What if strength training wasn’t simply about building muscle?
What if stepping beneath a barbell could become an act of devotion?
In this episode, I sit down with Awen of Primal Druidry, whose approach to physical training challenges many of our modern assumptions about both fitness and spirituality.
For her, the gym isn’t merely a place to improve health or appearance. It becomes sacred space—a place where discipline becomes ritual, physical hardship becomes offering, and strength training becomes a way of cultivating relationship with the divine.
Throughout our conversation, we explore questions like:
What is Primal Druidry, and what makes it a living tradition rather than an attempt to recreate the ancient past?
Why has strength training become such a central part of her spiritual practice?
What changes when exercise becomes ritual instead of self-improvement?
How does physical discipline shape character, devotion, and spiritual life?
What does she mean when she describes receiving guidance through training?
How do we think carefully about deeply personal spiritual experiences without dismissing them…or accepting them uncritically?
One aspect of our discussion that I found especially compelling is the challenge it poses to a very modern assumption: that the body is simply a vehicle for the mind. Throughout history, many religious and philosophical traditions have understood bodily practices (whether fasting, pilgrimage, martial arts, dance, or manual labor) as capable of shaping the soul.
This conversation asks whether lifting weights might belong in that lineage.
Even if you don’t share her theology or spiritual framework, I think the deeper questions are worth exploring.
Can repeated physical practice become a form of prayer?
Can discipline become devotion?
Can the body become a place where meaning is discovered rather than simply performed?
Those are the questions at the heart of this conversation.
As always, the goal isn’t to tell you what to believe. It’s to explore ideas with curiosity, ask better questions, and think more deeply about the relationship between body, mind, and the search for the sacred.
Thank you for taking the time to listen/watch, comment and share. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
Hey Hey, Welcome back to Taste0ftruth Tuesdays. In today’s episode we are sitting down with Tina K. of The Rune Shack to explore runes, esotericism, and Norse-Germanic spirituality, alongside my own path through New Age spirituality, Christianity, and deconstruction.
For years, I was searching.
I wandered through wellness culture, festival communities, New Age spirituality, psychedelic conversations, evangelical Christianity, and eventually the long road of deconstruction. Every step taught me something. Every community offered language for experiences that often felt deeply meaningful.
But over time, I began to wonder:
How do we know when spirituality is making us more grounded—and when it is simply helping us escape reality?
Modern spirituality often promises awakening, healing, manifestation, higher consciousness, hidden knowledge, or secret wisdom. Sometimes those ideas genuinely encourage reflection and personal growth. Other times, they can become substitutes for the harder work of living honestly, accepting limits, grieving loss, cultivating discipline, and remaining accountable to reality and to other people.
This conversation isn’t a rejection of mystery. Far from it.
I believe human beings need myth, ritual, symbol, beauty, and experiences that remind us life is deeper than material reductionism alone can explain.
The challenge for me has been learning to distinguish between mystery and manipulation.
That distinction is one reason I wanted to invite Tina K. from The Rune Shack onto the podcast. Rather than centering on a single article, this conversation explores a broader landscape of ideas:
What is heathen spirituality?
What are runes beyond their popular image?
What does esotericism actually mean?
Why can spiritual authority become dangerous?
What makes New Age spirituality appealing and where can it become escapist?
Why do so many modern spiritual movements continue to reinterpret Jesus through ideas like the cosmic Christ or Christ consciousness?
And perhaps the deepest question of all:
What does real spirituality actually require?
I don’t approach these questions as someone who has everything figured out.
I ask them as someone who has lived inside several different spiritual worlds and has become increasingly interested in discernment rather than certainty.
My hope is to encourage more thoughtful questions about the stories we inherit, the authorities we trust, and the practices that shape our lives.
I hope you’ll join us for the conversation. Please let me know your thoughts.
Jesus, Scripture, and the Mythmaking Machinery of the Abrahamic World
Listen here
One of the most successful ideas in modern spirituality is the belief that Jesus represented a radical break from the religious world that produced him.
The problem is not merely that modern people have misunderstood Jesus. It is that the Gospel texts themselves are capable of generating multiple, even contradictory versions of him: compassionate teacher, apocalyptic judge, mystic, revolutionary, cosmic redeemer. That textual instability is one reason Christianity has proven so endlessly adaptable. Readers can extract the Jesus they want and then present that selection as the essence.
Whether presented as an enlightened teacher, a cosmic Christ, a universal sage, or simply a wise moral reformer, Jesus is often portrayed as transcending the tribalism, judgment, and exclusivity associated with the covenantal and apocalyptic world of the Hebrew scriptures. In popular imagination, he stands opposed to the harshness of the Old Testament: a teacher of love replacing a god of wrath, compassion overcoming law, and universal brotherhood replacing ancient tribal loyalties.
Later philosophical and spiritual movements took that elasticity and pushed it even further. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents such as Theosophy, New Thought, Western esotericism, and Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual reinterpretations recast Christ as a universal principle rather than a figure embedded in a specifically Jewish apocalyptic and covenantal world. “Christ” becomes less a messianic title rooted in Jewish expectation and more a symbol of inner divinity, cosmic consciousness, or spiritual evolution.
I reject that rescue attempt entirely. The modern “cosmic Christ” is not a recovery of some hidden essence. It is one more extraction from a set of texts already structurally open to reinterpretation. The same flexibility that allows one reader to find a gentle moral teacher allows another to find a figure of judgment, exclusion, and cosmic authority.
And that harsher figure is not hidden in some obscure corner of the tradition. Jesus speaks of judgment. He divides humanity into the saved and the condemned. He warns of outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth, eternal punishment, and destruction for those who reject his message. Paul speaks of everlasting destruction. Revelation culminates in divine wrath, cosmic warfare, and the final defeat of God’s enemies.
This is not a departure from the older scriptural framework. It is its expansion.
What if the New Testament did not abandon the worldview of the Hebrew scriptures, but carried its deepest assumptions forward in universalized form?
That is the argument I want to follow here. The New Testament did not discard the basic structure of the Hebrew scriptures. It expanded it. Covenant became salvation history. Chosenness became a global saved-versus-condemned framework. Messianic expectation became cosmic kingship. Scripture became biography. On this reading, Christianity was not a liberation from the older framework, but its Gentile-facing sequel.
Representative examples of New Testament passages in which Jesus is portrayed not only as a moral teacher, but as a figure of exclusive authority, judgment, division, and ultimate rule.
Research from the Copenhagen School, along with scholars such as Russell Gmirkin, Jan Assmann, Yonatan Adler, and Thomas Thompson, has challenged assumptions many of us once took for granted. Their work points toward a far more dynamic process of literary construction, cultural memory, reinterpretation, and retrospective claims to antiquity behind the Hebrew scriptures. Some of that scholarship presses the issue further still, raising the unsettling possibility that Jesus himself may belong in the same larger scriptural problem-set as other biblical figures whose historicity has been asserted far more confidently than it has been demonstrated.
In previous episodes of my Jesus Myth series, I argued that the Gospels should not be treated as straightforward eyewitness biographies. Archaeology can illuminate the world of first-century Judea, but it does not confirm the Jesus of the Gospels. Paul’s letters give us a cosmic, scriptural Christ rather than a detailed memory of a recent Galilean teacher. The early Christian movement appears fragmented from the beginning, with competing visions of Christ long before later orthodoxy cleaned up the story.
This essay begins where that argument left off.
If the Gospels are not simple biography, then what are they? And if the Jesus figure is shaped so deeply by earlier scripture, then an even more unsettling question follows:
What kind of scripture was doing the shaping?
Because once we begin examining the New Testament closely, an extraordinary pattern emerges. The Jesus of the Gospels does not merely quote scripture. He is a product of it. The story begins to look less like the fulfillment of ancient history than the continuation of an ongoing literary tradition.
And if that scriptural world could generate covenant, chosenness, law, and sacred history, the possibility that it could also generate a messiah is no longer so easy to dismiss.
God giving the Tablets of the Law to Moses, from a manuscript attributed to Chrétien Legouais, 1325 CE. Image source: gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque municipal de Rouen.
Not Influence but Scaffolding
The claim that the Gospel writers drew from Jewish scripture is not controversial. Virtually every New Testament scholar acknowledges that the evangelists quoted, interpreted, and reworked earlier biblical texts. The real question is what kind of borrowing we are dealing with.
Some modern writers argue that the Gospels are fundamentally Greek in character, shaped by Hellenistic literary conventions such as heroic archetypes, divine signs, dramatic climaxes, and narrative form recognizable to a Greek-speaking audience. There is truth in that observation. The Gospels were written in Greek, circulated in a Hellenistic world, and emerged from a culture saturated with literary adaptation and symbolic storytelling. But that framing can miss something more concrete. The density of engagement with Jewish scripture in the Gospels is not merely thematic or stylistic. It is textual, structural, and relentless.
Dozens of explicit citations appear across the texts. Beneath them lies a much larger web of allusions, echoes, narrative patterns, and character templates drawn from the Hebrew Bible. Counted conservatively, these parallels number in the dozens. Traced more fully, they run into the hundreds. Entire scenes are shaped by earlier passages. Entire narrative arcs follow scriptural precedent. By comparison, proposed parallels to Greek myth or pagan figures are usually broader, more conceptual, and far less anchored in specific texts. My aim is not to deny Greco-Roman influence, but to put it in proportion. The Gospels may speak Greek, but they think in Hebrew scripture.
This framing is not idiosyncratic; volumes such as Is This Not the Carpenter? place the question of Jesus’ historicity alongside Paul, intertextuality, and the “rewritten Bible,” showing how difficult it is to separate later “biography” from scriptural rewriting and theological construction.
One example of that scriptural-political matrix appears in the star and scepter imagery attached to messianic expectation.
Star, Scepter, and Political Theology
Long before Christianity, certain biblical oracles had already been charged with political and eschatological force. Numbers 24:17, “a star shall come out of Jacob, a scepter shall rise out of Israel,” was read in the Dead Sea Scrolls as prophecy of a coming Davidic ruler. Matthew places a star over Bethlehem. Revelation has Jesus call himself the bright Morning Star. This imagery stood at the crossroads of Jewish expectation and the wider symbolic world of antiquity, where heavenly signs marked kingship, divine favor, and world-changing rule. Early Christians did not invent that language. They seized it and redirected it toward Jesus.
Matthew tells us that the holy family’s return from Egypt fulfills Hosea’s words, “Out of Egypt I called my son.” In its original context, Hosea was speaking about Israel, not a future messiah. The passage is not simply cited. It is repurposed. And that pattern repeats across the Gospels.
The crucifixion sharpens the problem because it is often treated as the most historically secure element of the Gospel tradition. Yet when we look closely, the scene does not read like a bare report of an execution. It reads like a carefully arranged scriptural drama. Psalm 22 is especially central. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” appears in the Gospels as Jesus’ cry from the cross. The mocked sufferer, the taunts of the crowd, and the casting of lots for garments all appear in the passion narrative. Isaiah 53 adds the rejected and afflicted servant who is silent before his accusers and numbered among transgressors. Psalm 69 contributes the sour wine. Zechariah supplies the struck shepherd and pierced figure. Even the Wisdom of Solomon describes a righteous man mocked for calling God his father and condemned to a shameful death. Taken one by one, these parallels can be treated as interpretation. Taken together, they stop looking incidental and start looking compositional.
At minimum, the evangelists are constructing the meaning of Jesus’ death through inherited texts. At maximum, some of the scene’s most memorable details may have been generated by those texts.
The same dynamic extends beyond individual scenes into the wider narrative structure. Joseph is betrayed by his brothers, sold for silver, stripped, cast into a pit, and later exalted. Jesus is betrayed by Judas, sold for silver, stripped, entombed, and exalted. Jonah spends three days in the belly of the fish; Jesus predicts three days in the heart of the earth. Moses escapes a ruler bent on killing Hebrew infants, emerges from exile, ascends a mountain, and mediates a covenant. Jesus follows the same symbolic arc: threatened by a murderous ruler, called out of Egypt, tested in the wilderness, teaching from a mountain, and inaugurating a renewed covenant. This is not random resemblance. It reflects a world in which earlier stories functioned as templates.
Ancient Jewish authors did not treat scripture as a static archive of facts. They treated it as a living body of tradition that could be revisited, reinterpreted, and applied to new circumstances.
One key technique is typology recognized recurring patterns across time: Moses could become a template for a future deliverer, and Israel’s exile could foreshadow restoration. Midrash explored hidden meanings, tensions, and new applications within older texts. Pesher, attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, treated scripture as containing encoded meanings that spoke directly to the interpreter’s own time.
By the time we arrive at early Christianity, scripture is no longer functioning merely as a record of the past. It is functioning as a codebook. The first Christians did not read the Hebrew scriptures as neutral background material for a life that had already happened. They searched them for hidden patterns, veiled prophecies, typological correspondences, and Spirit-guided meanings. A passage did not have to be about Jesus in its original context in order to become about Jesus through inspired interpretation. Israel could become Jesus. The suffering righteous man could become Jesus. The rejected servant could become Jesus. A sign given to an ancient king could become Jesus. The text became a map, and Christ was the figure readers were trained to find within it.
That is crucial because it shows how scripture was actually being used. Early Jewish readers were not passively receiving texts as fixed records of the past. They were searching them, recombining them, and uncovering patterns that could be applied to their own historical moment. As Richard Carrier and others have noted, this kind of scriptural decoding was not marginal. It was widespread. The New Testament writers emerged directly out of this world. They were Jews steeped in a tradition where scripture was not treated as a flat archive of past events, but as a living body of meaning to be searched, reread, and reapplied. When early Christians portrayed Jesus, they were not simply recording a life in the modern biographical sense. They were rereading the Hebrew scriptures to interpret his life, death, mission, and cosmic significance. That is why so much of the Gospel narrative appears to fulfill older texts. The authors were not recording events and then attaching verses afterward. They were crafting a theological portrait through inherited techniques of scriptural interpretation.
This is visible even in the words attributed to Jesus. What later readers encounter as the “red-letter” sayings are not free-floating teachings dropped into history untouched by tradition. They are deeply embedded in a scriptural world. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus answers by quoting Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19. His warning that “the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone” comes from Psalm 118. Even his cry from the cross is lifted from Psalm 22. He does not stand outside the tradition commenting on it from a distance. He speaks from within it.
Once the literary architecture of the Gospels becomes visible, a more difficult question comes into focus. Are the evangelists taking a real remembered life and interpreting it through scripture, or are they using scripture itself to shape the narrative they present? Those are not small variations of the same idea. They are rival explanations. One begins with a historical figure and treats scriptural patterning as interpretation. The other begins with a scriptural tradition and understands the figure as emerging from it. The more densely these patterns appear, the harder it becomes to maintain a clear boundary between the person being described and the literary tradition doing the describing.
The Foundation Is Younger Than It Appears
Most readers imagine the Hebrew scriptures as ancient deposits of sacred memory stretching deep into the past. Moses belongs to remote antiquity. The prophets stand centuries before Jesus. The New Testament then appears as the culmination of an immense and venerable arc.
But that inherited picture is much shakier than people like to admit.
Biblical minimalists associated with the Copenhagen School, including Thomas L. Thompson, Niels Peter Lemche, and Philip Davies, challenged the assumption that the Hebrew Bible gives us transparent access to early Israelite history. Their argument was not that nothing existed before the texts, but that the biblical story of Israel may be less a record of national origins than a later literary construction of those origins.
Elephantine Temple reconstruction petition, 5th century BCE. The Elephantine papyri preserve evidence of a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt that worshiped Yahweh and maintained a temple outside Jerusalem — a striking challenge to the assumption that Torah-centered Judaism was already universally organized around Jerusalem by this period.
The Elephantine Problem
The Elephantine papyri make that problem hard to ignore. In the fifth century BCE, a Jewish/Judean military community in southern Egypt worshiped Yahweh, maintained its own temple, practiced sacrifice, and remained in contact with Jerusalem. Yet this community does not clearly reflect the fully formed Torah-centered Judaism later projected backward into Israel’s past. There is no obvious evidence of an exclusive Jerusalem cult, a centralized Pentateuchal legal order, or the religious system later treated as ancient and universal. That does not prove no Pentateuchal traditions existed in any form, but it does make the traditional timeline look far less secure.
Archaeology adds more pressure. The patriarchal age, the Exodus, the conquest, and the grandeur of the united monarchy have all been heavily challenged. Egyptian records do not confirm the biblical Exodus. Archaeology has not vindicated the conquest of Jericho in the form the Bible presents it. Even early Israelite religion appears messier than later monotheistic memory allows, with inscriptions invoking Yahweh alongside Asherah. The issue is not merely that the Bible contains embellishment. The issue is that some of its foundational stories may be retrospective national myths written as ancient history.
Plato, Moses, and the Making of Sacred Antiquity
This is where Russell Gmirkin pushes the argument further. He argues that the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, in the Alexandrian and Ptolemaic world of the third century BCE, close to the Septuagint project and the intellectual culture of the Great Library. On this model, the Torah was not merely translated into Greek at Alexandria. It may have been composed or finalized there.
Gmirkin’s argument is controversial, but it is not random. He points to literary dependence: Genesis 1–11 drawing on Berossus’ Babylonian history, Exodus engaging Manetho’s Egyptian history, and the Torah’s legal materials reflecting Greek, especially Platonic, models of law, constitution, and national foundation. Philippe Wajdenbaum develops a similar comparison, arguing that the Hebrew Bible resembles Greek literature, especially Plato’s Laws, in its construction of a people around a lawgiver, sacred land, twelve tribes, and a divinely authorized legal order.
This changes the way Moses looks. In Gmirkin’s reading, Moses is not simply a prophet. He resembles an oikist, a founder figure: the one who organizes a people, distributes land, establishes institutions, and anchors political order in a sacred origin story. The Torah, in turn, begins to look less like a loose bundle of ancient laws and more like a charter myth. It tells a people who they are, where they came from, why their laws are sacred, and why obedience to that order is obedience to God.
That is where the real trick lies. Once law is placed in the mouth of Moses and projected backward into sacred antiquity, it stops looking like legislation and begins to look like revelation.
This also helps explain later apologetic reversals. By the time we reach writers such as Philo and Josephus, the direction of influence has been flipped. Greek thinkers are now said to have borrowed from Moses, not the other way around. The issue was never merely content. It was priority. The Bible’s authority depended not only on what it said, but on when people believed it had been said. The Letter of Aristeas belongs to the same machinery of sacred self-presentation: Jewish antiquity staged for the Greek world as though ancient wisdom were simply being translated, rather than emerging from a competitive Hellenistic culture of literary production and historical self-invention.
Yonatan Adler adds one final complication. The question is not only when these texts were written, but when they became socially real. Adler argues that widespread Torah observance becomes clearly visible much later than tradition claims, especially in the Hasmonean period. A text can exist before it rules. A law can be written before it governs a people.
The implications of that compressed timeline are enormous.
The implications are enormous. If the Pentateuch reached final form around 273–272 BCE, and the Gospels were written between roughly 70 and 100 CE, then the scriptures supposedly being “fulfilled” by the Gospel writers may be only three or four centuries older than the Gospels themselves.
That does not make the connection less Jewish. It makes it look less like the unfolding of immemorial revelation and more like literary tradition building on literary tradition.
And once that compressed timeline is taken seriously, the next question is no longer simply how old the tradition was supposed to be. It is how sacred antiquity itself was made.
The Library of Alexandria in Egypt: the intellectual crossroads of the Hellenistic world, where texts were collected, translated, and rewritten. Building on comparative studies and source criticism, Russell Gmirkin argues that the Pentateuch may have taken shape in this environment in the third century BCE, drawing on Greek histories, legal traditions, and philosophical works.
From Failed Kingdom to Spiritual Messiah
This is the missing hinge. Jewish messianic hope did not arise in a vacuum. It was forged in the long shadow of conquest, exile, humiliation, and imperial domination. From Assyria and Babylon to the Greeks and Romans, Jewish life was repeatedly shaped by foreign rule. It is not difficult to see why restoration, divine justice, and the dream of an anointed deliverer became so central. A people under pressure will search its own sacred memory for the pattern of rescue.
By the first century, that hope had become unstable. Second Temple Judaism was not a unified religion serenely awaiting fulfillment. It was a fractured landscape of rival sects, competing scriptural interpretations, anti-Temple resentment, apocalyptic expectation, and bitter disagreement about where Israel had gone wrong. Some blamed foreign occupation on sin. Some blamed corrupt elites. Some rejected the legitimacy of the Temple leadership altogether. In that environment, scripture was not merely read. It was mined for survival strategies.
This is where Carrier’s point becomes useful. As he writes, “The traditional messianic hope (of a conclusive military victory over all of Israel’s neighbors) was a doomed hope, and that would have been obvious to at least some Jews.” A warrior-king who would visibly crush Rome was precisely the kind of messiah history kept refusing to produce. A spiritual messiah, by contrast, could not be falsified so easily. He could conquer Satan rather than Caesar, the heavens rather than the earth, sin rather than empire. Defeat could be reinterpreted as hidden victory. Political disappointment could be absorbed into myth.
