. If you stick to the forgiveness parts, you make more friends. Yes, Jesus forgives sins. Yes, we will sin because we are fallen. Yes, we must turn back to him to receive the forgiveness. But nowhere does it suggest, in any terms, that the laundry list of sins that he mentions are to be blessed or affirmed. What he is trying to tell us, in metaphor, in teachings, in literal words, and in his life itself is that you must recognize that you are a sinner, that your interior self has a fatal flaw, which is why you sin. Somehow we twist this around and say there is no such thing as sin, which is the opposite of what Jesus is trying to say. We’re just so good at finding arguments to eat of the fruit of the garden and inventing reasons to build the Tower of Babel. This is the point. It’s the point of Israel preserving the faith in one God and the point of Jesus as the one God coming here to straighten us out. He has to chase out the bad spirits, because they are everywhere and reigning supreme.

These spirits harass and bother us in order for them to have power over God’s creation. Since they can never defeat God, they try to destroy us, God's most beloved creatures. For a long time, as the mythologies openly tell us, the powers of the world had turned away from the "Most High God," and only by the path of the chosen nation did we return to worship of the one true God. Without Israel we would be engaging only in tree worship and building golden calves.

The story of Israel is literally the story of a people setting their faces like flint and stepping into a storm of slings and arrows to return the true God to glory in this world. His glory was never lost in reality, but the nations, the "powers and principalities," had distracted us from the truth. The salvation history of Israel is a noble story of suffering and hope, a fight for truth, against an onslaught of falsehoods and cruelty. Yes, the Israelites committed many war crimes themselves in this journey, which is why all of it is recorded. They slaughtered and were slaughtered, but all of this history was for the greater glory of the God that the world wanted to kill once and for all.

What God accomplished through the people of Israel is so powerful that I have yet to fully appreciate it, because it is a long and forbidding act of faith, hope, and love for the one true God that allowed for the savior to come to us, and while I know the will of God obviously guided it to completion, much heartache and suffering traveled with them in those many years of swimming upstream. The real ending to the story, as I see it, is this:

The cultures surrounding had already moved on from the one God. He was considered dead, something from the past, an artifact of history. Only one group of people knew that he was real, that he was still present, that he was alive, and that he was tending to his sheep. The world wanted to kill God, just as many do today, and the declaration of Nietzsche that "God is dead" is as false when he wrote those words, as it was in the desert of the Exodus, as it is today with the New Atheists claim. The truth is that people who have rejected God want the comfort of believing that God is dead. Those in rebellion desire certainty that God is dead. Oddly enough, the Pharisees who were trying to protect the one true God, also wanted God dead, and in the twist of all twists, the chosen people and the pagan polytheist Romans banded together to do just that. They literally killed God.

Or they tried. They tried so hard. They nailed the incarnated one true God to a cross and then to be certain he was dead, they ran a spear into his side. They got what they wanted.

But that's the funny thing about getting what you want. In the end it's what you want the most that will purify you, will burn you, will leave you empty, will destroy you, and finally will set you free. Because just when the Romans and Pharisees got what they wanted, in killing God, they wiped their hands and considered the task taken care of once and for all. Three days later, they discovered that they could not kill God.

Getting what they want did not play out as expected, because it never does. Instead, like it always does, it purified them. The Romans, hoping to avoid religious disputes and stick with the easy, non-demanding false gods, were complicit in God's murder and soon after were converted away from their polytheism, back to the one true God. The death of Jesus unwound thousands of years of false idols. The Pharisees, thinking they would gain power, saw the temple destroyed 40 years after the crucifixion, and with it their power and influence faded away. Those who converted, like Saul who became Paul, found new life. The rule always holds. What you desire most, if you get it, will take you somewhere very unexpected.

