What Women Were Never Told About Weight, Aging, and Control
The Science They Never Told Us
This is the first episode of 2026, and I wanted to start the year by slowing things down, getting a bit personal instead of chasing the latest talking points.
At the end of last year, I spent time reading a few books that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. Not because they offered a new diet or a new protocol, but because they challenged something much deeper: the story we’ve been told about discipline, control, and women’s bodies.
There is a reason women’s bodies change across the lifespan. And it has very little to do with willpower, discipline, or personal failure.
In Why Women Need Fat, evolutionary biologists William Lassek and Steven Gaulin make the case that most modern conversations about women’s weight are fundamentally misinformed. Not because women are doing something wrong, but because we’ve built our expectations on a misunderstanding of what female bodies are actually designed to do.
A major part of their argument focuses on how industrialization radically altered the balance of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids in the modern food supply, particularly through seed oils and ultra-processed foods. They make a compelling case that this shift plays a role in rising obesity and metabolic dysfunction at the population level.
I agree that this imbalance matters, and it’s a topic that deserves its own full episode. At the same time, it does not explain every woman’s story. Diet composition can influence metabolism, but it cannot override prolonged stress, illness, hormonal disruption, nervous system dysregulation, or years of restriction. In my own case, omega-6 intake outside of naturally occurring sources is relatively low and does not account for the changes I’ve experienced. That matters, because it reminds us that biology is layered. No single variable explains a complex adaptive system.
One of the most important ideas in the book is that fat distribution matters more than fat quantity.
Women do not store fat the same way men do. A significant portion of female body fat is stored in the hips and thighs, known as gluteofemoral fat. This fat is metabolically distinct from abdominal or visceral fat. It is more stable, less inflammatory, and relatively enriched in long-chain fatty acids, including DHA, which plays a key role in fetal brain development.
From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense. Human infants are born with unusually large, energy-hungry brains. Women evolved to carry nutritional reserves that could support pregnancy and lactation, even during times of scarcity. In that context, having fat on your lower body was not a flaw or a failure. It was insurance.
From this perspective, fat is not excess energy. It is deferred intelligence, stored in anticipation of future need. This is where waist-to-hip ratio enters the conversation.
Across cultures and historical periods, a lower waist-to-hip ratio in women has been associated with reproductive health, metabolic resilience, and successful pregnancies. This is not about thinness, aesthetics, or moral worth. It is about fat function, not fat fear, and about how different tissues behave metabolically inside the body. It is about where fat is stored and how it functions.
And in today’s modern culture we have lost that distinction.
Instead of asking what kind of fat a woman carries, we became obsessed with how much. Instead of understanding fat as tissue with purpose, we turned it into a moral scoreboard. Hips became a problem. Thighs became something to shrink. Curves became something to discipline.
Another central idea in Why Women Need Fat is biological set point.
The authors argue that women’s bodies tend to defend a natural weight range when adequately nourished and not under chronic stress. When women remain below that range through restriction, over-exercise, or prolonged under-fueling, the body does not interpret that as success. It interprets it as threat.
Over time, the body adapts, not out of defiance, but out of protection.
Metabolism slows. Hunger and fullness cues become unreliable. Hormonal systems compensate. When the pressure finally eases, weight often rebounds, sometimes beyond where it started, because the body is trying to restore safety.
From this perspective, midlife weight gain, post-illness weight gain, or weight gain after years of restriction is not mysterious. It is not rebellion. It is regulation.
None of this is taught to women.
Instead, we are told that if our bodies change, we failed. That aging is optional. That discipline and botox should override biology. That the number on the scale tells the whole story.
So, before we talk about culture, family, trauma, or personal experience, this matters:
Women’s bodies are not designed to stay static. They are designed to adapt.
Once you understand that, everything else in this conversation changes.
Why the Body Became the Battlefield
This is where historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s work in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, provides essential context, but it requires some precision.
Girls have not always been free from shame. Shame itself is not new. What has changed is what women are taught to be ashamed of, and how that shame operates in daily life.
Brumberg asks a question that still feels unresolved today: Why is the body still a girl’s nemesis? Shouldn’t sexually liberated girls feel better about themselves than their corseted counterparts a century ago?
Based on extensive historical research, including diaries written by American girls from the 1830s through the 1990s, Brumberg shows that although girls today enjoy more formal freedoms and opportunities, they are also under more pressure and at greater psychological risk. This is due to a unique convergence of biological vulnerability and cultural forces that turned the adolescent female body into a central site of social meaning during the twentieth century.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, girls did not typically grow up fixated on thinness, calorie control, or constant appearance monitoring. Their diaries were not filled with measurements or food rules. Instead, they wrote primarily about character, self-restraint, moral development, relationships, and their roles within family and community.
One 1892 diary entry reads:
“Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self-restrained in conversation and in actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”
In earlier eras, female shame was more often tied to behavior, sexuality, obedience, and virtue. The body mattered, but primarily as a moral symbol rather than an aesthetic project requiring constant surveillance and correction.
That changed dramatically in the twentieth century.
Brumberg documents how the mother-daughter connection loosened, particularly around menstruation, sexuality, and bodily knowledge. Where female relatives and mentors once guided girls through these transitions, doctors, advertisers, popular media, and scientific authority increasingly stepped in to fill that role.
At the same time, mass media, advertising, film, and medicalized beauty standards created a new and increasingly exacting ideal of physical perfection. Changing norms around intimacy and sexuality also shifted the meaning of virginity, turning it from a central moral value into an outdated or irrelevant one. What replaced it was not freedom from scrutiny, but a different kind of pressure altogether.