That shift matters. A suffering, dying, or heavenly messiah fits prolonged subjugation far better than a triumphant Davidic conqueror who never arrives. Christianity did not solve the Roman problem by overthrowing Rome. It solved it by changing the terms of victory. The kingdom became “not of this world.” The struggle moved from flesh and blood to cosmic powers. The messiah no longer needed to raise an army from Jerusalem if he could instead be enthroned in heaven.
And that made Christianity exportable. The movement that emerged did not require Gentiles to become Jews in the full covenantal sense. It offered a way for Gentiles to worship the God of Israel without circumcision, kosher law, or full Torah observance. Acts 15 is the obvious flashpoint. The Jerusalem leadership approves Gentile inclusion through a reduced set of obligations, allowing the biblical framework to expand beyond ethnic Judaism without dissolving its theological core. The God remains the God of Israel. The scriptures remain Jewish scriptures. The messiah remains the Jewish messiah. What changes is access.
That is one of the most important transformations in religious history. Christianity became, in effect, Judaism for Gentiles: a way of universalizing Israel’s God, Israel’s scriptures, Israel’s messianic story, and Israel’s eschatological framework without requiring the nations to become Jews. The old covenantal architecture was not abandoned. It was scaled.
And once that is clear, the next question presses harder than ever. If this new messiah emerged from scriptural reinterpretation, apocalyptic disappointment, sectarian fragmentation, and theological adaptation to empire, then the issue is no longer merely what early Christians believed about him.
It is whether there was ever a stable historical figure there in the first place.
The Last Firewall: “But Surely Jesus Was Historical”
By this point in the argument, a familiar fallback usually appears. The miracles may be myth. The resurrection may be theology. The birth stories may be literary invention. The passion narrative may be scriptural construction. The speeches may be later compositions. The chronology may be artificial. Fine. Grant all that, people say. But surely there was still a man underneath it all.
I no longer accept that assumption, and I do not think it deserves to be treated as intellectually safe merely because it is familiar.
Once literary and theological construction has been conceded at nearly every level of the tradition, the so-called “historical Jesus” begins to look less like a demonstrated figure than like a residue, a placeholder left standing after everything obviously mythic has been stripped away. The problem is not that a historical core has been disproved in some crude, absolute sense. The problem is that it is constantly assumed, while the evidence for it remains astonishingly thin.
Where, exactly, is this man supposed to be found?
There is no contemporary, independent, non-Christian evidence for Jesus as a historical person. There is no inscription, no administrative record, no eyewitness account, no Roman report from his lifetime, no Jewish source from his lifetime, no archaeological evidence identifying him, no surviving text from anyone who actually met him. What we possess are Christian theological writings.
And our earliest source, Paul, does not give us a remembered Galilean teacher wandering around first-century Judea. He gives us a revealed, cosmic, scriptural Christ known through visions, revelation, scripture, death, resurrection, and heavenly significance. Paul does not preserve a stable earthly biography. He does not narrate Bethlehem, Nazareth, Galilee, Judas, Mary Magdalene at the tomb, Pilate’s trial scene, or the sermon material that later becomes central to the Gospel portrait. That absence is not a trivial inconvenience. It is a structural problem.
Even 2 Peter is revealing on this point. “For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” The denial is telling. It does not prove invention by itself, but it does show that early Christian claims could be heard as mythic, visionary, or constructed. And the response is instructive. The author does not answer by providing a grounded earthly biography. He answers with prophecy, revelation, glory, and Spirit-soaked authority.
The Gospels themselves do not rescue the situation. They are anonymous literary-theological compositions written decades after the alleged events, in Greek, through dense scriptural patterning. They do not read like independent eyewitness memory. They read like sacred narrative built from older texts, typology, apocalyptic expectation, and theological necessity.
The supposed external witnesses do not solve the problem. Josephus is late, textually disputed, and preserved through Christian transmission. Tacitus is later still and tells us, at most, what Christians in his own time believed about their origins. These are not contemporary confirmations of Jesus’ life. They are later references to a movement that already existed. They tell us Christianity happened. They do not securely tell us that the Gospel figure at its center was historical in the way readers are encouraged to imagine.
The same goes for the phrases in Paul that are endlessly hauled out as if they settle the matter. “Born of a woman,” “seed of David,” “brother of the Lord” — these are not granite biographical anchors. They can function as incarnation language, messianic credentialing, or intra-community title. They do not give us a recoverable historical Jesus standing solidly behind the later narratives. They give us phrases. The heavy lifting is done by prior belief.
This is why I reject the polite compromise that says, “Of course the Gospel Jesus is mythologized, but there must have been a real preacher behind him.” Must there? Why? Because modern scholars feel more respectable keeping one sandal planted on the ground? Because the imagination panics at the thought that the whole figure may be literary from the start? Because once the miracles, fulfillment scenes, speeches, chronology, passion details, and resurrection appearances are recognized as constructed, people still want one final reassuring object left?
To me, this often functions less like an argument than a psychological reflex.
And this is precisely where Gmirkin’s work ceases to be merely interesting and becomes a consistency test.
If we are willing to follow biblical minimalism when it exposes the Pentateuch as a late literary-theological construction, why should the inquiry suddenly stop at Christianity? If the Hebrew scriptures can be composed, adapted, borrowed, and projected backward into sacred antiquity, why is Jesus protected from the same analysis? Why is the critique allowed to dismantle Moses, law, covenant, and national memory, only to halt politely at the Messiah as if some invisible velvet rope had been lowered around him?
That exemption makes no sense.
Christianity does not escape the biblical matrix. It depends on it. It preserves the God of Israel, the prophets, the covenants, the messianic framework, the chosen-people logic, and the eschatological expectation that history moves toward divine judgment and final rule. Its dispute with Judaism is not over the structure. It is over who gets to occupy the central role within it. Christianity is not the grand liberation from the older framework that its admirers like to imagine. It is the sequel.
And once that is admitted, the next step is not radical at all. It is obvious.
If scripture can generate Moses, covenant, law, land, chosenness, and sacred national memory, then scripture can also generate Jesus, fulfillment, cross, resurrection, judgment, and cosmic kingship. If a literary-theological tradition can manufacture sacred antiquity, why should it suddenly lose that power when it reaches the first century? If the old stories can produce a founder, a people, a law, and a history, why should they not also produce a messiah?
Christianity does not begin, in our earliest sources, with a stable man later decorated with myth. It begins with a revealed Christ known through scripture and visions. The earthly biography comes later, and when it appears, it arrives already saturated with literary design.
If that is true, then the task is no longer to keep exhausting ink and paper trying to peel a “real Jesus” out of layers of literary construction. The more urgent question becomes: what were the earliest apostles, visionaries, and authors actually doing? What experiences did they think they were having? What apocalyptic expectations drove them? What rhetorical and mythical work were the later stories performing? Once the data about Jesus comes to us primarily through scripture, revelation, and literary invention rather than recent biography, the center of gravity shifts. The real subject is no longer a recoverable Galilean teacher hiding behind the text, but the motives, methods, and imaginative world of the people who produced the text.
The Gospel Jesus is not history remembered and then embellished. He is scripture personified, given narrative form, furnished with a recent setting, and made to walk through a world already prepared for him by text. At that point, Christianity begins to look less like a movement built around a misremembered man and more like a movement built around visionary claims, apocalyptic expectation, scriptural decoding, and later literary elaboration. What demands explanation is not how a historical teacher was gradually mythologized, but how a mythic and scriptural Christ was gradually narrativized.
That is the last firewall. Once readers are willing to concede literary construction everywhere else, Jesus becomes the one figure they are still expected to protect. Not because the evidence suddenly improves, but because the emotional and institutional cost of following the argument any further becomes too high. And if that protection finally collapses, then a great deal of Jesus studies will have to admit that it has been spending enormous effort on the wrong pursuit. The real work would no longer be reconstructing a man behind the myths, but reconstructing the interpretive practices, sectarian motives, visionary experiences, and literary intentions that produced the myth in the first place.
And that is exactly where Jan Assmann becomes useful.
The resistance here is not just intellectual. It is civilizational. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer defending one ancient figure among others. They are defending a memory-world: a moral vocabulary, a theory of suffering, a structure of hope, a story about history, and often the emotional architecture through which they understand themselves. That is why the argument suddenly feels so charged. It is no longer just about evidence. It is about what happens when literature hardens into memory and memory hardens into reality.
Mnemohistory: When Literature Becomes Memory
“Mnemohistory,” a term coined by Jan Assmann, refers not simply to the past, but to the way societies remember the past. That sounds academic. In practice, it is far more destabilizing than it first appears.
I was first introduced to Assmann’s work through my friend Brado, and once the idea clicked, a great deal of human behavior stopped looking mysterious. One of the hardest things to swallow is realizing how much of what people confidently call “history” is not history in the plain sense at all, but mnemohistory: emotionally charged civilizational storytelling repeated so often that it hardens into something psychologically untouchable.
A society does not merely pass down facts. It passes down stories about origins, suffering, enemies, rescue, chosenness, betrayal, exile, return, and destiny. Those stories do not simply describe the past. They train perception. They teach people what to love, what to fear, whom to trust, whom to blame, and what future to desire. After a while, people are no longer defending a memory. They are defending the world that memory built for them.
That is why historical arguments go feral so quickly. You are never just disputing an event. You are touching the memory structure through which a group recognizes itself. The Exodus is one of the clearest examples. It is not merely a story to be remembered, but a story about remembering: bondage, liberation, divine rescue, covenant, promised land. It turns memory into identity and identity into destiny. The past is ritualized so that it can keep governing the present.
This is also where Neil Van Leeuwen’s distinction between factual belief and religious credence becomes clarifying. A factual belief is supposed to track reality across contexts. Religious credence works differently. It behaves less like stable fact-tracking and more like an imaginative, identity-bound commitment activated in specific social and ritual settings. A church can gather in a gymnasium and everyone still knows they are sitting on bleachers under fluorescent lights. Yet within that setting, the space becomes sacred. The credence does not erase ordinary reality. It overlays it and reorganizes meaning.
That helps explain why apologetics so often feels impervious to evidence. It is not primarily a truth-seeking enterprise, but a credence-maintenance system. Doubt is framed as danger, questions are met with prefabricated responses, and rituals, narratives, and authorities work together to protect identity rather than expose it to risk. As Van Leeuwen argues, when an attitude is rooted in group identity, truth can easily take a back seat.
Once you see that, a great deal of Christian apologetics becomes easier to understand. Its stubbornness is not a bug. It is the design. It is not really trying to investigate whether the historical Jesus can bear the weight placed on him. It is trying to prevent the collapse of the cognitive and social world built around him.
That is why arguments about Jesus’ historicity so often feel like Groundhog Day. One side keeps asking what the evidence can actually support. The other keeps reasserting the figure as though familiarity itself were proof. By the time people reach Jesus, they are no longer just defending one ancient claim among others. They are defending a moral universe, a structure of consolation, a theory of suffering, a promise of justice, a spiritual identity, and often an entire social world.
This is how Christianity became one of history’s most successful Trojan horses. It entered the Roman world clothed in humility, forgiveness, self-denial, and the sanctification of suffering. But that moral vocabulary was tailor-made for rule. A religion that teaches obedience, glorifies submission, and casts suffering as meaningful does not merely coexist with empire. It serves it. Constantine did not have to distort Christianity into something authoritarian. Its authoritarian potential was already there, waiting to be scaled.
The reason this matters is not that ancient people wrote sacred stories. Humans have always done that. The reason it matters is that some sacred stories do not stay on the page. They become political grammar. They teach civilizations how to imagine enemies, destiny, land, obedience, suffering, and war.
Modern Consequences: When Sacred Story Becomes Political Machinery
And this is where the conversation is no longer academic or safely trapped in antiquity.
In the modern West, and especially in the United States, support for Israel is often presented not merely as a strategic choice but as a moral and even spiritual duty. For millions of Christians, conflict in the Middle East is not simply geopolitics. It is part of a sacred script. Apocalyptic language has not remained tucked away in pulpits and prophecy conferences. It has drifted upward into policy, media, lobbying, diplomacy, and war.
And the problem is larger than American evangelicalism.
What is now sold as “Judeo-Christian friendship” increasingly functions as a transnational political package. Israel is marketed not simply as a nation-state but as a symbol of “the West,” biblical truth, anti-communism, anti-Islamism, anti-woke moral order, technological modernity, and civilizational resolve. That is why gatherings such as the JNS International Policy Summit in Jerusalem and the Judeo-Christian Zionist Congress matter. They are not quaint interfaith exercises. They are strategy rooms in which theology, media, diplomacy, philanthropy, and security discourse are braided together and sent back out as political messaging.
Latin America makes the pattern especially visible. As evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity grows as a political force, Israel is increasingly recoded as a sacred-political emblem of order, family values, anti-left resistance, and biblical destiny. The Isaac Accords are a perfect example. They are presented in the language of democratic values, innovation, security, and cooperation, but the emotional engine underneath them is older and hotter than that. Israel becomes a proof-text. Foreign policy becomes catechism by other means. The old Abrahamic machinery has simply evolved to speak the language of diplomacy, branding, and strategic partnership.
This is why the usual dismissals fail. We are not dealing with private religious sentiment lingering harmlessly at the margins. We are dealing with inherited apocalyptic structures that shape how nations imagine enemies, allies, legitimacy, time, and destiny. When political leaders, religious institutions, military personnel, media ecosystems, and ordinary citizens inherit stories about Israel, Iran, final battles, messiahs, Armageddon, and divine destiny, the line between prophecy and policy begins to blur. Conflict stops looking contingent. It starts looking prewritten.
The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit coined the term hyperstition for ideas that bring themselves into existence because people believe them strongly enough to act on them. That concept belongs here. A prophecy does not have to be true to become dangerous. It only has to recruit enough believers willing to organize behavior around it. Once that happens, old stories stop functioning as symbolic expectation and begin operating as strategic motivation.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all carry end-times narratives organized around the same theological lore: messianic figures, final conflict, cosmic judgment, and the Middle East.
A revealing example appears in the Qur’an’s treatment of Jesus. In Surah 3:45, Jesus is called al-Masīḥ — the Messiah. Islam does not use that title in the Christian sense: Jesus is not divine, not the Son of God, and not a crucified savior. But the messianic category remains.
The traditions are not identical, and their details often conflict sharply. But they share enough inherited narrative architecture to be significant here.
Maimonides makes the continuity unusually explicit, and his wording matters because he was no fringe oddball. He was one of the most important Jewish legal and philosophical authorities in history. In Mishneh Torah, Laws of Kings 11:4, frames Jesus and Muhammad as figures who, within divine providence, helped spread knowledge of messianic expectation and the God of Israel among the nations.
That is the blueprint: a shared body of theological lore, a transmitted narrative architecture that persists even as details are revised. Its logic is self-reinforcing. Prophecy validates scripture, scripture is reread as fulfilled prophecy, and each new crisis is folded back into the old frame as confirmation. The game works not because the texts reliably predict history, but because they are endlessly reinterpreted, retrofitted, and made to certify one another.
And that is why literary origins matter. If sacred histories are constructed, revised, projected backward, and then defended as untouchable truth, they do not remain harmless. They shape borders, justify wars, license alliances, sanctify violence, and train populations to see obedience as virtue and confrontation as destiny. The danger is not simply that people believe old stories. The danger is that these stories still command institutions, budgets, media systems, electorates, intelligence networks, and weapons.
Entire populations become characters in someone else’s sacred drama. Human beings become pieces on an apocalyptic chessboard. War ceases to be merely war. It becomes fulfillment.
Voltaire’s warning still bites: those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
This is why I do what I do with such fierce passion. I believe the Abrahamic traditions are built on layers of fabrication, borrowed myths, retroactive claims to antiquity, and sacred stories whose origins are rarely examined with the seriousness they deserve. To me, it is an insult to wisdom, curiosity, and the pursuit of knowledge that so much of our culture remains shaped by narratives that are historically unstable, morally suspect, and fiercely defended as untouchable truth.
Questioning these stories is not hatred. It is not divisive. It is intellectual self-defense. It is spiritual self-defense. It is the work of reclaiming the human mind from inherited scripts that have too often taught people to sanctify obedience, suffering, conquest, and fear.
If sacred stories can shape civilizations, then examining them is not a niche academic exercise. It is necessary work.
Resources and Further Reading
Laurent Guyénot — “Russell Gmirkin and the Biblical Con” (Substack series) Jan Assmann: Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism Jan Assmann: Cultural Memory and Early Civilization Richard B. Hays: Echoes of Scripture in the Gospels Dale C. Allison Jr.: The New Moses: A Matthean Typology E.P. Sanders: The Historical Figure of Jesus Geza Vermes: Jesus the Jew Bart D. Ehrman: Did Jesus Exist? Yonatan Adler: The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal Russell Gmirkin: Berossus and Genesis, Manetho and Exodus Russell Gmirkin: Plato and the Creation of the Hebrew Bible Philippe Wajdenbaum: Argonauts of the Desert Thomas L. Thompson: The Mythic Past Philip R. Davies: In Search of “Ancient Israel” Ze’ev Herzog: “Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho” (Haaretz, 1999) David Skrbina: The Jesus Hoax Richard Carrier: On the Historicity of Jesus, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus Thomas L. Thompson and Thomas S. Verenna, eds., Is This Not the Carpenter? The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus
When Plato Returned, Religious Authority, and the Birth of Freedom of Conscience
This week I sat down with fellow Virginian Collin Conkwright of American Esoteric to discuss a topic that has deeply fascinated me: the pagan, Platonic, and esoteric currents that helped shape the Italian Renaissance.
Most of us inherit a fairly simple story. Christianity triumphs, paganism fades away, and the Renaissance eventually arrives as an artistic and cultural flowering. But history is rarely that neat.
One reason these questions interest me is because of Jan Assmann’s idea of the “Mosaic Distinction.” You’ll hear me mention this concept several times throughout the interview, so I wanted to offer more clarification here.
In simple terms, Assmann argued that many ancient religions could accommodate multiple gods, cults, and local traditions, while the Jewish Torah tradition introduced a much sharper distinction between true religion and false religion, orthodoxy and error. A topic we discuss often here, is what happens when competing worldviews are no longer seen as different paths, but as rivals in a struggle over truth itself? That tension sits quietly beneath much of what we discussed in this episode.
Our conversation centered on figures like Gemistos Plethon, the Byzantine scholar who helped reintroduce Plato to Renaissance Italy, and the remarkable recovery of ancient philosophical traditions that many assumed had long vanished. We discussed everything from Neoplatonism and intermediary spiritual beings to the preservation, destruction, and transmission of ancient texts.
One of the themes that kept resurfacing was memory. How much of the ancient world actually survived? How much was lost? And how much of what survives comes to us through institutions that may have opposed the very ideas they were preserving?
The destruction of Plethon’s Book of Laws became a particularly fascinating example. It raises a question I’ve found myself returning to often: when we’re trying to understand antiquity, are we seeing the ancient world itself, or are we seeing the ancient world through the lens of those who copied, edited, condemned, and preserved it?
A fresco in Anagni Cathedral C.1250, illustrating the theme of Plato’s Timaeus. At the centre of the universe, the macrocosm, is a human figure, the microcosm. The surrounding circles represent the ages of man, the seasons and the four humours.
We also explored the strange relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy. The Renaissance recovery of Plato wasn’t entirely foreign to Christian thought. Figures like Philo of Alexandria had already fused Jewish and Platonic ideas centuries before the formal development of Christian theology. In many ways, the Renaissance reopened conversations that had never fully gone away.
This is where the story becomes especially interesting to me.
The Logos language that became so central to Christianity did not emerge from nowhere. It moved through Hellenistic Judaism, and through a world already shaped by Greek philosophical categories.
For me, the broader pattern is difficult to ignore, Christianity positioned itself as transcending both Judaism and paganism while carrying important elements of both within its own intellectual framework. The irony is striking, dontcha think? The later Christian West often came to fear the return of pagan philosophy, even though portions of its own theological architecture had been built from those exact materials centuries earlier.
The Triumph of Christianity Over Paganism, by Tommaso Laureti 1585
As Laurent Guyénot puts it, perhaps too sharply for some readers, this represented
“a turning point in Western intellectual history—a Jewish coup on the Gentile mind.”
Hermes Trismegistus passing ancient wisdom to the Greeks and Egyptians. Renaissance thinkers increasingly believed that forgotten truths could be recovered through philosophy, mysticism, and ancient texts.
One unexpected moment in the conversation led to a friendly scholarly disagreement between Collin and me. We began discussing Christianity’s relationship to power and empire, and whether the alliance between Christianity and imperial authority represented a corruption of the original movement or something more deeply rooted in the tradition itself.
Collin suggested that he couldn’t imagine Jesus signing off on the imperial structures that later developed around Christianity. My immediate reaction was that I’m not entirely convinced the divide is that clean. The language of kingship, authority, judgment, obedience, dominion, and universal truth claims seems deeply embedded within both the Old and New Testaments. For me, the harder question is not whether Christianity became attached to power, but whether some of those impulses were already present from the beginning.
We didn’t solve that debate, and honestly I’m glad we didn’t.
It’s one of those conversations where reasonable people can look at the same texts and arrive at very different conclusions. I’d be curious to hear where listeners land on that question after hearing the episode.