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The bets we place on the roulette wheel result in different patterns and outcomes. This occurs for individuals. The same happens for nations. The answer you choose to the question of one God, no god, or many gods, dramatically alters your destiny. Depending on your choice, the heroes become different. The goals change. The heroes of ancient Greece, Odysseus and Achilles, are unlike the heroes of Israel, Moses and David. The foundation story of Rome, through the founder Romulus, is very unlike the founder of Christianity, a carpenter named Jesus. The story that gives structure to your life or nation guides choices toward different ends.

Our selected worldview leads to various pathways because the decision tree steers us in different directions that we cannot revert from or modify easily, like a train switching tracks as it leaves the station. Once on the wrong track and moving, it’s not always easy to undo.

The belief in one God leads to very a different path for Israel than that of Babylon or Egypt. The Hebrews openly reject all other gods like Baal and Zeus and Marduk or Ra. They declare them all to be false gods. Likewise, they don’t believe that human emperors like Ramses or Caesar Augustus are actual deities. They don't believe in a pantheon of many gods. Their entire worldview centers around one creator God, and not on any sub-deities. In other words, they have not abandoned the first God. All of the surrounding cultures tell stories about how the first, primordial god or gods, was killed or rendered impotent. That is the main point of contention.

None of this is hidden from us. The mythologies of ancient cultures tell these stories of how the first God or gods died. Hesiod's Works and Days tells how Ouranos was replaced. Egyptian tales explain how Osiris was overthrown. They have abandoned the idea of one God. This is exactly why Israel is alone, different, set apart, and yes, chosen. In fact, they are the only ones that have chosen to return to the idea of the one true God.

Anyone that likes mythology already knows these stories. I’m not stumbling onto something secret or esoteric. In the myths, chaos is almost always the starting point, which is a condition that any parent, artist, office manager, or software architect is well aware of. We can all relate to the idea of a shapeless mess. There is this watery nothing, an emptiness, which is sometimes called a chasm, or a void, or disorder. You may think of it as something like the upside-down in the mind of Eleven in Stranger Things. Then out of the chaos comes a creation story, the family tree, and then follows the saga of the gods, with entire genealogies and top-notch treachery. There is rebellion among the children of the initial gods that explain the past and present state, right up to the current state of the world. When Israel is writing its story of salvation history, so are the Greeks and others, since writing has suddenly become possible. But what’s curious is that as they are writing this, the only people who don't have a hierarchy or genealogy of gods and goddesses is the Hebrew people. Every other group has plowed the initial God into the past, while the Bible declares him to be alive. They alone have held a candle for the one true God in the mind of humanity when all others have declared him snuffed out.

This is what makes the Hebrews so different. They are not like any other people. They do not and will not bow to these other gods. They won’t play nice just to get along. They reject the myths as mere stories. If there is only one God, all of these myths and stories are just that: stories without any real power.

Why would this matter? Who cares? Why can’t they just get along and pour out a little liquor for these other gods?

Because they can’t. To play along will blow out the candle. It makes an enormous difference in meaning about who and what God is, what the idea of God means, and how we are to interact or worship that God. Having only one God makes every other god into an idol, a false god, and reading the Bible you can see how that irritates and enrages the surrounding cultures.

Why?

Because the Hebrews won't bow or bend to any of these myths. Rest assured that no one, today or in the ancient world, enjoys mockery or belittlement of that which gives them purpose. I don't care what era you live in, or who you are, or how your sense of meaning comes about, but if someone or some group tries to tell you that the center of your life, the meaning of your life, is false, then anger will result. There is hardly a person alive today who can stand strong when their purpose or sense of meaning is mocked or called out as a joke. Hence, the chosen people, in choosing to follow the first God, the one God, are hated throughout history because they will not bend to the world around them and call these sub-gods equal to their God, because they can’t. The lesser gods are not worthy of worship.

This leads to a whole can of worms being opened, because if you read the Old Testament with this understanding, it shines a light on many stories. The hostile world that Abraham lives in begins to make sense when you see the conflict, when you see how deep and fundamental this division is between them and the surrounding cultures.

Why are the others so angry? Why are these events so weird and violent?

The Hebrews are living in a time when their tradition is the only odd one, the only one that cannot and will not adapt. To the rest of the world, they have chosen to go backwards. For polytheistic cultures, to offer prayer or sacrifice to another city's god, or to another group's deity, is not a problem, because their concept of "god" is small. If Athens can have a patron god and Corinth can have a different one, then the power of a god is limited. Visitors can go to either place and worship or sacrifice without betraying the home team. They can make offerings and pray for sweet deals. This is what is meant by, “When in Rome, do as the Romans.”

It’s easy to fit in with the local people if you don’t mock or belittle the hometown god or team. I’m sure there were cities like Philadelphia back then, where even if you didn’t mock the hometown Eagles, the drunk locals might still have beaten you up. However, in a world of many gods, it’s not the end of the world to change your allegiance. A timid Minnesota Vikings fan can survive in Philadelphia by faking his fandom and wearing an Eagles jersey for the day, without feeling like he had betrayed the Vikings franchise. The Vikings after all, will break his heart come December, so to deny them to save himself a black eye is ok. But denying his allegiance to the Minnesota Vikings franchise, a for-profit business in the entertainment industry, is not the same as denying the foundation that gives meaning to life.

So for Israel, this cannot be done. They cannot put on a Philadelphia Eagles jersey for the day. There can be no worship of any of these small gods, because it immediately disrespects and de-thrones the one God from the highest place. The stakes are much higher than Monday Night Football. The polytheists have already de-throned the one God, and they have no qualms inserting and dropping gods like rows in a database. Israel cannot do that, and thus the problem exists. As long as they maintain that there is only one God, they cannot worship any other god, because to do so destroys their entire worldview. In other words, how they derive meaning from existence is directly opposed to the surrounding world, which puts them always at odds with their neighbors. They have no choice but to call the Philadelphia Eagle what it is: an idol.

This makes the choice to worship the one God a demanding and difficult way of life. It’s not like being a Minnesota Vikings fan is challenging. I can buy a jersey and turn on the TV. By that ritual act alone I’m a member of the club. One thing I will say for Eagles fans is that they actually seem willing to die for the team, and not only through self-inflicted alcohol poisoning but by actual human sacrifice. Or maybe I’m still bitter over the 2018 beat-down the Vikings received from the Eagles in the NFC championship game. I was riding the high of the Minneapolis Miracle that happened the week before when that debacle happened. But I’m fair-weather fan anyway, and I personally think the sports obsession in America is a symptom that is preceding a major illness.

The Hebrews, however, make Eagles fans look like fair-weather fans. You can see this in many stories, where the Israelites will not bend a knee to the false gods. In Daniel, one of my favorites of the entire Bible is when King Nebuchadnezzar has built a giant gold statue and wants everyone to pay homage and worship it. He calls in all the nations and cultures for the day of dedication. Everyone falls in line. Everyone, of course, except for the Jewish representatives. Why? Why can't these three guys just toe the line? Why must they rock the boat of Nebuchadnezzar?

They don't worship his gold statue, because they can't. Or they could do it, but they won’t. If they do, they have rejected the one true God. If they do, then they have abandoned their faith. If they do, their lives lose all meaning, because they know that the one true God is the truth, thus there is nothing more precious and worthy than keeping faithful to the one true God. Not to mention, there is a good precedence in Exodus for why "golden" statues should not be worshiped, since the Golden Calf incident ended with a lot of corpses, and those involved had to literally drink the melted and powderized metal calf as punishment.

So King Nebuchadnezzar is told, "they will not serve your god or worship the golden statue which you set up." The King is livid and orders the three men to be burned in a furnace, demanding that the furnace be stoked to the highest level of heat possible. He gives the three dissidents a chance to change their mind, but they refuse. They respond with one of the ultimate comebacks in execution history, as they tell the King (using my translation here), "Our God may save us. But just so you know, even if he doesn't, we don't really care. But we will never worship your stupid statue."

This is a badass tale, like most stories where people stand up for the truth. This is the stuff of legend. They are saying, "Go ahead and kill us. Your god is a fake. Yes, we may burn, but we won’t die as apostates."