One reason I loved Collin’s video on Thomas Jefferson and Virginia’s fight for religious freedom is because it reminds us that Americans were not merely inheriting a tidy Christian political order. They were actively trying to disentangle state power from enforced religious authority.
The “Christian nation” narrative becomes much harder to sustain once you start looking at Enlightenment thought, classical influence, religious pluralism, and Virginia’s own struggle over conscience. Early American liberty imagery drew heavily from Greece and Rome while existing within a broadly Christian culture. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and Madison’s arguments against religious assessments did not emerge from nowhere. They emerged from centuries of debate over authority, conscience, philosophy, and the proper relationship between religion and the state.
In many ways, that’s what makes the Renaissance relevant to this conversation.
The recovery of ancient philosophy helped reopen intellectual space. Competing traditions could once again be examined. Older assumptions could be questioned. The monopoly of a single inherited worldview became increasingly difficult to maintain.
Raphael’s School of Athens places Plato and Aristotle at the center of the ancient intellectual world. Plato points upward toward transcendent realities, eternal forms, and truths beyond the material world, while Aristotle gestures downward toward observation, experience, and the world around us. The painting captures one of the great tensions in Western thought: revelation and reason, idealism and empiricism, the eternal and the earthly. The Renaissance did not merely rediscover classical art. It reopened an entire philosophical conversation that had been unfolding for nearly two thousand years.
The Renaissance itself was, in many ways, an act of remembering. Forgotten texts resurfaced. Ancient philosophers returned to the conversation. Assumptions that had gone unquestioned for centuries were examined again.
Whether we’re talking about Plato, Plethon, Christianity, paganism, religious freedom, or the preservation of knowledge itself, the same questions keep appearing. What do we inherit from the past? What do we forget? What gets preserved, and what gets lost? And perhaps most importantly, who gets to decide?
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Collin Conkwright as much as I did. As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts, especially on our friendly disagreement about Christianity, empire, and whether those two worlds were destined to collide from the beginning or simply converged through the circumstances of history.
Until then, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in! 🎙️🔒
SOURCES: Adams, John. A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. London: C. Dilly, 1787–1788.
Buckley, Thomas J. Establishing Religious Freedom. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
Freneau, Philip. On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature. In Poems Written Between the Years 1768 & 1794, 395–396. Monmouth, NJ: Printed at the press of the author, 1795.
Holmes, David L. The Faiths of Our Founding Fathers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Statute for Religious Freedom. 1777–1786. Manuscript, Virginia.
Madison, James. Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. 1785. Manuscript, Virginia.
Paine, Thomas. Age of Reason. London: J. Watson, 1794–1807.
Hey hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today’s episode is where we dig into philosophy, culture, history, and the ideas that have shaped the world we’re living in—everything from classical texts to the American founding documents that are still very much relevant to how we should think about freedom today.
Listen here:
There’s a growing sense that something isn’t working.
You see it in the fragmentation of identity, the erosion of shared norms, and the breakdown of trust across institutions.
You don’t have to look very hard to notice it.
People don’t trust elections, medicine, or the media—sometimes all at once, and often for completely different reasons.
Dating is “freer” than it’s ever been, and yet it feels more unstable, more transactional, and more confusing than most people expected.
Corporations speak like moral authorities, issuing statements about justice and truth, while operating through incentives that have nothing to do with either.
Everything is still functioning. But less of it feels legitimate.
In my last piece, I traced one part of this problem back to a common assumption, that Christianity built the foundations of the West. But when you actually follow the development of those ideas, much of what we associate with Western thought—natural law, reason, and the structure of political life—has deeper roots in the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition.
That matters, because the frameworks we inherit shape what we think freedom is, and what we expect it to do.
This piece is a continuation of that question. Not only about where those ideas came from, but about what they require to hold together.
Because a free society doesn’t sustain itself on freedom alone. It depends on discipline, restraint, and a shared understanding of limits—conditions that the system itself cannot produce.
And when those begin to erode, the system doesn’t just break. It follows a pattern that’s been observed for a very long time.
Jefferson intentionally designed the Virginia Capitol in Richmond directly after the Roman temple Maison Carrée~16 CE
I. The Fear Beneath the Founding
This isn’t a new problem.
The relationship between freedom and instability shows up wherever societies try to govern themselves.
The American founding emerged out of that concern. The people designing the system weren’t just thinking about how to create liberty, they were trying to understand why it collapses.
The colonists weren’t casually referencing Rome. English translations of Vertot’s Revolutions that Happened in the Government of the Roman Republic (1720) were in almost every library, private or institutional, in British North America. They studied how free societies decay, how power shifts from shared trust into something self-serving, and how internal corruption (not just external threat) brings systems down.
They believed they were watching it happen in real time.
What they took from antiquity was not blind optimism about freedom, but caution.
And this wasn’t limited to classical history. As Bernard Bailyn observed, the colonists were immersed in dense and serious political literature, shaped by philosophy, and sustained reflection on the problem of power.
Part of what they were working with was an older line of thought running through Greek and Roman philosophy.
The idea that human life is not directionless. That there are patterns to how people live, and that some ways of living lead to stability and flourishing, while others lead to breakdown.
You can already see the foundation of this in Aristotle. He didn’t use the term “natural law,” but the structure is there. Human beings have a nature, and flourishing comes from living in alignment with it—not whatever we happen to want in the moment, but a way of life shaped by discipline, balance, and the cultivation of virtue over time.
The Stoics make this more explicit. They describe the world as ordered by reason—logos—and argue that human beings can come to understand that order.
From that perspective, moral truth isn’t something we invent. It’s something we discover. And law, at its best, should reflect that underlying structure rather than contradict it.
By the time you get to Rome, this idea is articulated more directly. Cicero describes a true law grounded in right reason and in agreement with nature—something universal, not dependent on custom or preference, but rooted in reality itself.
These ideas don’t disappear. They are carried forward and developed.
Christian thinkers later absorb and expand them, especially through Thomas Aquinas, who integrates Greek philosophy and Roman legal thought into a more explicit framework of natural law. And that influence is real. It’s part of the Western story whether we like it or not.
But that’s not the point of this piece.
What matters here is that by the time you reach the early modern period, this idea of a structured moral order—something that places limits on behavior and grounds freedom in discipline—is already well established.
You can see that continuity clearly in how the Founders and colonists read earlier political thought. Returning to those earlier sources, Plato describes how political systems degrade over time, arguing that excessive and undisciplined freedom can produce disorder, which eventually leads people to accept tyranny in the search for stability. Aristotle traces how democracies collapse when law gives way to persuasion and personality. Polybius maps the recurring cycle through which governments rise and decay.
What he described was called anacyclosis, a recurring cycle of political systems. Governments begin in relatively stable forms, rule by one, by a few, or by many, but over time they degrade. Kingship becomes tyranny. Aristocracy becomes oligarchy. Democracy, when it loses discipline, collapses into what he called ochlocracy, rule by the mob.
This wasn’t abstract to the colonists, like I said, they believed they were watching this pattern unfold in real time. And it shows up just as clearly in the political language of the founding era itself.
As Bailyn explains, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were each seen as capable of producing human happiness. But left unchecked, each would inevitably collapse into its corrupt form: tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule.
Writings like Cato’s Letters were widely read in the colonies and helped shape how ordinary people understood government, power, and liberty.
What’s striking when you read Cato more closely is how little confidence they placed in moral restraint alone. It doesn’t describe freedom as unlimited expression or personal autonomy. The idea that belief, fear of God, or good intentions would keep power in check is treated as dangerously naive. Power is not self-regulating, and it is not made safe by the character or beliefs of those who hold it. It has to be exposed, limited, and actively resisted—because even institutions and ideas meant to restrain it, including religion, can be repurposed to justify its expansion.
It describes government more as a trust—one that exists to protect the conditions that make ordinary life possible.
As Cato writes:
“Power is like fire; it warms, it burns, it destroys. It is a dangerous servant and a fearful master”
And more directly:
“What is government, but a trust committed…that everyone may, with the more security, attend upon his own?”
The assumption is clear. Power must be restrained. Freedom depends on it.
But in Cato’s framing, that restraint doesn’t come from structure alone. It depends on constant exposure and resistance. Freedom of speech and a free press aren’t treated as abstract rights, but as active safeguards—tools for uncovering corruption and preventing power from consolidating unchecked. The logic is simple but demanding: power does not correct itself. It expands, protects its own interests, and, if left unchallenged, begins to operate beyond the limits it was given.
The point of understanding the political cycles of revolution wasn’t to say that any one system was uniquely flawed. It was that all systems are vulnerable to the same underlying problem:
Human nature.
Self-interest eventually creeps in. Restraint erodes. Power shifts from a trust into something personal and extractive.
And once that shift happens, the form of government matters less than the character of the people within it. That thread runs directly into the founding.
The American system wasn’t designed as a pure democracy. It was an attempt to stabilize a problem earlier thinkers had already identified.
Rather than choosing a single form of government, the founders built a mixed system, blending elements of rule by one, rule by a few, and rule by many. An executive to act with decisiveness. A Senate to provide deliberation and continuity. A House to represent the people more directly.
This wasn’t accidental.
It reflected an awareness that each form of government carries its own risks, and that concentrating power in any one place tends to accelerate its corruption.
By distributing power across different institutions, the goal was to create tension within the system itself. Ambition would check ambition. Competing interests would slow the consolidation of power.
From my understanding, they weren’t trying to escape the cycle Polybius described. They were trying to manage it.
They weren’t designing a perfect system. They were attempting to design one built to withstand imperfect people.
But even that depended on something it could not guarantee.
In Federalist No. 10, James Madison writes:
“The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man.”
He’s not describing a temporary problem. He’s describing a permanent one.
Differences in opinion, interests, wealth, and temperament don’t disappear. They organize. They form groups. And those groups will sometimes pursue aims that are at odds with the rights of others or the stability of the system itself.
Madison’s conclusion is straightforward:
“The causes of faction cannot be removed… relief is only to be sought in the means of controlling its effects.”
That distinction is crucial. He doesn’t try to eliminate conflict or force unity. He assumes conflict is inevitable and builds a system around that reality.
Instead of requiring perfect discipline from individuals, the structure disperses power, multiplies interests, and forces negotiation. Representation slows decision-making. Scale makes domination more difficult.
Freedom is preserved not by removing conflict, but by structuring it.
“They looked ahead with anxiety, not confidence. Because they believed liberty was collapsing everywhere. New tyrannies had spread like plagues. The world had become, in their words, “a slaughterhouse.” Across the globe: Rulers of the East were almost universally absolute tyrants…Africa was described as scenes of tyranny, barbarism, confusion and violence. France ruled by arbitrary authority. Prussia under absolute government. Sweden and Denmark had “sold their liberties.” Rome burdened by civil and religious control. Germany is a hundred-headed hydra. Poland consumed by chaos. Only Britain (and the colonies) were believed to still hold onto liberty. And even there… barely.” From revolutionary-era political writings, as compiled by Bernard Bailyn
University of Virginia Rotunda-Modeled after the Roman Pantheon
II. Ordered Liberty and the Kind of Person It Requires
The founders believed in liberty, but not as an unlimited good. They believed in ordered liberty. Freedom that exists within a framework of responsibility, discipline, and civic virtue. The system they designed assumed a certain kind of person, one capable of self-governance, restraint, and participation in a shared moral world.
That assumption was not optional. It was structural. It’s easy to miss how much is built into that.
And this is where the modern tension and the current understanding of freedom begins to diverge from its origins.
Classical Liberalism, in its earlier form, was not about as Deneen states in Why Liberalism Failed, detaching individuals from all institutions, identities, or relationships. But it was about protecting individuals from tyranny while preserving the conditions necessary for a functioning society. It assumed the continued existence of family, community, religious frameworks, and shared norms.
But where Deneen is right, early liberal thought did introduce something new.
John Locke, for example, reframed institutions like marriage as voluntary associations rather than fixed, inherited structures. That didn’t mean early liberal political philosophy was designed to erode the family. But it did change how those institutions were understood. It placed individual choice alongside social stability in a way that could be expanded over time.
To understand where this expansion comes from, you have to look at what came before it
Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom; and no such thing as publick liberty, without freedom of speech: Which is the right of every man, as far as by it he does not hurt and control the right of another; and this is the only check which it ought to suffer, the only bounds which it ought to know. Cato’s letters No.15
III. The Moral Inheritance of the West
The Lia Fail Inauguration Stone on the Hill of Tara in County Meath Ireland
In many pre-Christian societies, moral life wasn’t organized primarily around abstract rules or universal doctrines, but around continuity. Identity was tied to lineage, family, and inherited roles. Authority came not from individual preference, but from what had been passed down—customs, obligations, and expectations shaped over generations. To live well wasn’t just a personal project. It meant upholding something larger than yourself: maintaining the reputation of your family, fulfilling your role within a community, and carrying forward a way of life that you didn’t create but were responsible for preserving.
You can see how this played out in places like Anglo-Saxon England, where social structure and legal life were more embedded in family and local custom than in centralized doctrine. Women, for example, could own property, inherit land, appear in legal proceedings, and in some cases exercise real economic and political influence. These weren’t modern equality frameworks, but they complicate the assumption that agency and rights only emerge through later “progress.”
That structure did more than organize society. It created cohesion. It gave people a shared reference point for what mattered, what was expected, and what should be restrained—even when no one was watching. Authority wasn’t something constantly renegotiated. It was inherited, lived, and reinforced through participation in a shared way of life.
Greek and Roman life was also structured around civic duty, hierarchy, and inherited roles.
Their moral frameworks reflected that structure. Thinkers like Aristotle emphasized virtue as balance, habits cultivated over time within a community, oriented toward harmony and the common good.
As Christianity spread, moral authority became less tied to lineage and local custom, and more anchored in universal doctrine—rules that applied across communities, not just within them. Obligation didn’t vanish, but it was increasingly reframed. Less about inherited roles within a specific people, more about the individual’s relationship to a broader moral order.
That shift didn’t happen all at once, and it’s not a simple story. The development of early Christianity, its integration into the Roman Empire, and the ways it reshaped intellectual life and authority are far more complex than a few paragraphs can capture here. I’ve gone into that in more detail elsewhere, particularly around the Constantinian period and the rise of revelation and fall of reason.
This development intensifies further with the rise of Protestantism, where that reframing of obligation becomes even more explicit.The movement from the Seven Deadly Sins to the Ten Commandments as a dominant moral framework.
The Seven Deadly Sins, pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, are not rules in the strict sense. They describe internal dispositions, patterns of character that distort judgment and pull a person out of balance. They are concerned with formation, with who you are becoming.
The Ten Commandments, by contrast, are structured as prohibitions. You shall not. They define boundaries, obedience, and transgression in relation to divine authority.
Both frameworks aim at moral order. But they operate differently. One is oriented toward the cultivation of character within a shared moral world. The other emphasizes compliance, law, and accountability before God.
The Protestant Reformation further reduced the role of mediating institutions, emphasizing personal conscience, direct access to scripture, and an individual relationship to truth. Authority became less external and more internalized, but also more individualized and less uniformly shared.
The emphasis is unmistakable. Moral responsibility is no longer primarily inherited or communal, but individual and direct.
This did not dissolve the community. But it did begin to relocate the moral center of gravity, from the maintenance of balance within a community, to the accountability of the individual before God.
A political system built on individual rights and self-governance emerged from a cultural framework that had already begun to center moral responsibility at the level of the individual.
At the same time, Christianity reshaped how the natural world was understood. Earlier traditions often treated nature as infused with meaning, order, or even divinity. Christianity maintained that the world was ordered, but no longer sacred in itself. It was created, not divine.
That distinction introduced a kind of distance. A world that is no longer sacred in itself becomes, over time, easier to treat as something external, something to study, measure, and ultimately use.
None of these shifts were inherently destabilizing on their own. But they altered the underlying framework.
Over time, they contributed to a gradual reorientation, one that made it easier to conceive of the individual as separate, autonomous, and capable of standing apart from inherited structures.
That development would later be expanded and amplified through liberal thought.
But the point is not that Protestant Christianity caused modern individualism. It is that it helped make it thinkable.
By the time you reach the Enlightenment and the American founding, those earlier shifts had not disappeared. They had been carried forward and reworked into a new framework—one increasingly shaped by reason, not as a rejection of religion entirely, but as a refusal to let authority go unquestioned simply because it claims moral or divine legitimacy.
The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (and) when his own preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of mankind, and may not, unless it be to do justice on an offender, take away, or impair the life, or what tends to the preservation of the life, the liberty, health, limb, or goods of another.
-John Locke on the rights to life, liberty, and property of ourselves and others
IV. When Freedom Loses Its Structure
Over the next two centuries, that framework continued to expand. Early expansions focused on political participation—who could vote, who counted as a citizen, and who could take part in public life.
By the mid-20th century, that expansion accelerated through civil rights movements, which pushed the language of equality and access further into law, culture, and institutions.
In the 1960s into the 1970s, the focus widened into personal life. Questions of family, marriage, sexuality, and individual identity were increasingly reframed in terms of autonomy and personal choice.
The sexual revolution, in particular, was widely understood as an expansion of personal freedom: loosening traditional constraints around sex, marriage, and family life. But over time, some of the assumptions underlying that shift have come under renewed scrutiny. The idea that women can navigate complete sexual and relational autonomy without significant cost appears increasingly fragile, especially in the absence of the social structures that once provided stability and direction.
Expanding rights changes the system, not just access to it.
What’s often assumed is that this expansion is self-justifying—that extending rights is always a net good, and that the system can absorb that expansion without consequence. But that assumption is rarely examined.
As the scope of participation widens, so does the demand placed on the system and on the people within it.
A political system built on equal participation assumes a level of judgment, responsibility, and long-term thinking that is not evenly distributed. It assumes that individuals, given more freedom, will be able to navigate it without undermining the conditions that make it possible in the first place.
What we also see in modern times is the cultural and institutional structures that once shaped behavior—family expectations, community standards, shared moral frameworks have become much weaker, more contested, or easier to reject.
For most of known human history, moral behavior wasn’t just a matter of personal conviction. It was embedded in small, stable, reputation-based communities where actions were visible, remembered, and judged over time. Behavior carried consequences because it was tied to relationships that endured.
That community system relied on three conditions: shared standards, stable enforcement, and long-term relationships. As those weaken, accountability becomes less consistent or non existent. Not because human nature has changed, but because the structures that made behavior visible and tied to consequences have broken down.
Part of that shift is tied to the broader move toward secularism. As religious frameworks lose authority, the shared narratives that once provided cohesion, meaning, and moral orientation begin to fragment. This doesn’t eliminate the human need for structure—it shifts where people look for it. It disperses into competing sources of identity, morality, and meaning.
In The Republic, Plato makes a similar observation about belief itself. What matters is not just what people claim to believe, but whether those beliefs hold under pressure. “We must test them… to see whether they will hold to their convictions when they are subjected to fear, pleasure, or pain.”
Without shared structures reinforcing those convictions, belief becomes more reactive, more situational, and more easily reshaped by external forces.
We are left with a society of multiple, incompatible systems of belief—each with its own values, demands, and claims to legitimacy, but no widely accepted structure holding them together.
What was once a shared moral world becomes a contested one.
In Propaganda, Edward Bernays makes a blunt observation: the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses is not only possible, but essential to managing modern society. That insight becomes more relevant, not less, in the absence of a shared framework.
Because when a society loses the unifying structures that once held it together, the vacuum doesn’t stay empty. New ideologies rush in (secular, political, cultural) offering belonging, morality, and meaning, often with more intensity than the systems they replaced.
More autonomy. Less formation. More fragmentation. Less agreement on what freedom even demands.
This raises a harder question: whether removing earlier constraints produced the kind of freedom it promised, or simply replaced one set of pressures with another.
As that imbalance deepens, people don’t simply become more independent. They look for stability elsewhere.
This is where Deneen’s observation becomes useful, even if I don’t fully agree with his framing. As traditional institutions weaken, dependence doesn’t disappear—it shifts. From local, relational structures to larger, more abstract systems like the state and the market.
Another way to see this is that societies don’t just rely on formal institutions. They rely on something less visible—a kind of cultural immune system. Shared norms, expectations, and informal boundaries that regulate behavior without constant enforcement.
When those weaken, systems don’t become freer. They become easier to exploit.
One of the clearest examples of that vulnerability is the modern corporation.
The American system was designed in deep suspicion of concentrated power, yet over time it has extended expansive protections to corporate entities, allowing large institutions, backed by wealth, media, and legal abstraction, to shape public life in ways the founding framework was poorly equipped to restrain.
The founders were wary of concentrated power, but they were not designing a system for multinational corporations with vast economic and informational reach. Over time, constitutional doctrine expanded in ways that made these entities increasingly difficult to limit, culminating in decisions like Citizens United, where the Court held that independent political spending by corporations and unions could not be restricted under the First Amendment.
This is part of the same pattern. A system built to preserve liberty becomes easier to exploit when power no longer appears as a king, a church, or a visible ruling class, but as diffuse institutions operating through law, markets, and media.
And as we have seen that happen, trust has eroded, cooperation breaks down, and the very conditions that made freedom possible have begun to unravel.
But I don’t think that was the original aim of classical liberalism.