Then Nebuchadnezzar grows even more angry and has them thrown into the furnace. But they do not burn. Something is shielding them from the fire. The book reads (not my translation here), "They walked about in the flames, singing to God and blessing the Lord." They are singing in a furnace like it was a warm shower. Something or someone has interceded so that "the fire in no way touched them or caused them pain or harm."

They sing a long song worshiping God, the one God. Then the best part of this story arrives. Nebuchadnezzar looks into the furnace, and sees these three men walking around in the fire, but there is another person. There is a fourth body. Something strange is happening. A fourth person or being is inside the furnace. The King says, “I see four men unbound and unhurt, walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.” We don't find out who the fourth person or angel or being was (but there is lots of speculation if you want to research it). The three men emerge unburnt and not even smelling of fire. This leads to a kind of conversion for Nebuchadnezzar, as he is shocked and amazed. He gives orders that everyone must now praise the "Most High God", the one God, going so far to add that anyone who disrespects the one God of these three Jews "...shall be cut to pieces and his house made into a refuse heap. For there is no other God who can rescue like this."

This example in Daniel shows what the chosen people are facing and how their declaration of faith enrages the world around them.

The chosen people are set apart because they are attempting to re-enthrone the one true God. The lesser gods are all false, so they can never defeat the real God in battle. The demons and lesser gods have only taken power over the minds of men, but they have no true power. This is why lesser gods and demons are said to attack humans; it is the only way they can gain power. They cannot defeat God, but they can corrupt what he loves, which is his creation. To say that a god is powerless will also enrage those who elevate lower, invented gods. This is like going into a diehard Green Bay Packers fan's basement where he has collected years of posters, ticket stubs, team souvenirs, and signed jerseys and then telling him, "The Packers suck!" It's going to sting. It's not how to win friends and influence people. Sticking with the one God, and telling people that whatever they elevate to give them meaning in life is a false god, is inviting conflict, hatred, and wrath.

This story in Daniel kind of sums up the problem with why the Jews face so many difficulties. They have chosen a path of difficulty, a tradition that has been left behind by other cultures. If you consider the story in Daniel in comparison to the story of Odysseus, the Greek hero, their way of interacting with the world could not be more different. Odysseus is a great character because he slips through tricky situations. He adapts and maneuvers to make his way home to Ithaca. Odysseus is like a chameleon who can say whatever is needed to survive, which is why we love him and haven't stopped talking about him for several thousand years. He's crafty, clever, slippery. He's cool. He's even kind of like the snake in the garden a bit. When faced with a difficult situation, he shifts. The open line of the Odyssey has various translations, but the Robert Fagles one I like the best: "

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turnsdriven time and again off course..."

He is a man that can change, quickly, to ride out the days of this crazy world. Like various successful salespeople I have interacted with, Odysseus sees a setback as an opportunity and the truth is always fuzzy and grey. I get the sense that Pontius Pilate had some attributes of Odysseus, because when beset with the trouble of Jesus' trial, he maneuvers to save himself, his image, his power. Better yet, when Pilate hears Jesus talking about the idea of "truth" he gives a telling answer, an answer that betrays his worldview.

So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice."

Pilate said to him, “What is truth?"

This to me is the root issue that the chosen people are constantly fighting, and it is that of sticking to the one God, because once you depart from the truth of one God, then you can begin to dabble around in declaring anything to be true. Odysseus isn't terribly concerned with what is true, unless it helps him get what he wants.

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This may sound like I’m pulling this out of thin air, but this story is told not only in Genesis, but in all of the surrounding mythologies of the ancient world. They tell the same story but from a different viewpoint.

The myths written by the surrounding cultures are telling the story from the other side. Star Wars is told from the perspective of the Rebel alliance, but the Empire’s tale would make them the righteous protector of freedom. Lord of the Rings is told from the vantage point of hobbits and elves, but the orcs would tell a completely different tale.