It’s not that it set out to dismantle the community. It’s that over time, through cultural, economic, and technological changes, the balance between freedom and structure eroded. And now we’re dealing with the consequences of that imbalance.
The more I read, the harder it is to ignore the tension at the heart of the American Revolution itself.
It speaks the language of liberty, but often operated through pressure, surveillance, and social enforcement. Groups like the Sons of Liberty didn’t just resist authority—they replaced it with their own forms of coercion, loyalty tests, and public punishment.
The sons of liberty regularly tar and feathered anyone who offended them or were officers of the British government.
I am not saying the ideals were wrong. It means liberty, on its own, doesn’t sustain itself.When formal authority is rejected, power doesn’t disappear. It simply relocates.
And without shared discipline or internal restraint, it often reappears in more fragmented, less accountable forms.
Liberty is not the absence of power.
It’s a problem of how power is structured, restrained, and lived.
There’s another reaction to this tension that’s worth acknowledging, even if it goes too far.
Thinkers like Mencken argued that the real problem isn’t the system, but the people—that democracy inevitably lowers the standard because it reflects the average citizen.
And I understand the sentiment; but that framing misses something important.
The issue isn’t that people are inherently incapable of self-government.
It’s that self-government requires habits, discipline, and formation that a system alone cannot produce.
What makes this moment particularly interesting is that the unease people feel doesn’t map neatly onto political categories.
Across both the left and the right, there’s a growing intuition that something isn’t functioning the way it should.
You see it in the rare points of agreement. Public frustration over the lack of transparency in the Epstein files cuts across political lines, with overwhelming majorities convinced that key information is still being withheld and justice is yet to be served.
You see it in foreign policy as well. Even in a deeply divided country, there is broad skepticism toward escalating conflicts like the war involving Iran, with many of us questioning the purpose, cost, and direction of involvement.
That concern isn’t new. It shows up clearly in Cato’s Letters, where distrust of power wasn’t abstract—it was grounded in history. The Roman Empire was a constant reference point, especially in how standing armies, once established, could be turned inward, gradually eroding liberty and consolidating control.
They weren’t against defense. But they were deeply wary of permanent military power and foreign entanglements that primarily served those in control, not the public. War wasn’t just protection. It was one of the fastest ways power could expand.
And it’s hard not to wonder how they would look at what we now call the military-industrial complex—how permanent it’s become, how embedded it is, and how easily it justifies its own expansion.
Power attracts interests that seek to influence it through money, proximity, and favor and over time those interests become embedded within the system itself, shaping decisions in ways that are no longer aligned with the public.
How this shows up today in modern times points to the fact that governmental power no longer feels like a trust. We The People who want to put America and her people’s needs First, are witnessing an occupied government like never before. And that our institutions are no longer held accountable. They have become self-protective and disconnected from the very people they’re meant to serve.
“Power, in proportion to its extent, is ever prone to wantonness.” — Josiah Quincy Jr., Observations on the Boston Port-Bill (1774)
“The supreme power is ever possessed by those who have arms in their hands.” (colonial political writing, mid-18th century)
Standing armies, they warned, could become “the means, in the hands of a wicked and oppressive sovereign, of overturning the constitution… and establishing the most intolerable despotism.” — Simeon Howard, sermon (c. 1773–1775)
Which is why Jefferson insisted on keeping “the military… subject to the civil power,” not the other way around (1774).
There’s also empirical evidence from over a decade ago pointing in that direction.
Sometimes known as “the oligarchy study” published in 2014 by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed nearly 1,800 policy decisions in the United States and found that economic elites and organized business interests have a substantial independent influence on policy outcomes, while average citizens have little to no independent impact.
Policies favored by the majority tend to pass only when they align with the preferences of the wealthy. When they don’t, public opinion has almost no measurable effect.
This one study doesn’t prove that the system has fully collapsed into oligarchy.
But it does reinforce our intuition that something has shifted, that power is no longer functioning as it should and that representation is much more limited than we assume.
What I’ve learned from putting this together is that this concern is not new. It’s ancient.
It’s the same fear that appears in the Greek philosophers, carries through Rome, reemerges in the founding era, and is now unfolding again in modern society.
This is the same dynamic Madison was pointing to in Federalist No. 10. When legitimacy starts to weaken, people don’t simply disengage.
They form groups around competing explanations for what’s gone wrong—different interests, different priorities, different visions of what should replace it.
Within the modern left, those responses are not all the same.
Establishment Democrats still operate within existing systems. Liberals tend to push for reform through policy. Progressives begin to question the structure itself. And further out, democratic socialists and revolutionary groups are not aiming to fix the system, but to replace it entirely.
That distinction matters. Because once you move from reform to replacement, you’re no longer arguing about how to use a system.
You’re arguing about whether it should exist at all. At the far end of that spectrum, some movements push toward dismantling foundational structures entirely, treating them as irredeemably corrupt.
You can see this in specific, coordinated efforts.
Large-scale protest movements like the recent “No Kings” demonstrations, like on March 28th, 2026, bringing 8 million people into the streets across the United States. With more than 3,300 coordinated events spanning all 50 states, the mobilization set a record for the largest single day of protest in U.S. history.
They have planned actions like May Day strikes, where activists are calling for mass labor disruption and economic shutdown. And organized noncooperation campaigns designed to train people in how to resist, overwhelm, or halt existing systems altogether.
Their logic is that the system of capitalism is no longer seen as something to work within, but something to resist, bypass, or bring to a stop.
Not reform. But disruption and replacement.
I’ve spent enough time around these spaces to understand the appeal. When institutions feel captured or unresponsive, the instinct is not to reform them—but to burn them down to the ground.
Freedom is not collapsing because people have rejected it. It’s becoming unstable because we can no longer agree on what it is, what it requires, or what its limits should be.
And as more of the burden falls on individuals while leadership fails to model it, people start to feel both responsible and powerless. And that’s where apathy begins to take hold——when it no longer feels like it matters, especially to the people at the top.
United States Capitol Rotunda — The Dome Painting “The Apotheosis of Washington” Painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865
V. The Human Problem at the Center of Freedom
A republic doesn’t survive on laws alone.
It survives on citizens who can exercise restraint, who understand limits, who see freedom not just as permission, but as responsibility.
One way to understand this shift more clearly is through moral psychology. Human beings don’t arrive at morality purely through reasoning. We rely on a set of underlying intuitions (care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred) that shape how we judge right and wrong before we ever explain why.
In more conservative or traditional societies, these moral intuitions tend to operate together rather than in isolation. Care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred reinforce one another, creating a more unified moral framework. People may still disagree, but they are drawing from a shared moral language, with expectations around family, roles, restraint, and what should or should not be done.
But that kind of shared moral framework doesn’t hold evenly across modern society.
The second way to see this is by looking at how these moral intuitions organize into distinct patterns cluster across different groups. In the chart, you can see three broad orientations: progressives, conservatives, and libertarians. Progressives tend to cluster around care and fairness. Conservatives draw from a wider range, incorporating loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred alongside those concerns. Libertarians center heavily on liberty, placing less weight on the others. What looks like a disagreement about politics is often a difference in moral orientation—people emphasizing entirely different parts of the same moral landscape.
And the differences don’t just show up in orientation, but in intensity.
This bar graph illustrates this pattern more clearly when we look at how different groups actually prioritize these moral intuitions.
Secular liberals and the religious left tend to emphasize care and fairness most strongly, focusing on reducing harm and promoting equality. By contrast, more traditional or socially conservative groups draw more evenly across a broader set of values, including loyalty, authority, and a sense of the sacred alongside care and fairness. Libertarians tend to narrow even further, prioritizing individual liberty while placing less emphasis on collective or traditional moral structures.
The result isn’t just disagreement over morality—it’s a difference in what people are even measuring in the first place, which makes shared judgment harder to sustain.
You can see the split in how people respond to the same breakdown in trust.
For those on the left, freedom means removing constraint entirely and that leads to a push to dismantle systems they see as corrupt or oppressive.
For those on the right, it produces deep suspicion: distrust of elections, media, public health authority, and government itself, along with a desire to restore order, stability, and clearer boundaries. In some cases, that turns into nostalgia for earlier structures: family roles, gender norms, and forms of religious authority that are seen as more stable, even if that restoration comes with its own trade-offs.
These aren’t just different political positions.
They reflect different instincts about what matters most and different assumptions about what freedom is for.
And both risk missing the deeper question.
Not just: what system creates freedom?
But what kind of people can sustain it?
This is where Aristotle’s framework becomes difficult to ignore. In that sense, his may be closer to the truth than many modern assumptions. It starts from the premise that people are not equal in their capacity for judgment or self-governance—and builds from there, rather than pretending those differences don’t matter.
It shows up in how people live, how they make decisions, and how they exercise restraint. That’s where his framework of virtue comes in—not as an ideal, but as a way of describing what it actually takes to live well and participate in a functioning society.
He didn’t think virtue was about perfection. He thought of it as balance. Courage sits between cowardice and recklessness.
Self-control between indulgence and insensibility.
Generosity between stinginess and excess.
Virtue is not automatic. It is cultivated. And it can be lost.
He applied that same logic to political systems. A government can exist in a healthy form, oriented toward the common good, or in a corrupted form, serving only a faction. At that point, the difference isn’t just structural. It comes down to character.
One tension that keeps resurfacing in political thought is the gap between equality in principle and inequality in capacity.
You can see this play out in small, everyday ways. Give ten people the same freedom, the same opportunity, the same set of rules—and you don’t get the same outcomes. Some plan ahead. Some act impulsively. Some take responsibility. Others look for ways around it. The structure is equal, but the response isn’t.
Because human beings are not identical in judgment, discipline, or temperament. Some are more capable of long-term thinking, self-restraint, and navigating complexity than others.
A free society doesn’t eliminate those differences. It has to operate in spite of them. And that creates the real challenge.
A system built on self-government depends on habits it cannot enforce, on restraint it cannot require, and on a shared understanding of limits it cannot guarantee.
Which raises a difficult question:
What happens when a system built on equal freedom depends on unequal capacities to sustain it?
Freedom is not self-sustaining. The more we treat it like it is, the more fragile it becomes.
When those conditions weaken, the structure doesn’t collapse all at once. It loosens, then drifts, and eventually begins to follow the same pattern that earlier thinkers warned about.
Not because the idea of freedom was flawed, but because it was always contingent on something more demanding than we like to admit.
And that’s what makes the older warnings so difficult to ignore. The concerns that show up in Greek philosophy, carry through Rome, and reappear in the founding era weren’t tied to one moment in history. They’re describing something recurring. Power doesn’t stay put. It accumulates. It protects itself. And without pressure against it, it shifts (often quietly) into something more self-serving than it was at the start.
The documents and letters from the founding era weren’t written for a stable world. They were written by people who assumed this drift was inevitable. That’s why they were obsessed over things like faction, corruption, and the abuse of power. Not just as political problems, but as moral ones. Because once corruption sets in, it doesn’t just distort institutions. It reshapes the people within them. A corrupt government cannot be a just government. That’s why they treated free speech, free press and an informed public less like ideals and more like important tools—ways of forcing power into the open before it had the chance to consolidate.
Cato’s letters, in particular, were relentless on this point. They knew that a society that becomes consumed with wealth, status, and self-interest doesn’t just become unequal. It becomes easier to manipulate, easier to divide, and eventually less capable of governing itself at all. Civic virtue wasn’t a side note. It was the condition that made freedom possible in the first place.
And when you look at it from that angle, it doesn’t feel like you’re reading writings from the 18th century. It feels familiar, much closer to home.
Of course, the scale is different now. The mechanisms are different. But the tension is very much the same. Governments and corporations operate with a level of reach the founders never could have imagined with technology. Information is filtered, behavior is shaped, and power often moves through systems that don’t look like power at all. You don’t always see it directly. But you feel the effects of it.
So the responsibility doesn’t go away. It never did.
If anything, it becomes less obvious and more necessary at the same time.
A system like this doesn’t hold because it was designed well. It holds, when it does, because enough people are still paying attention. Still pushing back. Still unwilling to let power define its own limits.
And once that slips…once that expectation fades, the structure doesn’t fail all at once. It just stops holding in the way it used to. And the pattern continues.
United States Capitol Rotunda — The Dome Painting “The Apotheosis of Washington” Painted by Constantino Brumidi in 1865
Resources:
This piece pulls from a mix of ancient sources, founding-era writing, and modern critiques. Not because I agree with all of them, but because each one sharpens a different part of the problem. If you want to work through it yourself, these are the ones that shaped how I’m thinking about it:
Bernard Bailyn — The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution Less about what the founders built, more about what they were reacting to—especially the collapse of earlier republics.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay — The Federalist Papers A direct look at how they thought about human nature, power, and why freedom needs structure to hold.
Patrick Deneen — Why Liberalism Failed I don’t agree with all of it, but the critique of modern individualism and the erosion of shared norms is worth taking seriously.
Plato — The Republic Still one of the clearest descriptions of how excessive freedom destabilizes a society.
Aristotle — Politics Helpful for understanding how democracies drift when law loses authority and personality takes over.
Polybius — Histories His framework for how governments rise and decay is hard to unsee once you see it.
Louise Perry — The Case Against the Sexual Revolution A modern example of how expanded freedom doesn’t always produce the outcomes people expect.
Jonathan Haidt — The Righteous Mind Useful for understanding why reason alone doesn’t hold societies together—and why people experience morality so differently.
Charles Freeman — The Closing of the Western Mind Explores how early Christianity reshaped intellectual life in the West. Also recommended:The Opening of the Western Mind
Roger E. Olson — The Story of Christian Theology A clear overview of how Christian thought developed over time and how its internal tensions evolved.
Judith Bennett — Women in the Medieval English Countryside Insight into everyday life, structure, and roles in pre-modern society.
Christine Fell — Women in Anglo-Saxon England A look at social organization and cultural norms in early English society.
Panpsychism, the Emergence Problem, and the Fractures Inside Mythicism with Dr. Skrbina
Today’s conversation isn’t just about whether Jesus existed.
It’s about something sitting underneath that entire debate.
Most mythicist conversations, meaning scholars and skeptics who argue that Jesus may be a literary or constructed figure, operate inside a philosophical framework called materialism.
Materialism in this sense doesn’t simply mean “trust science.” It’s a deeper metaphysical claim: that everything that exists is ultimately physical. Matter is fundamental, and consciousness is something the brain produces when matter is arranged in the right way.
Revisit a past episode where we discussed the dogma of materialism further
In that picture, mind comes after matter. Meaning comes after biology. Religion becomes a byproduct of social evolution.
But there’s a philosophical tension hiding inside that assumption.
Evolution can explain how biological bodies change. It can describe how organisms adapt and diversify. What it does not explain is something much more basic:
Why is there subjective experience at all? Why does pain actually hurt? Why does the color red look like something?
If matter is completely mindless at the ground level, how does experience suddenly appear?
Philosophers call this the emergence problem.
One alternative view (panpsychism) proposes that consciousness isn’t produced by matter at all. Instead, consciousness may be fundamental to reality itself.
That’s where philosopher Dr. David Skrbina enters the conversation.
His book Panpsychism in the West traces this idea across centuries of philosophical thought, showing that the notion of a mind-infused cosmos has appeared again and again throughout Western intellectual history.
But Skrbina has also stepped directly into the mythicist debate with his book The Jesus Hoax. More recently, he published a sharp response to criticism from fellow skeptics David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier.
Add to that Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception, which approaches early Christianity from yet another angle, and something interesting starts to appear:
Mythicism isn’t a unified theory. It’s fracturing into camps.
So, this conversation moves across several layers at once:
• consciousness and materialism • the emergence problem • whether panpsychism overlaps with Neoplatonism • Paul: historical strategist or literary construct? • and how The Jesus Hoax differs from The Jesus Deception
Let’s start with the philosophical ground beneath it all.
Consciousness and the Return of Panpsychism
Panpsychism is one of those philosophical ideas that sounds strange the first time you hear it but becomes harder to dismiss the more you think about the alternatives.
In plain terms, the idea is simple: mind or experience may exist at some level throughout reality.
That doesn’t mean rocks are thinking thoughts. Rather, it suggests that the basic constituents of the universe may possess extremely simple forms of experience.
The reason this idea keeps resurfacing across centuries of philosophy is precisely because of the emergence problem.
If consciousness appears only when matter becomes sufficiently complex, we still have to explain how completely mindless matter suddenly gives rise to subjective experience.
Panpsychism flips that question around. Instead of asking how consciousness emerges from matter, it proposes that matter itself may already possess proto-mental properties.
Skrbina’s historical work traces this idea from ancient Greek philosophy through early modern thinkers and into contemporary debates in philosophy of mind.
The interesting thing is that the idea never quite disappears. Even in periods dominated by strict materialism, it keeps resurfacing whenever philosophers run into the same problem: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical processes.
Materialism and the Emergence Problem
Materialism has been extraordinarily successful as a scientific framework.
It assumes that the universe is composed of physical entities governed by consistent laws. That assumption has allowed science to model everything from particle physics to molecular biology.
But when we apply that framework to consciousness, something unusual happens.
If matter is entirely mindless at the fundamental level, then at some point in the evolutionary process subjective experience must suddenly appear.
But where?
There’s no obvious “magic neuron” where awareness switches on. There’s no clear moment in development when matter transforms from non-experiencing to experiencing.
This is the emergence problem in its most basic form: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical systems.
Some scientists have attempted to address this by looking deeper into physics itself. Theories like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s Orch-OR model propose that consciousness may be connected to quantum processes occurring inside neurons.
Whether or not those models succeed, they reveal something important: even within science, researchers are exploring ways to rethink the relationship between mind and matter.
Panpsychism is one such attempt.
Is Panpsychism Just Neoplatonism?
Because panpsychism proposes a cosmos infused with mind, people often assume it’s simply a modern version of Neoplatonism.
But the two traditions aren’t identical.
Neoplatonism describes reality as a hierarchical structure flowing from the One— a metaphysical unity that gives rise to intellect and soul. It carries strong teleological and ethical implications about how humans align themselves with the structure of reality.
Panpsychism, by contrast, is often framed as a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of matter and consciousness, without necessarily including the moral or spiritual framework found in Neoplatonic thought.
Still, the overlap is hard to ignore. Both challenge the idea that the universe is purely mechanical.
Both suggest that mind and reality may be deeply intertwined.
The Mythicism Debate Fractures
Another interesting tension here is that some of the things Skrbina is criticized for aren’t that far from ideas that already exist in mythicist literature.
One of the central claims in The Jesus Hoax is that St Paul and a small cabal of early Christians may have functioned as a kind of non-military strategy within the Roman world. Instead of armed revolt, the movement theologically conquered by the spread through ideas, theology, and cultural influence.
Skrbina frames this as a kind of ideological or narrative strategy that could reshape behavior across the empire.
What makes the criticism somewhat puzzling is that a similar concept appears in Richard Carrier’s own work.
In Not the Impossible Faith, Carrier describes early Christianity as a movement that spread not through military rebellion but through cultural transformation. Rome could defeat armed revolts, but it could not easily suppress ideas that moved through communities, texts, and belief.
Carrier even characterizes this as a kind of revolutionary strategy. If Rome would always win a military conflict, the only rebellion that could succeed would be a cultural one— a war ofideas rather than armies. (Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 9).
In that sense, the notion that early Christianity functioned as a non-military cultural movement is not controversial. It is widely recognized that the early Jesus movement spread through persuasion, networks, and theology rather than organized violence.
Where the real disagreement emerges is over intent and origin.
Skrbina interprets this cultural transformation as something that may have been deliberately constructed or strategically shaped. His critics tend to view it as an organic religious development rather than a coordinated narrative project.
Another point raised in the exchange concerns the authorship of the gospels, particularly the question of whether Luke was a Gentile writer. Skrbina notes that even if certain details of authorship were revised, for example: if Luke were ultimately shown to be Gentile, the core structure of his argument would not collapse. It would simply require refinement.
That willingness to concede smaller points while maintaining the broader model is something he addresses repeatedly in his response.
The broader takeaway from this debate is that mythicism itself is not a single theory. It is a field where scholars often agree that the traditional gospel narrative is historically unreliable but disagree sharply about what actually replaced it.
One of the most important figures in this entire discussion is Paul of Tarsus.
Skrbina’s model treats Paul as a strategic actor who played a central role in shaping early Christian theology.
But other scholars have raised a more radical possibility: that the Pauline corpus itself may not represent a stable first-century historical figure at all.
Research such as Nina Livesey’s work on the Roman literary context of the Pauline letters suggests that some of these texts may reflect later second-century developments.
If Paul himself were partly a literary construct, it would reshape the debate considerably.
Yet even in that scenario, Skrbina argues, the broader thesis of deliberate narrative construction would not necessarily collapse. It would simply require revision.
Adam Green and the Midrashic Jesus
Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception adds another dimension to the conversation.
Green emphasizes the possibility that the gospel narratives were crafted through midrashic techniques, weaving together Hebrew scriptures to construct the story of Jesus.
This raises a broader question about how religious narratives function historically.
Are they simply stories? Or do they operate as cultural scripts that shape behavior across entire societies?
Green invokes a concept from cultural theory called hyperstition: the idea that beliefs can begin to influence reality because people act as if those beliefs are true.
In other words, a prophecy doesn’t need to be literally true to become historically powerful.
It only needs to be believed strongly enough that people start behaving in ways that bring it about.
That possibility becomes particularly interesting when we look at modern geopolitics.
Some recent reports have suggested that military personnel have framed conflicts in the Middle East through apocalyptic biblical language, describing events as part of a divine plan leading toward Armageddon.
Whether or not such interpretations reflect official policy, they illustrate how powerful religious narratives can be in shaping political imagination.
For readers who want to explore the topics discussed in this episode more deeply, the following books and research have shaped the ideas discussed in this conversation. These works cover philosophy of consciousness, panpsychism, early Christianity, and the intellectual history of the ancient world.
Philosophy of Consciousness & Panpsychism
Panpsychism in the West – David Skrbina A comprehensive historical survey tracing the idea that mind or experience may be fundamental to reality across centuries of Western philosophy.
Science Set Free – Rupert Sheldrake A critique of the assumptions underlying modern scientific materialism and an exploration of alternative ways of thinking about nature, consciousness, and scientific inquiry.
The Emperor’s New Mind – Roger Penrose A physicist’s investigation into the nature of consciousness, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the possibility that consciousness is tied to deeper physical processes in the universe.
The Jesus Hoax – David Skrbina Explores the possibility that early Christian narratives functioned as a strategic cultural movement within the Roman world.
The Jesus Deception – Adam Green Argues that the story of Jesus may have been constructed through Jewish midrashic storytelling traditions.
Not the Impossible Faith – Richard Carrier Carrier’s argument that Christianity’s success in the Roman Empire was historically improbable given the cultural environment of the time.
The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context – Nina Livesey A scholarly examination of whether the Pauline letters reflect later Roman literary production and rhetorical conventions.
The Opening of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman A history of classical Greek and Roman intellectual traditions and the philosophical foundations of the ancient world.
The Closing of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman Examines how classical philosophical traditions were gradually replaced by Christian orthodoxy in late antiquity.
Every December, the same argument erupts like clockwork.
“Christmas is pagan.” “No it isn’t, stop lying.” “Actually, it’s Saturnalia.” “Actually, it’s Jesus’ birthday.”
Christian Calling others out 😮
And honestly, the argument itself is the least interesting part.
Because Christmas didn’t replace older solstice traditions. It grew out of them.
Long before doctrine, people were already gathering at midwinter. Lighting fires. Sharing food. Hanging evergreens. Leaving offerings. Watching the sun closely. Trying to survive the longest night of the year.
Most of what we now call “Christmas spirit” (the lights, the feasting, the greenery, the warmth, even the winter gift-giver) is older than Christian theology by centuries.
And yet, when I converted to Christianity in 2022, none of that felt magical.
It felt dangerous.
My First Christian Christmas: Panic, Purging, and Fear
I was only a few months into my short-lived Christian phase when December arrived, and I suddenly found myself terrified that Christmas was pagan, demonic, or spiritually contaminated.
I burned books. I threw away crystals. I cleaned my home like I was preparing for divine inspection. I interrogated every decoration like it might open a portal.
I’m not exaggerating. I recently found an old document I wrote during that time, and reading it now is unsettling. It reads like I took an entire bucket of fundamentalist talking points, sprinkled in some Wikipedia conspiracies, and shook it like a snow globe.
Here are real lines I wrote in 2022:
“Christmas is a religious holiday. But it’s not Christian.” “Christmas is the birthday of the sun god Tammuz.” “Mistletoe came from druids who used it for demonic occult powers.” “Santa Claus is based on Odin and meant to deceive children.” “Jesus does not want you to celebrate Christmas.”
I believed every word of it.
Because fear-based Christianity works by shrinking your imagination. It makes symbols dangerous. History suspicious. The world a spiritual minefield.
That was my first clue this wasn’t JUST about theology. It was about fear. And the inability to hold layered meaning.
Why Winter Was Sacred Long Before Religion
For pre-industrial people, winter wasn’t cozy.
It wasn’t aesthetic. It wasn’t symbolic. It was dangerous.
Food stores ran low. Animals died. Illness spread. Darkness swallowed the day.
When the sun disappeared, it wasn’t metaphorical. It was existential.
That’s why midwinter mattered everywhere, not because cultures shared gods, but because they shared bodies, seasons, and risk.
Homes were built from thick logs, stone, and earth. Materials with thermal mass that held heat long after the fire dimmed. Hearths weren’t decorative. They were survival technology. Families and animals gathered together because warmth meant life.
This wasn’t primitive living. It was skilled living. And it shaped belief.
Seasonal rites weren’t abstract spirituality. They were instructions for how to endure.
This Isn’t Just Capitalism — It’s Cultural Amnesia
It’s tempting to blame modern capitalism for the way winter has been flattened into noise, urgency, and forced cheer. And capitalism absolutely accelerated the problem.
But that explanation skips a much older rupture.
Pre-Christian seasonal traditions already honored limits. Rest. Darkness. Slowness. Winter was understood as a time of contraction, not productivity. You didn’t push harder in December. You pulled inward. You conserved. You waited.
Those rhythms were disrupted long before department stores and advertising campaigns.
First came religious overwrite… seasonal intelligence reframed into theological narratives that demanded certainty and transcendence over embodiment. Then came industrialization, which severed daily life from land, daylight, and season entirely. Artificial light erased night. Clocks replaced the sun. Productivity became moral.
By the time capitalism arrived in its modern form, much of the damage was already done. Capitalism didn’t invent our disconnection from seasonal limits. It inherited it.
What we’re really dealing with isn’t just exploitation.
It’s amnesia.
We forgot how winter works. We forgot how rest works. We forgot how darkness functions as part of a healthy cycle. And once that memory was gone, it became easy to sell us endless brightness in the darkest part of the year.
What Yule Actually Was. Before Christianity Rewrote It
This is where the history gets interesting….
The earliest surviving written reference to Yule comes from the 8th century, recorded by the Christian monk Bede. Like much of what we know about pre-Christian traditions, it was documented after conversion had already begun. The traditions themselves are older, but the written record is fragmentary and filtered.
The Venerable Bede, an English monk and missionary, was among the earliest writers to record the existence of Yule.
That timing matters.
Like much of what we know about pre-Christian Europe, Yule was documented after conversion had already begun. Earlier traditions were primarily oral, and many were actively suppressed or destroyed, which means the written record is incomplete and filtered through Christian authors.
That does not mean the traditions were new.
It means Christianity arrived late to write them down.
Later sources, such as Snorri Sturluson in Heimskringla (12th–13th century), describe Yule as a midwinter feast involving communal drinking, oath-making, ceremonial meals, ancestor honoring, and celebrations lasting multiple days, often twelve. By the time Snorri was writing, Christianity had already reshaped much of Nordic life, yet the seasonal patterns he records remain strikingly consistent.
The record is not pristine. But it is consistent enough to tell us this: Yule was a land-based, seasonal response to winter, practiced long before Christianity and remembered imperfectly afterward.
So, when people talk about the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” they’re unintentionally echoing Yule, not the Gospels.
Yule Was Never One Thing — or One Date
There was never a single Yule and never a single calendar.
Some communities marked the solstice itself. Others observed the days before it. Others celebrated after, once the sun’s return was perceptible.
Yule could last days or weeks, depending on latitude, climate, and local conditions. This diversity wasn’t confusion. It was responsiveness.
Seasonal traditions bent to land, not doctrine. And that flexibility is one reason they survived so long.
Ancestors, Offerings, and the Household
Yule wasn’t only about gods. It was about the dead.
Midwinter was understood as a liminal time when ancestors drew near. The boundary between worlds thinned. Homes became places of hospitality not just for the living, but for those who came before.
Offerings were left. Food. Drink. Light. We still do this…. even if we pretend it’s just for children.
Milk and cookies for Santa didn’t come out of nowhere. They echo something far older: leaving nourishment overnight, acknowledging unseen visitors, participating in reciprocity.
The modern story makes it cute. The older story makes it sacred.
Before Santa, the Sky Was Crowded
Across Northern and Eastern Europe, winter solstice was associated with feminine figures of light, fertility, and renewal— many of whom traveled the sky.
In Baltic traditions, Saule carried the sun across the heavens. Among the Sámi, Beiwe rode through the winter sky in a sleigh pulled by reindeer, restoring fertility to the frozen land.
Darkness wasn’t evil. It was gestational.
The womb is dark. Seeds germinate underground. Transformation happens unseen. That imagery didn’t disappear.
It migrated.
Saule Goddess of the Sun By BasilBlake
🎄 Beaivi, Beiwe, Bievve, Beivve or Biejje
When Christmas Was Once Illegal
Here’s a part of the story that tends to surprise people.
Christmas was not always embraced by Christianity in America. In fact, it was once illegal.
In the mid-1600s, Puritan leaders in New England viewed Christmas as pagan, Catholic, and morally corrupt. Everything associated with it raised suspicion.
Evergreens were considered pagan. Feasting was considered pagan. Dancing, games, and excess were condemned. Even taking the day off work was seen as spiritually dangerous.
In 1659, the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law banning the celebration of Christmas outright. The statute read:
“Whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing labour, feasting, or any other way… every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shillings.”
Celebrating Christmas was a finable offense.
The ban remained in effect until 1681. And even after it was repealed, many New England towns treated December 25th as an ordinary workday well into the 1700s.
Early American Christianity didn’t preserve Christmas.
It rejected it.
And yet, winter rituals have a way of surviving rejection.
How Christmas Quietly Returned
Christmas didn’t re-enter American life through theology or church decree.
It returned through households.
Throughout the 1700s and early 1800s, winter customs persisted in small, domestic ways. Evergreen branches were brought indoors. Candles were lit in windows. Food was shared. Stories of winter figures and gift-givers circulated quietly within families.
These practices weren’t organized or ideological. They were inherited.
Passed down the way people pass down recipes, songs, and seasonal habits, especially in communities tied to land, season, and home.
They survived because they worked.
They made winter bearable. They gave rhythm to darkness. They anchored people to memory and place.
Over time, these household customs accumulated. By the mid-1800s, Christmas re-emerged into public culture, not as a restored Christian holy day, but as a reassembled seasonal festival shaped by folklore, family practice, and winter necessity.
Only later was it fully absorbed, standardized, and commercialized.
That shift, from household memory to mass reproduction…. changed everything.
Santa Claus, Commercialism, and My Mom’s Coca-Cola Bathroom
Santa is one of the clearest examples of what happens when household tradition gives way to mass culture. Early versions of Santa look nothing like the modern mascot. Long robes. Staffs. Hoods. Sometimes thin. Sometimes eerie. Often dressed in green, brown, or deep red.
These figures echo older winter travelers. Odin riding the sky, spirits roaming during Yule, ancestors moving close. This transformation accelerated in the 1800s, when American illustrators and writers began merging European folklore with newly invented holiday imagery.
By then, Santa took shape again.
My husband and I recently found a reproduction Santa figure based on an 1897 illustration. He’s dressed in a long green robe with a staff in hand. This style was common in the 1800s, especially in Germanic and Scandinavian traditions where the winter gift-giver was closer to a folkloric spirit than a cozy grandfather. Seeing him in that deep forest green, with that hooded, old-world posture, makes it obvious how far the modern Santa has drifted from his roots.
By the 1900s, Coca-Cola standardized him. Red suit. White trim. Jolly. Brand-safe. Growing up, this wasn’t abstract for me.
My mom worked for Coca-Cola when the company was based in Richmond, Virginia, in the early 1980s. My first word was “Coke.” Coca-Cola wasn’t just a brand in our house, it was part of the atmosphere.
My mom loved Coca-Cola décor. We had Coca-Cola signs, collectibles, and even a full Coca-Cola bathroom. At the time, it just felt normal. Cozy, even. Americana. Tradition.
I didn’t realize until much later how completely my sense of “holiday spirit” had been shaped by corporate nostalgia rather than ancestral memory. What I thought of as timeless wasn’t old at all. It was manufactured, standardized, and sold back to us as heritage.
That doesn’t make it evil. But it does matter.
Because when branding replaces ritual, something gets flattened. The symbols remain, but the relationship is gone. What was once seasonal, local, and embodied becomes aesthetic. Consumable. Safe.
And for many of us, that’s the only version of winter we were ever given.
That’s not a judgment. It’s just reality. Most of us weren’t raised with ritual. We were raised with branding.
What was lost in that transformation wasn’t belief. It was relationship— to land, to season, to memory.
And the people who held onto that relationship longest were already labeled for it.
Why “Heathen” Never Meant Godless
The word heathen never originally meant immoral or evil.
It meant rural.
Its earliest known form, haithno, is feminine and means “woman of the heath” — the open, uncultivated land beyond cities and roads. From there it spread through Germanic languages: Anglo-Saxon hǣþen, Old Norse heidinn, Old High German heidan.
Clergy used heathen to describe those who kept ancestral customs while cities converted. The 8th-century monk Paulus Diaconus wrote of heidenin commane (the rural people) calling them “the wild heathen.”
Offerings to trees, springs, and stones were condemned as sacrilege. Over time, heathen merged with Latin paganus, meaning “rural dweller,” and gentilis, meaning “of another tribe.”
What began as a description of people who would not leave the wild became a moral accusation.
Later, the same language was exported outward… applied to colonized lands as uncivilized or heathen.
The fear was never really about gods. It was about land that refused to be controlled.
What Actually Happened, and Why the Old Ways Are Calling Back
The same patterns repeat across centuries: suppression, survival, absorption, and forgetting.
But we need to be honest about what that suppression looked like.
This was not a gentle handoff. It was not mutual exchange. It was not respectful evolution.
Christianity did not simply reinterpret older traditions. It destroyed them where it could.
This is not rhetoric. It is history.
Historian Catherine Nixey documents this process in The Darkening Age. Early Christianity treated pagan traditions not as ancestors, but as enemies. Temples were smashed. Statues were defaced. Sacred groves were cut down. Libraries were burned. Seasonal rites that had structured life for centuries were criminalized.
This destruction was not hidden or accidental. It was celebrated.
Christian writers praised the demolition of temples. They mocked the old gods as demons. Beauty, pleasure, ritual, and joy were reframed as moral danger. Festivals became obscene. Feasting became gluttony. The body itself became suspect.
What could not be eradicated outright was stripped, renamed, and absorbed, while its origins were denied.
The solstice became Christ’s birth. The returning sun became metaphor. Evergreens became safe symbols. Ancestor offerings were reduced to children’s fantasy.
This was not borrowing. It was conquest, followed by selective inheritance.
When that conquest met resistance in rural places, in households, and in women’s hands, it adapted. It waited. It layered itself over what remained.
That is why the seams still show. That is why Christmas has always felt haunted. Layered. Conflicted. Unstable.
What survived did so despite institutional Christianity, not because of it.
It survived in kitchens and hearths. In fields and forests. In winter nights and quiet ritual. In land-based people who refused to forget how the seasons worked.
Centuries later, capitalism finished what religion began. What remained was flattened into nostalgia, branding, and spectacle.
Not because the old ways were weak. But because they were powerful.
Why the Call Feels Loud Again
The pull people feel now toward solstice, ancestors, darkness, rest, and land is not aesthetic.
It is memory.
It is the body remembering rhythms it was trained to forget. It is the psyche rejecting constant light, constant productivity, constant cheer. It is old intelligence resurfacing after centuries of suppression.
The old gods were never gone. They were buried. Winter has a way of thawing buried things.
If something in you responds to the fire, the darkness, the offering, or the pause, that does not mean you are rejecting modern life or indulging fantasy.
It means you are responding to a pattern older than doctrine. Older than empire. Older than the fear that tried to erase it.
What was destroyed is stirring. What was taken is being remembered.
In a few days, I’ll be sitting down with Universal Pagan Temple for a conversation on pagan culture, ritual, history, and lived practice, with Sigrún Gregerson, Pagan priestess and educator. If this piece brought up questions for you, about Yule, Mother’s Night, ancestor work, or what reclaiming these traditions actually looks like, I’d love to carry them into that conversation. Feel free to leave your questions in the comments or send them my way.
This is how the old ways return. Quietly. Carefully. Through memory, practice, and conversation.
Archaeology, “External Evidence,” and Groundhog Day in the Comment Section
Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays, where we stay curious, stay skeptical, and keep a healthy distance from any dogma, whether it’s wrapped in a Bible verse or a political ideology.
This is Part Two of my Jesus Myth series, and I’m going to be straight with you:
This one is a doozy. Buckle up, buttercup. Feel free to pause and come back.
Originally, the plan was to bring David Fitzgerald back for another conversation. If you listened to Part One, you know he’s done a ton to popularize the idea that Jesus never existed and to dismantle Christian dogma. I still agree with the core mythicist claim: I don’t think the Jesus of the Gospels was a real historical person. If you missed it, here is the link.
But agreeing with someone’s conclusion doesn’t mean I hand them a free pass on how they argue.
After our first interview, I went deeper into Fitzgerald’s work and into critiques of it (especially Tim O’Neill’s long atheist review that absolutely shreds his method.) While his critique of Fitzgerald’s arguments is genuinely useful; his habit of branding people with political labels (“Trump supporter,” “denier”) to discredit them is… very regressive.
It’s the same purity-testing impulse you see in progressive (should be regressive) spaces, just performed in a different costume.
And that’s what finally pushed me over the edge: The more I watch the atheist/deconstruction world online, the more it reminded me of the exact rigid, dogmatic cultures people say they escaped.
Not all atheists, obviously. But a very loud chunk of that ecosystem runs on:
dunking, dog-piling, and humiliation
tribal loyalty, not actual inquiry
“You’re dead to me” energy toward anyone who may lean conservative or shows nuance
It’s purity culture in different branding.
Then I read how Fitzgerald responded to critics in those archived blog exchanges (not with clear counterarguments) but with emotional name-calling and an almost devotional defense of his “hero and mentor,” Richard Carrier. For me, that was a hard stop.
Add to that: his public Facebook feed is full of contempt for moderates, conservatives, “anti-vaxxers,” and basically anyone outside progressive orthodoxy. My audience includes exactly those people. This space is built for nuance for people who’ve already escaped one rigid belief system and are not shopping for a new one.
He’s free to have his politics. I’m free not to platform that energy.
So instead of Part Two with a guest, you’re getting something I honestly think is better:
me (😜)
a stack of sources
a comment section that turned into a live demo of modern apologetics
and a segment at the end where I turn the same critical lens on the mythicist side — including Fitzgerald himself
Yes, we’re going there. Just not yet.
Previously on Taste of Truth…
In Part One, I unpacked why “Jesus might never have existed” is treated like a taboo thought — even though the historical evidence is thin and the standards used to “prove” Jesus would never pass in any other field of ancient history.
Then, in a Taste Test Thursday episode, I zoomed out and asked: Why do apologists argue like this at all? We walked through:
early church power moves
modern thought-stopping tricks
and Neil Van Leeuwen’s idea of religious “credences,” which don’t function like normal factual beliefs at all
Today is about the evidence. Especially the apologetic tropes that showed up in my comments like a glitching NPC on repeat.
⭐ MYTHS #6 & #7 — “History and Archaeology Confirm the Gospels”
Papyrus P52 (𝔓52), often called the oldest New Testament manuscript. (It’s the size of a credit card) Apologists treat it like a smoking gun. It contains… one complete word: ‘the.’
These two myths always show up together in the comments, and honestly, they feed off each other. People claim, “history confirms the Gospels,” and when that collapses, they jump to “archaeology proves Jesus existed.” So, I’m combining them here, because the evidence (and the problems) overlap more than apologists want to admit.
In short: Archaeology confirms the setting. History confirms the existence of Christians. Neither confirms the Jesus of the Gospels. And once you actually look at the evidence, the apologetic scaffolding falls apart fast.
1. What Archaeology Really Shows (and What It Doesn’t)
If Jesus were a public figure performing miracles, drawing crowds, causing disturbances, and being executed by Rome, archaeology should show something tied to him or to his original movement.
Here’s what archaeology does show:
Nazareth existed.
Capernaum existed.
The general layout of Judea under Rome.
Ritual baths, synagogues, pottery, coins.
A real Pilate (from a fragmentary inscription).
That’s the setting.
Here’s what archaeology has never produced:
no house of Jesus
no workshop or tools
no tomb we can authenticate
no inscription naming him
no artifacts linked to the Twelve
no evidence of a public ministry
no trace of Gospel-level notoriety
Not even a rumor in archaeology that points to a miracle-working rabbi. Ancient Troy existing doesn’t prove Achilles existed. Nazareth existing doesn’t prove Jesus existed.
Apologists push the setting as if it confirms the character. It doesn’t.
If the Gospels were eyewitness-based biographies, their geography would line up with first-century Palestine.
Instead, we get:
• Towns that don’t match reality
The Gerasene/Gadarene/Gergesa demon-pig fiasco moves between three different locations because the original story (Mark) puts Jesus 30 miles inland… nowhere near a lake or cliffs.
• Galilee described like a later era
Archaeology shows Galilee in the 20s CE was:
taxed to the bone
rebellious
dotted with large Romanized cities like Sepphoris and Tiberias
But the Gospels portray quaint fishing villages, peaceful Pharisees, and quiet countryside. This reflects post-70 CE Galilee: the era when the Gospels were actually written.