That is what is happening in the mythology around Abraham. The Bible is telling one story, and the myths are telling the other. The mythologies have rejected the idea of one God and believe that this the righteous state, a version of progress. This is all over the place. In myth after myth, the heroes are the ones that kill off the primordial creators and gods. The initial gods, such as Uranus, Osiris, and Anu are all killed off by their children, as if this is just normal. The slaying of the higher, older gods is told as a story of progress, in a sense.

The Bible is a book making a different argument. This book is telling us that the most high God created all things and is still the ruler of all. The world all around Abraham is polytheistic and is thus turned away from the idea of one God. In the mythologies, it was not the devil that was kicked off the patio in heaven, it was the one God. The rebellion and overthrow of the original gods by a child god is where the disconnect happens. Where you stand on this point of view is critical in understanding personal and cultural interactions, because it is foundational.

In Star Wars, we enter a world in the middle of history, Luke Skywalker overthrows his father, Darth Vader, a play on “Dark Father.” The Jedis worship a mysterious, uncertain, unknown thing called The Force, a power greater than any god or man. The Jedis are considered fools for following an ancient religion, and Luke has come to restore order through the power of The Force. The Rebel alliance of Luke and the ragtag X-Wing fighters is the people set apart from the rest. The real “rebellion” is that of the Sith, who have overtaken the world, thinking they have deposed The Force. But guess what, Darth? You can’t depose The Force. Your reign is temporary, because the real power is what will be restored through a savior. The rescue mission is on its way. Luke destroys evil and restores the world to health. There is a power greater than the Sith or the Jedi, or Luke, or Obi-Wan Kenobe. Star Wars has the elements of Abraham against the world, and it has the elements of the opposition like that of the pagan cultures around him. This is why it’s a great story: these two things cannot co-exist and must war against each other, so the conflict happens naturally.

In the surrounding cultures of Abraham, the Sumerian gods have slain the top god. It’s done already. The Mesopotamian leaders believe that the rightly ordered world is many gods. Leaders who govern with solid explanations in place would be insane to shake up the game board. Even false gods need to have good backstory, otherwise people will go insane.

Abraham cannot play that game because he knows it’s not real. He is like the boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, where everyone else is pretending the false gods matter, but Abraham can’t stand it and must speak up and say, “The Emperor has no clothes.” He shakes up the gameboard.

The rightly ordered world according to the Bible, is one God. These two positions cannot abide together peacefully unless one of the positions is abandoned. There are irreconcilable differences between these worldviews, as what grows from these foundations is radically different ways of life. One thing you can see for sure, through both worldviews, is that people are incurably religious. We just are.

The reason why we can't see the big picture is because we've been living in Christendom for so long we have forgotten the tales of the other cultures that surrounded Abraham. We don’t even know what that means in America. Our equality and social justice motives spring directly from Christian ideas, not mythological systems. There is no celebration of selflessness in mythology, aside from a few minor gods and goddesses. There is the idea of sacrifice and ascendency, but not of humility without some kind of reward. In mythology, dogs don’t do tricks unless they get the treat.

We have the script so close to our noses that we can’t even read it. We know the lines by heart, so we can fudge it and maybe we get some details wrong, but the widely accepted dogmas around love and dignity and charity did not come from Uranus. Peace and love most definitely did not come from a world governed by Zeus. No, Zeus was like Jeffrey Epstein in terms of showing us how to live. The mythological systems show no respect for the weak or frail or poor. They celebrated power, not gentleness. They wanted to win, not surrender. The mythological gods were prayed to like NFL coaches, who were to provide a game plan to bring victory. They represented strength, not peace and love. Peace was for suckers.

The chosen people were thus chosen by their choice, but it’s important to keep in mind that the chosen people does not mean they were themselves God. They were keepers of the flame. To keep a flame alive requires a fight, which means violence and bloodshed, which is exactly why people freak out reading the Old Testament, especially people who have been living comfortably in the Pax Americana for the last one hundred years. We just have no idea what it means to have to fight for something. We have no idea how hard it is to keep a candle lit the dark amid a storm.