• Homeric storms on a tiny lake
Mark treats the Sea of Galilee like the Aegean (raging storms, near capsizings, disciples fearing death) even though ancient critics mocked this because the “sea” is a small lake.
Dennis MacDonald shows Mark lifting whole scenes from Homer, which explains the mismatch: his geography serves his literary needs, not the historical landscape.
• Joseph of “Arimathea” (a town no one can find)
Carrier and others point out the name works more like a literary pun (“best disciple town”) than a real toponym.
• Emmaus placed at different distances
Luke places it seven miles away. Other manuscripts vary. There was no fixed memory.
These aren’t the mistakes of people writing about their homeland. They’re the mistakes of later authors constructing a symbolic landscape.
3. The Gospel Trial Scenes: Legally Impossible
This is the part Christians never touch.
One of the most respected legal scholars of ancient Jewish law did a line-by-line analysis of the Gospel trial scenes. He wasn’t writing from a religious angle, he approached it strictly as a historian of legal procedure.
His conclusion? The trial described in the Gospels violates almost every rule of how Jewish courts actually worked.
According to his research:
capital trials were never held at night
they were not allowed during festivals like Passover
capital verdicts required multiple days, not hours
the High Priest did not interrogate defendants
witness testimony had to match
beating a prisoner during questioning was illegal
and Jewish courts didn’t simply hand people over to Rome
When you stack these facts together, it becomes clear:
The Gospel trial scenes aren’t legal history…. they’re theological storytelling.
That’s before we even get to Pilate.
Pilate was not a timid bureaucrat.
He was violent, ruthless, removed from office for brutality.
4. Acts Doesn’t Remember Any Gospel Miracles
If Jesus actually:
drew crowds,
fed thousands,
raised the dead,
blacked out the sun,
split the Temple curtain,
and resurrected publicly…
Acts (written after the Gospels) should remember all of this.
Instead:
No one in Acts has heard of Jesus.
No one mentions an empty tomb.
No one cites miracles as recent events.
Roman officials are clueless.
Paul knows Jesus only through visions and the scriptures.
Acts behaves exactly like a community whose “history” was not yet written.
5. Manuscripts: Many Copies, No Control
Apologists love saying:
“We have 24,000 manuscripts!”
Quantity isn’t quality.
almost all are medieval
the earliest are tiny scraps
none are originals
no first-century copies
scribes altered texts freely
entire passages were added or deleted
six of Paul’s letters are pseudonymous
many early Christian writings were forged
Even Origen admitted that scribes “add and remove what they please” (privately, of course.)
The manuscript tradition looks nothing like reliable preservation.
6. The Church Fathers Don’t Help (and They Were Tampered With Too)
This is where Fitzgerald’s chapter hits hardest.
Before 150 CE, we have:
no Church Father quoting any Gospel
no awareness of four distinct Gospels
no clear references to Gospel events
Justin Martyr (writing in the 150s) is the first to quote anything Gospel-like, and:
he never names Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John
many of his quotes don’t match our Gospels
he calls them simply “the memoirs”
Even worse:
The writings of Ignatius, Polycarp, Dionysius of Corinth, and many others were tampered with. Some were forged entirely.
So the apologetic claim “The Fathers confirm the Gospels” collapses:
They don’t quote them. They don’t know them. And their own texts are unstable.
Metzger claimed we could reconstruct the New Testament from the Fathers’ quotations but his own scholarship shows the Fathers don’t quote anything reliably until after the Gospels were circulating.
7. External Pagan Sources: Late, Thin, and Dependent on Christian Claims
This is the other half of the myth… that “history” outside the Bible confirms Jesus.
Let’s look quickly:
• Tacitus (116 CE)
Reports what Christians of his day believed. He cites no source, no archive, no investigation.
• Pliny (c. 111 CE)
Says Christians worship Christ “as a god.” Confirms Christians existed — not that Jesus did.
• Josephus (93 CE)
The Testimonium is tampered with. Even conservative scholars admit Christian hands were all over it. The “James, brother of Jesus” line is ambiguous at best.
These are not independent confirmations. They’re late echoes of Christian claims.
In closing:
You can confirm:
towns
coins
synagogues
political offices
geography
But that only shows the world existed, not the characters.
The Gospels are theological narratives composed decades later, stitched out of scripture, symbolism, literary models, and the needs of competing communities.
Archaeology confirms the backdrop. History confirms the movement. Neither confirms the biography.
Once you strip away apologetic spin, the evidence points to late, literary, constructed narratives, not eyewitness records of a historical man.
Myth #8: “Paul and the Epistles Confirm the Gospels”
Albert Schweitzer pointed out that if we only had Paul’s letters, we would never know that:
Jesus taught in parables
gave the Sermon on the Mount
told the “Our Father” prayer
healed people in Galilee
debated Pharisees
From Paul and the other epistles, you wouldn’t even know Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem.
That alone should make us pause before saying, “Paul confirms the Gospels.”
Paul’s “Gospel” Is Not a Life Story
When Paul says “my gospel,” he doesn’t mean a narrative like Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. His gospel is:
Christ died for our sins
was buried
was raised
now offers salvation to those who trust him
No:
Bethlehem, Nazareth, Mary, Joseph
John the Baptist
miracles, exorcisms, parables
empty tomb story with women at dawn
And this isn’t because Paul is forgetful. His letters are full of perfect moments to say, “As Jesus taught us…” or “As we all know from our Lord’s ministry…”
He never does.
Instead, he appeals to:
his own visions
the Hebrew scriptures (in Greek translation, the Septuagint)
what “the Lord” reveals directly to him
For Paul, Christ is:
“the image of the invisible God”
“firstborn of all creation”
the cosmic figure through whom all things were made
the one who descends to the lower realms, defeats spiritual powers, and ascends again
That is cosmic myth language… not “my friend’s rabbi who did a lot of teaching in Galilee a few decades ago.”
The “Lord’s Supper,” Not a Last Supper
The one place people think Paul lines up with the Gospels is 1 Corinthians 11, where he describes “the Lord’s Supper.”
Look closely:
He never calls it “the Last Supper.”
He never says it was a Passover meal.
He never places it in Jerusalem.
He says he received this ritual from the Lord, not from human eyewitnesses.
The phrase he uses, kuriakon deipnon (“Lord’s dinner”), is the same kind of language used for sacred meals in pagan mystery cults.
The verb he uses for “handed over” is used elsewhere of God handing Christ over, or Christ handing himself over not of a buddy’s betrayal. The specific “Judas betrayed him at dinner” motif shows up later, in the Gospels.
Then, when later authors retell the scene, they can’t even agree on the script. We get:
Paul’s version
Mark’s version
Matthew’s tweak on Mark
Luke’s two different textual forms
and John, who skips a Last Supper entirely and relocates the “eat my flesh, drink my blood” thing to a synagogue sermon in Capernaum
That looks less like multiple eyewitness reports and more like a liturgical formula evolving as it gets theologized.
Hebrews and the Missing Connection
The author of Hebrews:
goes deep on covenant and sacrificial blood
quotes Moses: “This is the blood of the covenant…”
spends time on Melchizedek, who brings bread and wine and blesses Abraham
In other words: The author sets up what would be a perfect sermon illustration for the Last Supper… but he never takes it. No “as our Lord did on the night he was betrayed.” No Eucharist scene. No Passover meal.
The simplest explanation: He doesn’t know that story. He knows the ritual meaning; the later narrative scene in Jerusalem hasn’t been invented yet in his circle.
How Paul Says He Knows Christ
Paul is very clear about his source:
He did not receive his gospel from any human (Galatians 1).
He barely met the Jerusalem “pillars,” waited years to even visit them, and insists they added nothing to his message.
He says God “revealed his Son in me.”
His scriptures are the Septuagint, which he reads as a giant coded story about Christ.
In other words, for Paul:
Christ is a hidden heavenly figure revealed in scripture and visions.
The “mystery” has just now been unveiled.
That only makes sense if there wasn’t already a widely known human teacher whose sayings and deeds were circulating everywhere.
The Silence of the Other Epistles
If it were just Paul, we could say, “That’s just Paul being weird.”
But the pattern runs across the other epistles:
From the New Testament letters outside the Gospels and Acts, you would never know:
Jesus was from Nazareth or born in Bethlehem
he grew up in Galilee
he taught crowds, told parables, healed people, or exorcised demons
he had twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him
there were sacred sites tied to his life in Jerusalem
“Bethlehem,” “Nazareth,” “Galilee” do not appear in those letters with reference to Jesus. Jerusalem is never presented as, “You know, the place where all this just happened.”
The supposed “brothers of the Lord” never act like family with stories to tell. The letters attributed to James and Jude don’t even mention they’re related to Jesus.
When these early authors argue about circumcision, food laws, purity, and ethics, they consistently go back to the Old Testament…not to anything like a Sermon on the Mount.
That is very hard to reconcile with a memory of a recent, popular Galilean preacher inspiring the entire movement.
Myth #9: “Christianity Began With Jesus and His Twelve Besties”
If you grew up on Acts, you probably have this movie in your head:
Tiny, persecuted but unified Jesus movement
Centered in Jerusalem
Led by Jesus’ family and the Twelve
Paul shows up later in season two as the complex antihero
That’s the canonical story.
When you step back and read our earliest sources on their own terms, that picture melts.
Fragmented from the Start
In 1 Corinthians, Paul complains:
“Each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’ Is Christ divided?” (1 Cor. 1:12–13)
That’s not “one unified church.”
He also:
rants about people “preaching another Jesus”
calls rival apostles “deceitful workers,” “false brothers,” “servants of Satan”
invokes curses on those preaching a different gospel (Gal. 1:6–9; 2 Cor. 11)
Meanwhile, the early Christian manual Didakhē warns communities about wandering preachers who are just “traffickers in Christs” (what Bart Ehrman nicknames “Christ-mongers.”)
Right away, we see:
multiple groups using the Christ label
competing versions of what “the gospel” even is
no sign of one tight central group everyone agrees on
Different Jesuses for Different Communities
By the time the Gospels and later texts are in circulation, we can already see:
Paul’s Christ: a cosmic, heavenly savior, revealed in scripture and visions, ruling spiritual realms
Thomasine Christ: in the Gospel of Thomas, salvation comes through hidden wisdom; there’s no crucifixion or resurrection narrative
Mark’s Jesus: a suffering, misunderstood Son of God who’s “adopted” at baptism and abandoned at the cross
John’s Jesus: the eternal Logos, present at creation, walking around announcing his unity with the Father
Hebrews’ Christ: the heavenly High Priest performing a sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary
These are not just “different camera angles on the same historical guy.” They reflect:
different liturgies
different cosmologies
different starting assumptions about who or what Christ even is
And notice: there is no clean pipeline from “this man’s twelve students carefully preserved his teachings” into this wild diversity.
Paul vs. Peter: Not a Cute Disagreement
Acts spins the Jerusalem meeting as:
everyone sits down
hashes things out
walks away in perfect unity
Paul’s own account (Galatians 2) is… not that:
he calls some of the Jerusalem people “false brothers”
he says they were trying to enslave believers
he says he “did not yield to them for a moment”
he treats the supposed “pillars” (Peter, James, John) as nobodies who “added nothing” to his gospel
That’s not a friendly staff meeting. That’s two rival Christianities:
a more Torah-observant, Jerusalem-centered Jesus-sect
Paul’s law-free, Gentile-mystic Christ-sect
Acts, written later, airbrushes this into harmony. The letters show how close the whole thing came to a full split.
Where Are the Twelve?
If Jesus’ twelve disciples were:
real,
the main founders of Christianity,
traveling around planting churches,
we’d expect:
lots of references to them
preserved teachings and letters
at least some reliable biographical detail
Instead:
the lists of the Twelve don’t agree between Gospels
some manuscripts can’t even settle on their names
outside the Gospels and Acts, the Twelve basically vanish from the first-century record
Paul:
never quotes “the Twelve”
never appeals to them as the final authority
treats Peter, James, John simply as rival apostles, not as Jesus’ old friends
We have no authentic writings from any of the Twelve. The later “Acts of Peter,” “Acts of Andrew,” “Acts of Thomas,” etc., are generally acknowledged to be later inventions.
The simplest explanation is not that the Twelve were historically massive and weirdly left no trace. It’s that:
“The Twelve” are symbolic: twelve tribes, twelve cosmic seats, twelve zodiac signs, take your pick.
Their names and “biographies” were built after the theology, not before.
The Kenosis Hymn: Jesus as a Title, Not a Birth Name
In Philippians 2, Paul quotes an early hymn:
“Being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death — death on a cross. Therefore God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow…”
Notice:
The hymn does not say God gave him the title “Lord.”
It says God gave him the name Jesus after the exaltation.
That is not what you expect if “Jesus” was already the known name of a village carpenter from Nazareth. It makes a lot more sense if:
“Jesus” functions originally as a divine name for a savior figure (“Yahweh saves”),
assigned in the mythic story after his cosmic act,
and only later gets retrofitted as the everyday name of a human hero.
Mark: From Mystery Faith to “Biography”
All of this funnels into the earliest Gospel: Mark.
Mark announces up front that he’s writing a gospel, not a biography. Modern scholars have shown that Mark:
builds scenes out of Old Testament passages
mirrors patterns from Greek epics
structures the story like a giant parable, where insiders are given “the mystery of the kingdom,” and outsiders only get stories
In Mark’s own framework, Jesus speaks in parables so that many will see but not understand. The whole Gospel plays that way: symbolic narrative first, later read as straight history once the church gains power.
So did Christianity “begin with Jesus and his apostles”?
If by that you mean:
One coherent movement, founded by a famous rabbi with twelve close disciples, faithfully transmitted from Jerusalem outward…
Then no. That’s the myth.
What we actually see is:
multiple competing Jesuses
rival gospels and factions
no clear paper trail from “Jesus’ inner circle”
later authors stitching together a cleaned-up origin story and branding rivals as “heresy”
Biographies came after belief, not before.
Myth #10: “Christianity Was a Miraculous Overnight Success That Changed the World”
The standard Christian flex goes like this:
“No mere myth could have spread so fast and changed the world so profoundly. That proves Jesus was real.”
Let’s slow that down.
But before we even touch the growth rates, we need to name something obvious that apologists conveniently forget:
Christianity wasn’t the first tradition built around a dying-and-rising savior. Not even close.
Long before the Gospels were written, the ancient Near East had already produced fully developed resurrection myths. One of the oldest (and one of the most important) belonged to Inanna, the Sumerian Queen of Heaven.
Ancient Akkadian cylinder seal (2350–2150 BCE) depicting Inanna
Inanna’s Descent (c. 2000–3000 BCE) is the earliest recorded resurrection narrative in human history.
She descends into the Underworld, is stripped, judged, executed, hung on a hook, and then through divine intervention, is brought back to life and restored to her throne.
This story predates Christianity by two thousand years and was well known across Mesopotamia.
In other words:
✨ The idea that a divine figure dies, descends into darkness, and returns transformed was already ancient before Christianity was even born.
So, the claim that “no myth could spread unless it were historically real” falls apart immediately. Myths did spread. Myths do spread. Myths shaped entire civilizations long before Jesus entered the story.
Now (with that context in place) let’s actually talk about Christianity’s growth..
Christianities Stayed Small…. Until Politics Changed
Carrier’s modeling makes it clear:
even if you start with generous numbers (say 5,000 believers in 40 CE),
you still don’t get anywhere near a significant percentage of the Empire until well into the third century
And that includes all groups who believed in some form of Christ — including the later-branded “heretics.”
So, for the first ~250 years, Christianity:
is tiny
is fragmented
is one cult among many in a very crowded religious landscape
The “miracle” is not early explosive growth. It’s what happens when their tiny, disciplined network suddenly gets access to empire-level power.
Rome Falls; Christianity Rises
Fitzgerald is right that Christianity benefitted from Rome’s third-century crisis:
chronic civil wars
inflation and currency debasement
border instability and barbarian incursions
trade networks breaking down
urban life contracting
As conditions worsened:
Christianity’s disdain for “worldly” culture
its emphasis on endurance, suffering, and heavenly reward
its growing bishop-led structure and charity networks
…all became more attractive to the poor and dispossessed.
“It was a mark of Constantine’s political genius … that he realized it was better to utilize a religion … that already had a well‑established structure of authority … rather than exclude it as a hindrance.” Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
But there’s a step many historians including Fitzgerald often underplay:
How Christianity destroyed the classical world.
From Tolerated to Favored to Tyrannical
A quick timeline:
313-Constantine legalizes Christianity (Edict of Milan). Christianity is now allowed, not official. Constantine still honors Sol Invictus and dies as a pagan emperor who also patronized bishops.
4th century– Christian bishops gain wealth and political leverage. Imperial funds start flowing to churches. Pagan temples begin to be looted or repurposed.
380– Emperor Theodosius I issues the Edict of Thessalonica: Nicene Christianity becomes the official state religion.
395 and after– Laws begin banning pagan sacrifices and temple worship. Pagan rites become crimes.
Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age and Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind document how this looked on the ground:
temples closed, looted, or destroyed
statues smashed
libraries and shrines burned
philosophers harassed, exiled, or killed
non-Christian rites criminalized
Christianity didn’t “persuade” its way to exclusive dominance. It:
received funding and legal favor
then helped outlaw and dismantle its competition
That is not a moral judgment; it’s just how imperial religions behave.
The “Overnight Success” That Took Centuries and a State
So was Christianity a new, radically different, overnight success?
Not new: it recycled the son-of-god savior pattern, sacred meals, initiation, and rebirth themes common in the religious world around it. Even early church fathers admitted the similarities and blamed them on Satan “counterfeiting” Christianity in advance.
Not overnight: it stayed statistically tiny for generations.
Not purely spiritual success: it became powerful when emperors needed an obedient, centralized religious hierarchy to stabilize a collapsing state.
Christianity didn’t “win” because its evidence was overwhelming.
It won because:
it fit the needs of late-imperial politics
it built a strong internal hierarchy
it could supply social services
its leaders were willing to suppress, outlaw, and overwrite rival traditions
This is not unique. It’s a textbook case of how state-backed religions spread.
Why the Pushback Always Sounds the Same
After Part One, my comment sections turned into Groundhog Day:
“You’re ignoring Tacitus and Josephus!”
“Every serious scholar agrees Jesus existed.”
“Archaeology proves the Bible.”
“There are 25,000 manuscripts.”
“Paul met Jesus’ brother!”
“If Jesus wasn’t real, who started Christianity?”
“Ancient critics never denied his existence — checkmate.”
“You just hate religion.”
“This is misinformation.”
Different usernames. Same script.
This is where Neil Van Leeuwen’s work on religious credences helps:
Factual beliefs are supposed to track evidence. If you show me credible new data, I update.
Religious credences function differently: they’re tied to identity, community, and morality. Their job isn’t to track facts; it’s to hold the group together.
So when you challenge Jesus’ historicity, you’re not just questioning an ancient figure. You’re touching:
“Who am I?”
“Who are my people?”
“What makes my life meaningful?”
No wonder people come in hot.
That doesn’t make them stupid or evil. It just means the conversation isn’t really about Tacitus. It’s about identity maintenance.
Now Let’s Turn the Lens on Mythicism (Yes, Including Fitzgerald)
Here’s where I want to be very clear:
I am a mythicist.
I do not think the Jesus of the Gospels ever existed as a historical person.
But mythicism itself doesn’t get a free pass.
Carrier’s Probability Model: When Someone Actually Does the Math
Most debates about Jesus collapse into appeals to authority. Richard Carrier’s On the Historicity of Jesus at least does something different: it quantifies the evidence.
Using Bayesian reasoning, he argues roughly:
about a 1 in 3 prior probability that there was a “minimal historical Jesus”– a real Jewish teacher who got executed and inspired a movement
about 2 in 3 for a “minimal mythicist” origin– a celestial figure whose story later got historicized
Then, after weighing the actual evidence (Paul’s silence, the late Gospels, contradictions, etc.), he argues the probability of a historical Jesus drops further, to something like 1 in 12.
You don’t have to agree with his exact numbers to see the point:
Once you treat the sources like data, not dogma, the overconfident “of course Jesus existed, you idiot” stance looks a lot less justified.
O’Neill’s Critique of Fitzgerald: Atheist vs Atheist
Tim O’Neill, an atheist historian, wrote a long piece on Fitzgerald’s Nailed and does not hold back. His basic charges:
Fitzgerald oversells weak arguments
cherry-picks and misuses sources
ignores mainstream scholarship where it contradicts him
frames mythicism as bold truth vs. “apologist cowards,” which is just another tribal narrative
When Fitzgerald responded, he didn’t do so like someone doing serious historical work. He responded like an internet keyboard warrior.
And that same ideological vibe shows up in how he talks about people in general, which I said in the beginning.
Atheism as New Orthodoxy
The more time I spend watching atheist and deconstruction spaces online, the more obvious it becomes that a lot of these folks didn’t escape religion, they just changed uniforms. They swapped their church pews for Reddit threads, pastors for science influencers, and now “logic” is their new scripture. Ya feel me? It’s the same emotional energy: tribal validation, purity tests–like what do you believe or think about this? And the constant hunt for heretics who dare to ask inconvenient questions.
Say something even slightly outside the approved dogma…like pointing out that evolution (calm down, Darwin disciples) still has gaps and theoretical edges we haven’t fully nailed down and suddenly the comment section becomes the Inquisition. They defend the theory with the exact same fervor evangelicals defend the Book of Revelation. It’s wild.
And look, I’m all for science. I’m literally the girl who reads academic papers for funsies. But when atheists start treating evolution like a sacred cow that can’t be questioned, or acting like “reason” is this perfect, unbiased tool that magically supports all their existing beliefs… that’s not skepticism. That’s a new orthodoxy, dressed up as a freethinker. Different vocabulary, same psychology. Good gravy, baby— calm down.
and….here’s the uncomfortable truth a lot of atheists don’t want to hear:
Reason isn’t the savior they think it is.
French cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber have spent years studying how humans actually use reason and prepare yourself because: we don’t use it the way we think. Their research shows that reason didn’t evolve to help us discover truth. It evolved to help us win arguments, protect our identities, and persuade members of our group.
In other words:
confirmation bias isn’t a flaw
motivated reasoning isn’t a glitch
tribal loyalty isn’t an accident
They are features of the reasoning system.
Which is why people who worship “logic” often behave exactly like the religious communities they left… just with new vocabulary and a different set of heretics.
This is also why intellectual diversity matters so much. You cannot reason your way to truth inside an ideological monoculture. Your brain simply won’t let you. Without competing perspectives, reasoning becomes nothing more than rhetorical self-defense, a way to signal loyalty to the tribe while pretending to be above it.
John Stuart Mill understood this long before modern cognitive science confirmed it. In On Liberty, Mill argues that truth isn’t something we protect by silencing dissent. Truth emerges through friction, through the clash of differing perspectives. A community that prides itself on “rational superiority” but cannot tolerate disagreement becomes just another church with a different hymnal.
And that’s where many atheist and deconstruction spaces are now.
They haven’t transcended dogma. They’ve recreated it. Trading one orthodoxy for another.
This isn’t just about online atheists. This is about what happens when any movement stops questioning itself.
Challenging the Mythicist Side (Without Turning It Into Another Tribe)
Let’s get honest about the mythicist world too — because every camp has its blind spots.
Tim O’Neill’s critique of David Fitzgerald wasn’t just angry rhetoric. Strip away the insults, and he raises a few legitimate issues worth taking seriously:
1. Accusation of Agenda-Driven History
O’Neill argues that Fitzgerald starts with the conclusion “Jesus didn’t exist” and works backward, much like creationists do with Genesis.
Now Fitzgerald absolutely denies this. In his own words, he didn’t go looking for mythicism; mythicism found him when he started examining the evidence. And that’s fair.
But the deeper point still stands:
The mythicist movement can get so emotionally invested in debunking Christianity that it mirrors the very dogmatism it critiques.
You see this all over atheist spaces today — endless dunking, no nuance, purity tests, and very little actual curiosity.
That’s a valid critique.
2. Amateurism and Overreach
O’Neill also accuses Fitzgerald of relying too heavily on older scholarship, making confident claims where the evidence is thin, and occasionally overstating consensus.
Again — not entirely wrong. Fitzgerald’s book is sharp and compelling, but it’s not the cutting-edge end of mythicism anymore.
There are places where he simplifies. There are places where he speculates.
This matters because mythicism deserves better than overconfident shortcuts.
3. Fitzgerald doesn’t push far enough
And ironically, this is where I diverge from O’Neill entirely. He thinks Fitzgerald goes too far; I think Fitzgerald stops too soon.
There are areas where the mythicist case has advanced beyond Fitzgerald’s framework, and he doesn’t touch them:
• The possibility that “Paul” himself is a literary construct
Nina Livesey and other scholars argue that:
The Pauline voice may be a 2nd-century invention.
The letters reflect Roman rhetorical conventions, not authentic 1st-century correspondence.
The “apostle Paul” may be a theological persona used to unify competing sects.
Fitzgerald doesn’t address this— but it’s now one of the most provocative frontiers in the field.
• The geopolitical legacy of Abrahamic supremacy
Fitzgerald critiques Christian nationalism. Great. But he doesn’t go upstream to examine the deeper architecture:
It focuses almost exclusively on Christian excess while leaving the deeper architecture untouched: how Abrahamic identity claims themselves shape law, land, empire, and modern geopolitics.
When you zoom out, the story is not “Christian nationalism versus secular reason.”
It is competing and cooperating Abrahamic power structures, each with theological claims about chosen-ness, inheritance, land, and destiny.
Abrahamic Power Is Not Just Christian
Very few people are willing to look at the broader landscape of Abrahamic influence in American politics and global power structures. When they do not, they miss how deeply intertwined these traditions have been for over a century.
One under-discussed example is the longstanding institutional relationship between Mormonism and Judaism, particularly around shared claims to Israel and the “house of Israel.”
This is not hidden history.
In 1995, Utah Valley State College established a Center for Jewish Studies explicitly aimed at “bridging the gap between Jews and Mormons” and guiding relationships connected to Israel. One of the board members was Jack Solomon, a Jewish community leader who publicly praised the LDS Church as uniquely supportive of Judaism.
Solomon stated at the time that “there is no place in the world where the Christian community has been so supportive of the Jewish people and Judaism,” noting LDS financial and symbolic support for Jewish institutions in Utah going back to the early twentieth century.
This matters because Mormon theology explicitly claims descent from the house of Israel. Mormons do not merely admire Judaism. They see themselves as part of Israel’s continuation and restoration.
That theological framework shapes real-world alliances.
1. The Mormon Church Is a Financial Superpower
Most Americans have no idea how wealthy the LDS Church actually is.
The Mormon Church’s real estate & investment arm, Ensign Peak Advisors, was exposed in 2019 and again in 2023 for managing a secret portfolio now estimated at:
👉 $150–$200 billion
(Source: SEC filings, whistleblower leaks, Wall Street Journal)
To compare:
PepsiCo market cap: ~$175B
ExxonMobil (oil giant): ~$420B
Disney: ~$160B
Meaning:
📌 The LDS Church is financially on par with Pepsi and Disney, and not far behind Big Oil.
This is not a “church.” This is an empire.
And it invests strategically:
massive real estate acquisitions
agricultural control
media companies
political lobbying
funding influence networks
And let’s be clear: Mormons see themselves as a literal remnant of Israel (the last tribe) destined to help rule the Earth “in the last days.”
Which brings us to…
2. Mormonism’s Quiet Partnership with the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR)
NAR is the movement behind the so-called “Seven Mountain Mandate”— the belief that Christians must seize control of:
Government
Education
Media
Arts & Entertainment
Business
Religion
Family
This is the backbone of Christian nationalism and it’s far more organized than people realize. But here’s the part that never gets discussed:
Mormon elites collaborate with NAR leadership behind the scenes.
Shared goals:
influence over U.S. political leadership
shaping national morality laws
preparing for a prophetic “kingdom age”
embedding power in those seven spheres
This isn’t fringe. This is the largest religious–political coalition in the country, and yet most journalists never touch it.
3. The Ziklag Group: A $25M-Minimum Christian Power Circle
You want to talk about “elite networks”?
Meet Ziklag: an ultra-exclusive Christian organization named after King David’s biblical stronghold. Requirements for membership: a minimum net worth of $25 million Their mission? Not charity. Not discipleship.
Influence the Seven Mountains of society at the highest levels.
Members include:
CEOs
hedge-fund managers
defense contractors
political donors
tech founders
Including the billionaire Uihlein family, who made a fortune in office supplies, the Greens, who run Hobby Lobby, and the Wallers, who own the Jockey apparel corporation. Recipients of Ziklag’s largesse include Alliance Defending Freedom, which is the Christian legal group that led the overturning of Roe v. Wade, plus the national pro-Trump group Turning Point USA and a constellation of right-of-center advocacy groups.
AND YET…
Most people yelling about “Christian nationalism” have never even heard of Ziklag.
4. Meanwhile, Chabad-Lubavitch Has Met with Every U.S. President Since 1978
Evangelical influence isn’t the only Abrahamic power Americans ignore.
Chabad (a Hasidic cult with global reach) has:
direct access to every U.S. president
annual White House proclamations (“Education & Sharing Day”) explicitly honor a religious leader as a moral authority over the nation.
a network of emissaries (shluchim) embedded in power centers around the world
This is influence, not conspiracy.
This is religious lobbying at the highest level of government, treated as unremarkable simply because the public doesn’t understand it.
The Rebbe’s ambassador to Washington D.C., Rabbi Abraham Shemtov, addresses the crowd at an event in front of the White House organized by American Friends of Lubavitch, as President Carter and The Honorable Stuart E. Eizenstat, Chief Domestic Policy Adviser and the Executive Director of the White House Domestic Policy Staff, look on.
President Gerald Ford is greeted by Rabbi Abraham Shemtov (left), national director of American Friends of Lubavitch; Rabbi Moshe Feller (right), Chabad-Lubavitch emissary to Minnesota; and Senator Rudy Boschwitz; at the American Friends of Lubavitch Philadelphia dinner, May 1975.
President Ronald Reagan signs the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation
President Bill Clinton places a dollar bill in a charity box after receiving members of the American Friends of Lubavitch in the White House.
President George W. Bush speaks to Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis after signing the Education Day U.S.A. proclamation.
President Obama Welcomes Chabad-Lubavitch to the White House
Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis meet with President Donald J. Trump on Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A. in 2018. “The First Lady and I encourage all Americans to reflect upon the Rebbe’s teachings,” President Trump wrote in this year’s proclamation. “His inestimable dedication and unwavering example have become woven into the very fabric of our nation and its character. His memory remains a blessing to the world.”
Biden meets with over 100 Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis
See the Pattern Yet?
When people say “Christian nationalism,” they’re talking about one branch of a much older tree.
Christianity isn’t the problem. Atheism isn’t the solution.
The issue is Abrahamic supremacy: the belief that one sacred lineage has the right to rule, legislate, moralize, and define history for everyone else.
Across denominations, across continents, across political parties, the pattern is the same:
chosen-people narratives
divine-right entitlement
mythic land claims
sacred-tier influence operations
the blending of theology with statecraft
“Groupish belief systems that justify valuing one’s group above others must be inventable.” — Religion as Make-Believe.
Exactly.
These power structures aren’t ancient relics. They’re alive, wealthy, organized, and deeply embedded in American political life. And yet we’re told to panic exclusively about MAGA Christians… while studiously ignoring:
Mormon financial empires
NAR infiltration of U.S. political offices
Zionist influence networks
Chabad’s presidential pipeline
elite Christian dominionist groups like Ziklag
This isn’t about blaming individuals.
It’s about naming systems. Because if we’re going to talk honestly about orthodoxy, myth, and power…
we need to talk about all of it— not just the parts that are fashionable to critique.
4. Mythicism still hasn’t grappled with empire
Most mythicist writing stops at: “Jesus didn’t exist.”
Cool. Now what? The real question is:
HOW? How did a mythical figure become the operating system for Western civilization?
So, here’s where I actually land:
Christianity didn’t emerge from a single man. It emerged from competing myths, political incentives, scriptural remixing, imperial needs, and evolving group identities.
And if that makes me someone who doesn’t quite fit in the Christian world, the atheist world, or the deconstruction world? Perfect. My loyalty is to the question, not the tribe. That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
That’s exactly where I plan to stay.
aaaand as always, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️🔒
Footnotes
1. Jodi Magness, Stone and Dung, Oil and Spit (Eerdmans, 2011).
Archaeologist specializing in 1st-century Judea; emphasizes that archaeology illuminates daily life, but cannot confirm Jesus’ existence or Gospel events.
2. Eric M. Meyers & Mark A. Chancey, Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity (Baker Academic, 2012).
Shows how archaeology supports context, not Gospel narrative details.
3. Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Hendrickson, 2003).
Explains why the Testimonium Flavianum is partially or heavily interpolated and cannot serve as independent confirmation of Jesus.
4. Alice Whealey, “The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic,” New Testament Studies 54.4 (2008): 573–590.
Analyzes manuscript traditions showing Christian editing of Josephus.
5. Louis Feldman, “Josephus,” Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 3 (Yale University Press, 1992).
Standard reference summarizing scholarly consensus about the unreliable portions of Josephus’ Jesus passages.
6. Brent Shaw, “The Myth of the Neronian Persecution,” Journal of Roman Studies 105 (2015): 73–100.
Shows Tacitus likely repeats Christian stories, not archival Roman data, making him a witness to Christian belief — not Jesus’ historicity.
7. Pliny the Younger, Epistles 10.96–97.
Earliest Roman description of Christian worship; confirms Christians existed, not that Jesus did.
8. Bart D. Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus (HarperOne, 2005).
Explains why New Testament manuscripts contain thousands of variations, with no originals surviving.
9. Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000).
Argues Mark intentionally modeled episodes on Homeric motifs — supporting literary construction rather than eyewitness reporting.
10. Attridge, Harold W., The Epistle to the Hebrews (Hermeneia Commentary Series).
Shows how Hebrews relies on celestial priesthood imagery and makes no connection to a recent earthly Jesus, even when opportunities are obvious.
11. Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (1999).
Early mythicist argument emphasizing the epistles’ lack of biographical Jesus data.
12. Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus (Sheffield Phoenix, 2014).
Presents a Bayesian model estimating mythicist origins as more probable than historicity.
13. Richard Carrier, Proving History (Prometheus, 2012).
Explains the historical method he uses for evaluating Jesus traditions.
14. Paula Fredriksen, From Jesus to Christ (Yale University Press, 2000).
Demonstrates the pluralism and fragmentation within earliest Christianity.
15. Burton Mack, The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (Continuum, 2006).
Describes the emergence of various Jesus traditions as literary and theological constructions.
16. Clayton N. Jefford, The Didache (Fortress Press).
Analyzes early church manual revealing “wandering prophets,” factionalism, and market-style competition among early Jesus groups.
17. Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age (Macmillan, 2017).
Documents the destruction of pagan culture under Christian imperial dominance.
18. Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind (Vintage, 2005).
Explores how Christian orthodoxy displaced classical philosophy.
19. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (Yale University Press, 1984).
Shows Christianity expanded primarily through imperial power, incentives, and legislation, not mass persuasion.
20. H.A. Drake, Constantine and the Bishops (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
Outlines Constantine’s political use of Christianity and the shift toward enforced orthodoxy.
21. Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013).
Provides context for how Christianity overtook the Roman religious landscape.
22. Neil Van Leeuwen, “Religious Credence Is Not Factual Belief,” Cognition 133 (2014): 698–715.
Explains why religious commitments behave like identity markers, not evidence-responsive beliefs.
23. Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things (MIT Press, 2015).
Useful for understanding modern online purity culture dynamics, relevant to atheist-internet behavior discussed in your commentary section.
24. Joseph Reagle, Reading the Comments (MIT Press, 2015).
Analyzes comment-section behavior and ideological enforcement online.
25. Tim O’Neill, “Easter, the Existence of Jesus, and Dave Fitzgerald,” History for Atheists (2017).
Atheist historian critiquing Fitzgerald’s methodological errors, exaggerated claims, and misuse of sources.
26. Raphael Lataster, Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Brill, 2019).
Secular academic arguing mythicism is plausible but insisting on higher methodological rigor than many popularizers use.
27. Richard Carrier, various blog critiques of Fitzgerald (2012–2019).
Carrier agrees with mythicism but critiques Fitzgerald for overstatement and inadequate source control.
The story of intellectual destruction hidden behind the narrative of salvation
Hey Hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays! Except today…it’s Thursday, which means it’s my bonus edition: Taste Test Thursday. Why a bonus? Because the comment sections lately have been overflowing with so much brain-dead apologetics, I had to dedicate an entire post just to unpack the anti-intellectual tricks Christians trot out like clockwork.
Last week I interviewed David Fitzgerald. On one hand, I was navigating a man who built his career dismantling Christian dogma. On the other, I found myself running headfirst into his own political certainties— rigid, unyielding, and just as unquestioned as the ideas he critiques. The irony wasn’t lost on me, especially as a moderate: the ex-Christian deconstruction space can be just as inhospitable to nuance as the faith it once rejected.
But what really matters here isn’t politics. It’s the dogma that never changes. Every time I debate the historicity of Jesus or the so-called “intellectual foundations” of Christianity, it feels like stepping into a twilight zone where facts and evidence are optional, and certainty always gets the last word.
Apologetics didn’t grow out of some noble pursuit of truth; it grew out of power struggles, suppression, and centuries of treating curiosity and inquiry as threats.
What gets labeled today as “defending the faith” has roots far older, far more political, and far more violent than most Christians realize. And understanding that history changes the way you engage with believers now— especially when they parrot the same canned responses that have been circulating (in one form or another) for almost 1,500 years.
And that’s what today’s episode is all about… to trace where this all actually came from….
Ancient Roots: When Apologetics Became a Tool of Power
For early Christians, defending their faith wasn’t just about theology, but survival in a world built on pluralism and reason. Thinkers like Justin Martyr, Origen, and Tertullian weren’t arguing from positions of power. Quite the opposite: they came from largely disenfranchised, low‑status communities— often slaves, women, and the poor— who were dismissed by Greco-Roman society. Early critics like Celsus, sneered that Christians were “only slaves, women, and little children … led by woolworkers, cobblers, and the most illiterate.”
But Christians were also up against a far more entrenched cultural reality: in the Greco-Roman world, it was normal (even comfortable) for people to participate in a number of cults simultaneously. Polytheistic religion meant multiple gods, multiple rituals, and no single institution claiming total authority. According to Charles Freeman, the intertwining of authority and Christianity was profoundly revolutionary: where one could previously be devoted to several deities at once, Christianity insisted that allegiance to one truth meant rejecting all others.
Early on, some of the Church Father’s work was intellectually sincere. They were trying to show Christianity wasn’t irrational. But as Charles Freeman points out, reason in theology faces a structural problem: unlike math or empirical science, it lacks universally accepted axioms. You can prove Pythagoras’ theorem because everyone agrees on what a right-angled triangle is. You can do inductive reasoning with empirical evidence because everyone can test and observe it. Theology? There are no such universal starting points. Revelations can be claimed by anyone, scripture can be interpreted in multiple ways, and even the most careful theologians disagreed on what counted as a “self-evident” truth.
The early Church quickly ran into this problem. Different communities drew on different texts, emphasized different letters of Paul, or debated competing visions of Jesus’ nature. The Montanists, for instance, were sidelined and crushed because their claims to divine revelation conflicted with what became orthodoxy. Even Thomas Aquinas, one of Europe’s “greatest rational thinkers”, had to suspend reason when it collided with doctrinal authority.
The point isn’t that Christians ignored reason — they didn’t. The point is that reason alone could never achieve consensus in matters of theology. Unlike other spiritual movements in the ancient world, Christianity insisted on a centralized authority, a single orthodoxy enforced across an empire of diverse cultures. That insistence on uniformity was revolutionary, and it set the stage for apologetics to evolve into a tool not just for defending belief, but for controlling it.
Once Christianity fused with political power (especially after Constantine) apologetics shifted again. It wasn’t enough to argue for the faith intellectually; it became a method of asserting authority, suppressing dissent, and standardizing scripture. Defending the faith became synonymous with maintaining control. What started as reasoning with skeptics gradually transformed into a mechanism to enforce orthodoxy across the Christian world.
It stopped being “Here’s why I believe” and became “Here’s why everyone must.”
As imperial authority was crumbling in the west, this is when the bishops of Rome gained political backing, apologetics morphed into:
A tool for defining orthodoxy
A justification for suppressing dissent
A way to control access to scripture
A mechanism of dominance rather than debate
This shift marks the beginning of Christianity’s long relationship with enforcing belief rather than exploring truth — a pattern that shapes the modern faith more than its followers realize.
The Darkening Age: When Suppressing Ideas Became Holy Work
The Triumph of Christianity Over Paganism, by Tommaso Laureti 1585
Christian doctrine and its alliance with political power didn’t just close off types of questioning— it restructured the very social fabric of religious life. In effect, early Christians weren’t only claiming a new faith — they were demanding a new kind of loyalty built around a singular, authoritative orthodoxy. Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age doesn’t sugarcoat this period. Christianity’s rise didn’t just change the spiritual landscape; it also reshaped the intellectual world through force. At its heart, the book is a painful reminder of just how much was lost due to zealotry and religious dogma.
Nixey challenges the conventional narrative of Christianity “saving” Western civilization by exposing the far darker story: philosophers beaten, tortured, interrogated, exiled; their beliefs forbidden; intellectual traditions silenced. As the historian John Pollini observes, modern scholarship has often downplayed or overlooked these attacks, even presenting Christian desecration in a positive light.
Between the fourth and sixth centuries:
Pagan temples were smashed or repurposed
Statues were mutilated
Philosophical schools were closed
Entire libraries and works of classical literature were burned or erased
The destruction wasn’t without precedent. As I reflected in my notes for an upcoming episode on The Darkening Age, Christianity, emerging from a Jewish context, carried forward a zeal for nullifying rival religious objects and practices. Deuteronomy explicitly commands:
“You shall overthrow their altars, break their pillars, burn their growth with fire… and destroy the names of their gods out of that place.”