So yes, the idea of the "Chosen People" seems bizarre to us, as I used to wonder why couldn't the Egyptians be the chosen people? Why couldn’t it be the Amalekites? Or the Hittites? Or the Canaanites?

But that's the whole point. The other people could not be the chosen people of the one God, because the other people have already thrown that idea away, long ago, in a galaxy far away. The other peoples are telling the story of Darth Vader, who is like Zeus. They have not chosen one creator God, they have chosen sub-gods.

Since there is only one group of people that worship the one true God, the description of them as choosing each other makes total sense.

This is another one of these revelations that felt like a club over my head. Rather than looking at this question from my 21st century eyes, you have to look at this story from their perspective, just as you have to look at the Greek heroes through Greek eyes. The story of Abraham was written around 1500 B.C., and Abraham lived around 1800 or 1600 B.C. By choosing to believe in one God, he took a direct step against the grain, he started swimming upstream - whatever metaphor for struggle you prefer - that is what happened. And so the covenant between his people and the one God becomes plain to see. He will not leave God even if the whole world hates him. God will not leave Abraham, even if the whole world rejects God. They have each other. They are alone, but they are together. God uses the people, and they lean back, on God, like Forrest Gump and Bubba in the rain in the Vietnam mud.

Bubba to Forrest: I'm gonna lean up against you, you just lean right back against me. This way, we don't have to sleep with our heads in the mud. You know why we a good partnership, Forrest? 'Cause we be watchin' out for one another. Like brothers and stuff.

God and Abraham’s people are Forrest and Bubba: like brothers and stuff, suffering the slings and arrows of the universe and world. (Except in this case it’s like father and his children, or a shepherd and his sheep.)

The Egyptians and Hittites and Canaanites cannot be the chosen people of the one God because they have already abandoned the one true God, the Most High God, the God that we think of as the monotheistic God.

How do I know this? Assuming I’m not crazy, as I’m sure some family and friends are assuming by now, this wasn’t some kind of private revelation that I had, where I am pretending that something woke me and spoke in the night, like young Samuel. No. I’m not having some kind of experience to realize this, aside from reading both the Bible and mythology. This is all public domain material. I didn’t go to the grotto and hear a voice, I didn’t have a dream, I just read the books. The stories practically shout the situation that Abraham was in when this whole journey to Jesus begins.

The story of these other cultures clearly tell the story of their turning away from the idea of one God. The myths of Egypt and Greece literally tell the story of how the original deity was overthrown by sub-gods. The monotheistic God of old was removed from power, and if you believe that the stories were written to reflect the culture, then that is what the writers are telling us. There are no accidents in Hollywood, nor in propaganda (which is like saying the same thing actually). The idea of one God was abandoned, which is why they write about the many gods, to prove their point. They claim to have it correct. Their argument is no different from modern people who say the same thing, that God is dead. And of course, they are as wrong today as they were 4000 years ago.

This is exactly why the Bible is so different from any other book. It’s why the readings and lessons are so strange to us. Israel is telling the story that no one else is telling. The difference in storytelling alone shows how different a people must be to remain faithful to a single God versus many gods. They are, to put it crudely, the weirdos of the ancient world, and Christians joined them in that weirdness and restored the one God in the mind of human beings to its former glory. I hope this makes sense. The Christian story, in a nutshell, is the victory over the lie that God is dead. The life of Christ is the re-assertion that the one true God is real. The resurrection is the proof that all other gods are false.

For some reason it takes a long time, at least in how we see time, for this to play out. People ask why couldn’t God just tell us this and send a great sign. But he did do that. In fact, the parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus is the exact response to this question from people of “why couldn’t God have just sent us a sign?” We could talk about that parable for hours, but the point here is that Jesus says that signs have been sent. They have been sent repeatedly and were ignored. So what good is another sign? We ignored all of the prior signs, so what sign would get the message across? Those who choose not to believe, will choose not to believe whether there is a sign or not. When you are turned inward, you cannot believe because you refuse to ask for faith. When you are spiritually blind, you wouldn’t even see a flashing billboard advertising “free beer” with your name on it. The rich man in hell asks, “Why wasn’t there a sign?” and interestingly enough, the speaker from heaven in this parable is none other than Abraham himself, which is just so perfect. This parable blows my mind both literarily and spiritually. Abraham tells the rich man that he ignored all the signs, and that “If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.” (Lk 16:19-31) This parable surprises in so many ways that it may have to be a future episode.