Early Christians, many of them ethnic Jews, others European converts, obliterated traditional art — especially works venerating ancestors…in ways strikingly similar to this Torah mandate. The Talmud codifies the principle: defacing an idol: cutting off a nose, fingertip, or ear was a method to revoke its divine status. Once damaged intentionally, the object lost its sacred standing.
Germanicus Caesar Germanicus’s nose has been mutilated and a cross has been carved in his forehead–perhaps an attempt to “baptize” and neutralize any possible demons within
“As the Church Father Basil explained, such ecclesiastical censorship was not illiberal; it was loving. Just as Augustine advocated the beating of heretics with rods out of fatherly care, so Basil advocated the removal of great tracts of classical canon as an act of ‘great care’ to ensure the soul was safely guarded.” Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age the Christian Destruction of the Classical World
The primary sources are shocking. Some Christians didn’t just accept violence as a duty— they enjoyed it. Saint Augustine reportedly saw throwing down temples, idols, and groves as proof of abhorring paganism. Benedict of Nursia, revered as the founder of Western monasticism, was also celebrated as a destroyer of antiquities. John Chrysostom writes in The Homilies, On the Statues that punishing the pagan “sinner” (flogging, beating, even murder) was not harming them but saving them from the ultimate punishment. Murder in service of God was framed as prayer.
Reading this evokes deep visceral sadness. The destruction of creative thought, science, and philosophical inquiry is staggering. It’s impossible not to notice the echo in modern Christianity: when someone converts, they’re often asked to discard books, crystals, or other personal items that represent “pagan” or non-Christian influences. In some ways, the impulse to erase ideas, objects, and independent thought persists today.
ARCHIMEDES PALIMPSEST, C. IOTH-I3TH CENTURY
A tenth-century copy of Archimedes chalf Mechanical Theorems. In it, Archimedes had ingeniously applied mechanical laws, such as the law cl the lever, to find the volume and area of geometric shapes. Two thousand years before Newton, he had come tantalizingly close to deriving calculus. However, in the thirteenth century this work was scraped off and overwritten with a prayer book.
This isn’t apologetics as debate by any means. It was apologetics as a sledgehammer, operating under the conviction that only one worldview deserved to survive. Nixey’s work is enraging, tragic, and illuminating. It shows that while Christianity has morphed and evolved over centuries, the strategies of control, suppression, and moral justification remain recognizable today.
Closing of the Western Mind: When Faith Shut Down Reason
“By the fifth century, not only has rational thought been suppressed, but there has been a substitution for it of ‘mystery, magic and authority’ …” — Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind explains how Christianity, once in power, didn’t just defend itself; it fundamentally transformed the intellectual landscape of the West.
Greek philosophy, still vibrant in the early centuries, was gradually co-opted and subordinated to Christian authority. Faith, not reason, became the foundation of legitimacy. Independent philosophical traditions, especially those that didn’t align with Christian doctrine, were suppressed. Thought, inquiry, and debate were no longer neutral tools — they were potential threats
“Faith … involves some kind of acquiescence in what cannot be proved by rational thought.” — Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
The combination of church and imperial authority enforced orthodoxy across the empire.
“This ‘desire for control… of taxes and contributions’ was a corrosive feature of church politics. This linking of access to resources with orthodoxy was bound to lead to nasty rivalries when doctrine was so fluid.” Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
Freeman shows that this wasn’t simply an unfortunate side effect of religion gaining power.
“It was a mark of Constantine’s political genius … that he realized it was better to utilize a religion … that already had a well‑established structure of authority … rather than exclude it as a hindrance.” Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith & the Fall of Reason
It was a structural choice: intellectual freedom was sacrificed for doctrinal control. The centuries that followed were marked by a persistent tension between reason and religion, one that would only begin to loosen with the reintroduction of Aristotle in the 13th century.
In other words, modern apologetics, the slick, defensive arguments Christians use today, didn’t appear in a vacuum. They are built on a foundation laid over centuries: a system where questioning authority was discouraged, curiosity was suspect, and dissent could be dangerous. Understanding this context changes the conversation entirely.
When we debate Christians today about history, scripture, or reason, we aren’t just dealing with modern arguments…we’re confronting a legacy of intellectual suppression stretching back over a millennium.
Modern Apologetics: A Thought‑Stopping System Dressed Up as Intellectualism
Fast‑forward to today, and the patterns from history are still painfully familiar. Modern apologists like Lee Strobel or Josh McDowell often present themselves as investigators, journalists, or historians. But underlying that veneer of investigation is something much more defensive: their method isn’t really about seeking truth — it’s about creating an insulated echo chamber in which questioning feels unsafe.
You’ll notice how in their approach:
Doubt is pathologized
Questions are reframed as attacks
“Answers” come prepackaged
Evidence is curated selectively
Authority is invoked instead of demonstrated
This isn’t accidental. It’s the legacy of a system built not to evaluate claims, but to preserve credence.
To underscore that, let’s look at a couple of real voices:
Lee Strobel, in The Case for Christ, has described the evidence for Jesus like this:
“I picture the evidence for the deity of Jesus to be like the fast-moving current in a river. To deny the data would be like swimming upstream against the current … What’s logical, based on the strength of the case for Christ, is to swim in the same direction the evidence is pointing …”
On the surface, that sounds rational. But it’s also subtly coercive — it frames belief as a natural, almost inevitable conclusion. If you resist, you’re not just wrong; you’re swimming against the current. That metaphor doesn’t invite open inquiry; it discourages it.
Robert M. Price, in The Case Against the Case for Christ, goes even further. He accuses Strobel of building his “investigation” on a very narrow foundation:
“His true intention becomes clear by the choice of people he interviewed: every one of them a conservative apologist!”
He also critiques the entire enterprise as a “long exercise in applying the fallacy of informal logic known as ‘the appeal to authority.’” By highlighting that Strobel only interviews like-minded evangelical scholars, Price argues that Strobel never really engages with real skepticism or dissent. Instead, he reinforces what his audience already believes— with authority, not argument.
Why This Matters
Thought-stopping by design. Strobel’s river metaphor isn’t an invitation to inquire — it’s a mental funnel. It teaches you to treat questions as temptations and answers as preselected. That’s classic thought-stopping: reframe uncertainty as spiritual danger, and the search ends before it begins.
Selection bias on display. Price highlights how most “investigations” in apologetics aren’t investigations at all. They’re confirmation exercises. The conclusions are fixed, and the evidence is hand-picked to match. Doubt gets pathologized; alternative explanations get caricatured; and any data that threatens the thesis gets quietly dismissed as “liberal scholarship.”
Authority over evidence. A hallmark of thought-stopping systems is the outsourcing of your epistemic agency. Rather than wrestling with contradictory ideas, you’re told to trust select authorities who have already “done the work” for you. The message is subtle but effective: Don’t think — defer. And the more you defer, the easier it becomes to confuse loyalty with truth.
Identity first, truth second. when belief is woven into group identity, truth loses priority. In that ecosystem, bad arguments don’t weaken the faith — they strengthen belonging. The goal shifts from discovering what’s true to protecting who we are. And that’s why apologetics so often functions as thought-stopping: it reinforces identity boundaries rather than expanding understanding.
Modern apologetics doesn’t just argue— it fortifies. And once you see it for what it is, it’s easier to call out the patterns and not fall back into the same historical traps of intellectual control.
Mark Noll and the Scandal Christians Don’t Want to Acknowledge
Mark Noll famously wrote: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
And Noll’s critique isn’t just an evangelical problem. He’s describing a deep pattern that Christianity carried for centuries. Long before Darwin, before fundamentalism, before American politics ever touched a pulpit, Christians had already built an intellectual culture that favored:
authority over investigation
doctrine over open debate
preservation over exploration
Noll shows how early Christian communities learned to treat intellectual life as something to be “managed” rather than expanded. Church leaders policed ideas to protect unity. Questioning official teaching wasn’t framed as curiosity — it was framed as disloyalty.
That instinct hardened over time. Through the medieval church, the Reformation, and the rise of Protestant denominations, Christians inherited the same reflex: the safest mind is the obedient mind.
By the time evangelicalism appears in America, the pattern is already set. What looks like modern “anti-intellectualism” is really just the latest expression of something older: a tradition that trained generations to fear the consequences of independent thought.
Seen through Noll’s lens, apologetics suddenly makes perfect sense. It’s not an attempt to think freely — it’s an attempt to stabilize belief. It functions exactly the way a system built on centuries of intellectual gatekeeping would function— it’s functioning exactly the way it was designed to.
Credence vs. Belief: Why Arguments About Jesus Go Nowhere
One of the most clarifying concepts for understanding why Christian apologetics often feels impervious to evidence comes from Neil Van Leeuwen’s work on religious credence. He distinguishes between factual beliefs (which hold across all contexts and guide our actions consistently) and religious credence, which function more like imaginative or conditional assumptions tied to specific social and ritual settings.
Factual beliefs remain operative regardless of context. If you imagine your bed is a boat floating down stream, the reality of your bed remains unchanged. Stage actors, for instance, can fully inhabit the world of Hamlet while still acting according to the real physics of a stage. Religious credence, in contrast, are activated by particular experiences: rituals, rites of passage, confrontations with mortality, or challenges to identity.
Consider a church that rents a local gymnasium for Sunday service: everyone knows they’re sitting on bleachers in a multipurpose building, yet within that context, the space becomes sacred. The credence imposed by ritual and communal belief transforms ordinary surroundings into objects of spiritual significance, even while factual reality remains unchanged.
This distinction helps explain why apologetics doesn’t behave like fact-checking. Modern Christian arguments are not primarily designed to persuade with evidence; they are structured to maintain credence. Doubt is framed as dangerous, questions are answered with prepackaged responses, and rituals, narratives, and appeals to authority reinforce the believer’s identity and group loyalty. In other words, apologetics isn’t just defending a claim — it’s protecting a cognitive system that operates independently of factual reality.
In fact, as Neil Van Leeuwen puts it:
“When a belief is rooted in somebody’s group identity, truth often takes the back seat if a certain kind of attitude is playing a role in defining or constituting a group identity. Truth is not as important, and in fact they might do this better if they’re not true.”
This gets to the heart of why modern apologetics is less about investigation and more about protection. Doubt isn’t just unwelcome— it threatens the social and cognitive structures that support identity. Prepackaged answers, appeals to authority, and ritual reinforcement aren’t failures of reasoning; they are deliberate mechanisms to safeguard credence, keeping the believer anchored in a worldview that serves the group, not necessarily the facts.
This is why arguments about Jesus’ historicity feel like Groundhog Day. You’re not dealing with beliefs designed to track reality… you’re dealing with identity-protecting narratives designed to resist reality.
In closing:
This isn’t about dunking on individuals. It’s about recognizing what you’re actually interacting with.
Understanding this history gives you clarity:
You’re not debating a modern argument; you’re confronting 1,500 years of institutional thought management.
The frustration you feel isn’t personal— it’s structural.
The “answers” you hear aren’t original. They’re part of a system designed to be immune to evidence.
And most importantly: Apologetics doesn’t function to seek truth. It functions to protect credence.
Which means the biblical Jesus, the “case for Christ,” and the endless spiral of apologetic books aren’t neutral intellectual exercises. They’re artifacts of a culture built on suppressing alternative ideas, discouraging inquiry, and elevating belief above accuracy.
Once you trace the lineage, from temple-burning zealotry and doctrinal power struggles to modern thought-stopping scripts, the pattern is unmistakable. What appears as reasoned debate is often a carefully maintained system of intellectual control. Understanding that history doesn’t just explain the past; it equips you to see how apologetics functions today and why challenging it can feel like swimming upstream.
Ultimately, the story isn’t just about one book, one belief, or one faith. It’s about recognizing the enduring architecture of authority, credence, and control while reclaiming the space for curiosity, evidence, and honest questioning.
Hey hey my friends, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today’s episode is going to be heavier than usual, because I want to process something that has been shaking me to my core over the past week, the brutal death of Charlie Kirk.
Now, I need to start here: I did not agree with Charlie on everything, especially not his theology. You know me, I don’t subscribe to the idea that morality begins and ends with the Abrahamic scriptures. That’s a hard pass. But I also can’t deny the impact Charlie had on me. I spent years watching him debate, learning from the way he sharpened his arguments and stayed composed with people he deeply disagreed with. He’s one of the people who actually inspired me to study the Constitution, socialism, and to pay more attention to what’s happening politically.
So when I heard he was brutally murdered, I cried. It was horrific. And then, when I looked online and saw people celebrating his death? Saying he deserved it because he was a white, conservative, Christian man? That was gutting. Not just emotionally but morally.
In fact, let me show you a comment I received. This person told me she couldn’t believe I was mourning the death of a Trump supporter, that he had ‘spewed so much,’ and then announced she was unfollowing and blocking me.
That’s the climate we’re in. Not just disagreement, but outright dehumanization.
That kind of reaction, the dancing-on-the-grave energy, it’s not just tasteless. It’s a reflection of how far moral tribalism has gone. She is a perfect example of what I saw when I was navigating ex-Christian and ex-evangelical spaces. It is the same trend there: conservatives painted as villains, ridiculed, dismissed, treated as less-than.
Folks in my parasocial networks would send me podcasts or Instagram pages that were just openly disrespectful and overgeneralizing, like mocking anyone who leaned right was simply part of the healing process. And I remember sitting there thinking… how are you even friends with me if you despise people like me so much?
It’s like the hatred is so baked into the zeitgeist, people don’t even notice they’re doing it.
I’ve already done an episode on the radical left and why I left the left in 2020. Back then I saw the extremism ramping up with Black Lives Matter, with pandemic policies, and yes, with those shocking poll results in 2022, where a significant portion of Democrats said they believed unvaccinated people should have their kids taken away or even be put into camps.
That was the moment I realized this wasn’t just about public health. It was about authoritarianism cloaked in moral righteousness.
And I want to tie that moment to this moment. Because what we’re seeing with Charlie Kirk’s death is the exact same kind of moral righteousness, just flipped.
This is where Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind comes in and yall know I bring this book up a lot, but today it’s essential.
Haidt’s big idea is that morality isn’t one single thing. It’s made up of six different foundations, like taste buds of the moral sense. Let me walk you through them:
Care vs. Harm – the instinct to protect others from suffering. Progressives tend to emphasize this one the most.
Fairness vs. Cheating – concern for justice, reciprocity, equal treatment. Again, heavily weighted on the left.
Loyalty vs. Betrayal – valuing group solidarity, patriotism, belonging. This resonates more on the right.
Authority vs. Subversion – respect for tradition, leadership, order. Again, more prominent for conservatives.
Sanctity vs. Degradation – ideas of purity, sacredness, things that must not be defiled. Religion is one form, but health and nature can trigger it too. Conservatives score higher here, but you see progressives activate it around food purity or environmentalism.
Liberty vs. Oppression – the drive to resist domination and protect freedom. This one cuts across both sides but is framed differently, the right fears big government, the left fears corporate or systemic oppression.
Now, how does this help us explain what we’re seeing?
Progressives, whose moral taste buds are dominated by Care and Fairness, look at Charlie Kirk and say, ‘He caused harm to marginalized groups, he propped up unfair systems.’ So when he died, they felt justified in celebrating. Their moral taste buds told them: this is justice.
Conservatives, on the other hand, lean more heavily on Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Charlie embodied loyalty to the nation, respect for conservative traditions, and yes, defense of the sacred. So his death wasn’t just tragic, it was an attack on everything sacred to them. That’s why you’re seeing these martyrdom narratives, even AI videos of Charlie in heaven with other ‘heroes of the faith.’ It’s moral psychology in action.
I’m aware that this is AI of course — but it has moved me, I can only imagine how Charlie is celebrating 🕊️ pic.twitter.com/b9G4lBGVpZ
👉 And this is also the perfect moment to point out the formula behind Psy-Ops. Because these martyrdom narratives aren’t just spontaneous. They follow a pattern of influence:
That’s the formula. You feed people a stimulus, in this case, AI imagery of Charlie Kirk as a martyr. You attach it to a strong feeling: grief, anger, hope. By doing so, conscious awareness is bypassed, people aren’t stopping to analyze, they’re in raw emotion. And then you repeat it over and over. Before long, it’s not just an image, it’s a belief. This is why these videos are so powerful, they’re not just content, they’re psychological conditioning.
In the book FreeYour Mind, which we discussed in our previous podcast episode, Chapter 9 emphasizes the importance of getting ideas in writing—but it also highlights the unique power of images. As the book notes:
“An image tells a thousand words, and seeing is believing. You tend to be more easily persuaded by images than by words, and video is even more persuasive. On the other hand, reading leaves more breathing room for critical thinking.”
Images can define ideas and stick in our minds in ways words alone often cannot. A single powerful metaphor or visual statement can leave a lasting impression. Take Donald Trump’s political career, for example: it wasn’t only shaped by complex and abstract immigration policies, but also by concrete, visual symbols—a border wall, or the image of him standing with his fist raised, signaling defiance after the attempted assassination. Mental images grab our attention and viscerally anchor themselves in our minds. They’re persuasive tools that can move political movements forward.
Psychologists agree. This phenomenon is known as the picture superiority effect: images are far more memorable than words. In one study, participants were shown a mix of 612 images and words for six seconds each. When asked later which they recognized, 98% of the pictures were remembered, compared to just 90% of the words. Another study of news broadcasts found that only 16% of stories were remembered when heard over the radio, versus 34% when watched on television.
The takeaway? Images are not just memorable-they shape perception.
Seeing really is believing.
And here’s Haidt’s main takeaway: morality binds and blinds. Both sides feel righteous, but both sides are blinded. The left is blinded to the humanity of someone they disagreed with, so they cheer for his death. The right is blinded to pluralism and nuance, so they sanctify him and risk sliding into Christian authoritarianism.
And let’s pause here…because this rise in religious fervor is deeply concerning to me. I used to push back when people warned about Christian nationalism. I thought it was overblown. But watching Gen Z churn out martyr videos of Charlie Kirk, watching this wave of revivalist passion roll in, I can’t deny the potential for backlash anymore.
Go along with Jesus or you are a terrorist is basically the narrative these guys are spinning. pic.twitter.com/kRv2XRXnvp
It’s not just reverence – it’s symbolism, its revivalism, its identity politics wrapped in scripture. And that’s where my alarm starts.
Take the Noahide Laws movement. People often describe it as returning to a universal moral code. On its face, sure, that sounds appealing. But when morality is rooted in a particular scripture or identity, it often becomes a tool to say: ‘these norms are non-negotiable, and dissent or spiritual alternatives are forbidden’ That’s when spirituality crosses into political power-building.
Listen to this clip from Ben Shapero on the Daily Wire.
And we’re already seeing it creep into policy.
The administration just passed an executive order on ‘Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.’ Protecting religious freedom is vital, yes. But there’s a difference between protecting believers from discrimination and making laws where Christian sentiment is immune from critique or satire.
The White House posted a video mourning Charlie Kirk concluding with:
In loving memory of Charlie Kirk, a fearless patriot & man of unwavering faith who dedicated his life to America.
"It's bigger than you, I want you to remember that… It's bigger than me – you are here to make somebody else's life better, the pursuit of liberty & freedom."❤️ pic.twitter.com/3Xrf5dcFlP
“1 Corinthians 5 and 15 provide compelling evidence (not only intrabiblical but also extrabiblical) that Jesus Christ was a real historical figure. He lived a perfect life, was crucified, rose on the third day, and is Lord and God.”
If you still don’t see how Christianity and faith in Jesus, a figure who probably never existed—is both holding this country back and enabling Zionism, it’s time to wake up.
We’ve already seen new laws against so-called antisemitism that start to look a lot like blasphemy laws. How long before similar protections are extended to Christian sentiment?
This matters because young people might get swept into this revivalist Christian / Abrahamic framework without realizing it.
It reduces room for spiritual alternatives, for pluralism, for traditions like panpsychism or animism, worldviews that see all of reality as alive, interconnected, and worthy of respect. That feels more universal to me. Less tied to tribal texts, less prone to turning spirituality into a weapon of the state.
History has shown us that religious revivalism mixed with nationalism and state power is a dangerous cocktail. It binds, but it also blinds. And that’s why I can’t jump on board with this new wave of Abrahamic revivalism being fueled by Charlie’s death. My skepticism sharpens right here.
So here’s where I land: I grieve. I grieve for a man who influenced me. I grieve the way his life was taken. But I also grieve the way his death is being used by some to celebrate evil, by others to canonize him into sainthood. Both sides reveal how morality binds and blinds. And if we don’t wake up to that, we’ll keep swinging between authoritarian extremes.
And I want to close with a reminder from Jonathan Haidt himself. He wrote:
“Social scientists have identified at least 3 major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. We are now at the greatest level of political polarization since the 1860s. It’s more necessary than ever to return to these 3 forces in every way we can, individually and as a society.”
That’s where I want us to go. Beyond tribal stories of vengeance or martyrdom, back toward trust, strong institutions, and stories that unite rather than divide.
So, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in.
Further Reading & Sources
The Righteous Mind– Why Good People are Divided on Religion and Politics by Jonathon Haidt
Charlie Kirk’s Death Exposed the Biggest Scam in History This video exposes how suppression, radicalization, and division are weaponized not by ideology, but by systems designed to keep you outraged, divided, and distracted.
Taste0ftruth Tuesdays 