Keep in mind that God never lost any power or glory through all of this turning away by the people. He is no less because people just didn’t give him the glory and honor. No, it’s the people that have become fooled into trading the ultimate being, God, for the entertainment of a false object or a fallen spirit. They are praying to dolls and dummies and expecting miracles.

I am sorry to say that I have prayed for free-throws to be made late in games, as if there were a basketball god, even though I sent my prayer to the one God. In reality, I was praying for a basketball god to exist, as I fell for the most classic error in worship, which is to ask for something other than God’s will to be done. Not my will, God’s will. In fact, if I pray for anything other than God’s will to be done, then I need to go back and study the Lord’s Prayer because I’ve clearly forgotten that it doesn’t mention anything about getting what I want, including a free throw to be made, and really, why on earth would my prayer be for an orange ball to go through a metal ring? We have lost our minds when that type of prayer comes from our heart, because that is the entry point for false gods to insinuate themselves into our lives. That is where they get a hold of you.

The density of Genesis in chapters 1 through 11 is profound. Genesis was written around 1500 B.C. That may seem long ago, but 3,500 years ago is not that deep into human oral history and in God’s time is a blink. The ideas in Genesis did not suddenly spring into being in 1500 B.C., as they were oral traditions of people, long before the sacred writer took up a pen.

From the beginning, in the first sentence, the reason the Israelites are so different is because they reject the idea of a heavenly rebellion that succeeded. From that first line, they refuse to adopt a worldview that conflicts with this truth.

The hard thing about truth is that only one argument can be true, as there is no such thing as “my truth” and “your truth” as we like to say today. Either there is one creator God of the universe or there is not. Either there is one God, no god, or many gods. Only one of those can be true. So you have to choose.

If you choose “many gods,” then either Zeus sits on Mount Olympus or he doesn’t. Then you can drive a few hours away and ask the same question: either Marduk exists, or he doesn’t. You have to do this with all the gods. This gets really repetitive once you have to do these same questions for every culture in the world. This is why it’s so easy to throw them all out and declare all gods to be fake.

The argument that atheists and agnostics use today is, “I just believe in one less god than you do,” because the modern non-believer has fully rejected the idea that there are many gods. And so have I. Some people think they have rejected the many god world, but if they are into astrology or divination or all that stuff, then they have not. If you believe in crystals and reiki and witches, then you believe in gods. You have chosen and it’s not the one God of Christianity and Judaism.

But for those that do reject the idea of gods altogether, they should pause and ask themselves about the one God first. Either one God exists, or does not. The question is not about Zeus or Flying Spaghetti Monster that occupy this world and universe. This is a question of whether there is one God who existed before everything and created everything, before the chaos, before empty space. This is where we tend to argue today. You can argue forever if you like on this question, but only one outcome can be true, which makes it a very high-stakes game of roulette for those who put their chips in to play, and we all have to play this game whether we like or not, no matter how long we stand in the shadows trying to bide our time or hide in the corner. The choice here is whether you believe that we are nothing but material, pure chemistry and physics, or if there is the possibility of a soul. You can believe in a soul if you believe in many gods, but you cannot believe in a soul if you reject the one God and the many gods. If you choose that there are neither gods nor the one God, you don’t get to have a soul. You can’t have the cake and also eat it. So if you believe in a soul, you have chosen one God or many gods.

We can’t wish these questions away, because it raises the deepest concerns of our lives, which is to extract meaning and purpose from our senses, from our days, from our experiences, from our education, and most importantly from our hearts. These are high-stakes questions, so naturally we don’t want to bet too brashly or recklessly. People try to hedge their bets on this, but you can’t. You can’t play partially because your life here and hereafter is what’s at stake on the table. That’s why this game rouses anger and strong feelings, because we know that choosing incorrectly can lead to disaster. If I’m wrong my whole world, and what I hold to be most meaningful, falls to pieces. If I’m wrong, I’m a fool.

The choice of choosing the one God requires leaning into the void, looking at the mystery, and opting to allow for mystery. The reason faith is so hard to ask for is because it requires giving up control and knowledge. You can’t achieve faith. You can’t google it. You can’t order it. You can’t even work for it like money or fitness. You have to ask for it. And who likes to ask for things any more? Who wants to be weak, or vulnerable, or exposed? That is where the bet must be placed, on that razor blade. The choice cannot be split. If you are down to the decision of whether to have faith or not have faith, you have to choose God or the self, because if there’s no God, then the only person who can save you is yourself. If there’s no God, then the only person who can give your life meaning, is yourself. And that is exhausting.

So it’s very big bet to place but you have to place it before you die, because your chips go back to the house if you don’t play.

If you answer “no” to the question of God, then you can stop playing now. The rest of the quiz doesn’t apply. You can proceed to the bar and buffet. Enjoy!

If you answer ‘yes’ to the idea of one God, you have to play further. You’re not done after the question of God. There is another decision tree that must be traversed.

If you bet that there is one true God, then you have to consider a followup question, which is every bit as high-stakes as the one before it was. The next question is this: “Did Jesus rise from the dead?”

You could ask a slightly different one, and ask: “Was God incarnated as a human and did he live among us?” But I think the better question that gets to the heart of the matter real fast is the one about the resurrection. This is where we waffle today. This is where we make the choice of whether Jesus was a teacher or God. There is no better place to ponder or loiter than the tomb itself because this is like a light switch that you can either turn on or off. If you turn if off, if you bet against the resurrection, then Jesus was a teacher. He becomes an ordinary man. You can then proceed to the bar and the buffet as well.

Either the resurrection is real, or it was made up. Only one of those two things can be true. There is no “my truth” for this because the roulette wheel either stops on black or red. The wheel stops and your bet cannot be changed once the wheel comes to a halt. I think the better metaphor here is “the light switch is on of off” because this choice either puts Jesus to sleep or brings him to life.

St. Paul states the risk of this predicament openly and plainly. All is at stake for Paul in his bet. Paul’s own life, his own death, the meaning of his life, his hope, his faith - everything sits on the table with this question. And if he has chosen this strange and (seemingly) restrictive way of life, when he could be gorging at the bar and the buffet with those who bet on ‘no,’ then he says that he is a fool to be pitied. And it’s exactly right.

…if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins…If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all. (1 Cor 15)

If you bet that the resurrection is false, then you can ignore the Commandments. If the resurrection is false, the parables are just forgettable fables. You can get all of the ethical stuff from other writers. If the resurrection is false, then you need self-help books, not Jesus.

But if you accept the resurrection, then the Commandments are required. The parables become instructions for living. Every word he said explains the universe. If the light switch is on, then you cannot go to the bar, you have to ask for faith. Many people, like Paul, like Augustine, never wanted to turn that light switch on. I didn’t want it to. I spent many years doing everything I could to avoid that switch. But once this switch is on, you can’t turn it off. In fact, maybe this whole “choosing” about the resurrection is not really your own choice in the end. I may have led you to this choice incorrectly. Because this is the one choice that seems to choose you. It’s very strange. Very, very strange. I think perhaps you can get here on your own, if you try, if you ask. But this is a gift. Yes, I lied. This one is not a choice. This decision is a gift that comes to you, as if made for you. But this is the one gift where it is not rude to ask. This is the kind of gift you have to ask for. Then we have to come and stand in the empty tomb. We must be like Mary Magdalene, peering into that empty space, and decide whether the light will be on or off.

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