By the late twentieth century, girls were increasingly taught that their bodies were not merely something they inhabited, but something they were responsible for perfecting.
A 1982 diary entry captures this shift starkly:
“I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got a new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.”
What changed was not the presence of shame, but its location. Shame moved inward.
Rather than being externally enforced through rules and prohibitions, it became self-policed. Girls were taught to monitor themselves constantly, to evaluate their bodies from the outside, and to treat appearance as the primary expression of identity and worth.
Brumberg is explicit on this point. The fact that American girls now make their bodies their central project is not an accident or a cultural curiosity. It is a symptom of historical changes that are only beginning to be fully understood.
This is where more recent work, such as Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, helps extend Brumberg’s analysis into the present moment. Perry argues that while sexual liberation promised autonomy and empowerment, it often left young women navigating powerful biological and emotional realities without the social structures that once offered protection, guidance, or meaning. In that vacuum, the body became one of the few remaining sites where control still seemed possible.
The result is a paradox. Girls are freer in theory, yet more burdened in practice. The body, once shaped by communal norms and shared female knowledge, becomes a solitary project, managed under intense cultural pressure and constant comparison.
For many girls, this self-surveillance does not begin with magazines or social media. It begins at home, absorbed through tone, comments, and modeling from the women closest to them.
Brumberg argues that body dissatisfaction is often transmitted from mother to daughter, not out of cruelty, but because those mothers inherited the same aesthetic anxieties. Over time, body shame becomes a family inheritance, passed down quietly and persistently.
Some mothers transmit it subtly.
Others do it bluntly.
This matters not because my experience is unique, but because it illustrates what happens when a body shaped by restriction, stress, and cultural pressure is asked to perform indefinitely. Personal stories are often dismissed as anecdotal, but they are where biological theory meets lived reality.
I grew up in a household where my body was not simply noticed. It was scrutinized, compared, and commented on. Comments like that do not fade with time. They shape how you see yourself in mirrors and photographs. They teach you that your body must be managed and monitored. They plant the belief that staying small is the price of safety.
So, I grew up believing that if I could control my body well enough, I could avoid humiliation. I could avoid becoming the punchline. I could avoid being seen in the wrong way.
For a while, I turned that fear into discipline.
The Years Before the Collapse: A Lifetime of Restriction and Survival
Food never felt simple for me. Long before bodybuilding, chronic pain, or COVID, I carried a strained relationship with eating. Growing up in a near constant state of anxiety meant that hunger cues often felt unpredictable. Eating was something to plan around or push through. It rarely felt intuitive or easy.
Because of this, I experimented with diets that replaced real meals with cereal or shakes. I followed plans like the Special K diet. I relied on Carnation Instant Breakfast instead of full meals. My protein intake was low. My fear of gaining weight was high. Restriction became familiar.
Top left is when I started working out obsessively at age 16, top right and bottom photo are from middle school when I was at my “heaviest” that drove the disordered behaviors.
In college, I became a strict vegetarian out of compassion for animals, but I did not understand how to meet my nutritional needs. I was studying dietetics and earning personal training certifications while running frequently and using exercise as a way to maintain control. From the outside, I looked disciplined. Internally, my relationship with food and exercise remained tense and inconsistent.
Later, I became involved in a meal-replacement program through an MLM. I replaced two meals a day with shakes and practiced intermittent fasting framed as “cleanse days.” In hindsight, this was structured under-eating presented as wellness. It fit seamlessly into patterns I had lived in for years.
Eating often felt overwhelming. Cooking felt like a hurdle. Certain textures bothered me. My appetite felt fragile and unreliable. This sensory sensitivity existed long before the parosmia that would come years later. From early on, food was shaped by stress rather than nourishment.
During this entire period, I was also on hormonal birth control, first the NuvaRing and later the Mirena IUD, for nearly a decade. Long-term hormonal modulation can influence mood, inflammation, appetite, and weight distribution. It added another layer of complexity to a system already under strain.
Looking back, I can see that my teens and twenties were marked by near constant restriction. Restriction felt normal. Thriving did not.
The book Why Women Need Fat discusses the idea of a biological weight “set point,” the range a body tends to return to when conditions are stable and adequately nourished. I now understand that I remained below my natural set point for years through force rather than balance. My biology never experienced consistency or safety.
This was the landscape I carried into my thirties.
The Body I Built and the Body That Broke
By the time I entered the bodybuilding world in 2017 and 2018, I already had years of chronic under-eating, over-exercising, and nutrient gaps behind me. Bodybuilding did not create my issues. It amplified them.
I competed in four shows. People admired the discipline and the physique. Internally, my body was weakening. I was overtraining and undereating. By 2019, my immune system began to fail. I developed severe canker sores, sometimes twenty or more at once. I started noticing weight-loss resistance. Everything I had done in the past, was no longer working. On my thirty-fifth birthday, I got shingles. My energy crashed. My emotional bandwidth narrowed. My body was asking for rest, but I did not know how to slow down.
Around this time, I was also navigating eating disorder recovery. Learning how to eat without panic or rigid control was emotionally exhausting even under ideal circumstances… but little did I know things were about to take a massive turn for the worst.
COVID, Sensory Loss, and the Unraveling of Appetite
After getting sick with the ‘vid late 2020, everything shifted again. I developed parosmia, a smell and taste distortion that made many foods taste rotten or chemical. Protein and cooked foods often tasted spoiled. Herbs smelled like artificial chemical. Eating became distressing and, at times, impossible.
My appetite dropped significantly. There were periods where my intake was very low, yet my weight continued to rise. This is not uncommon following illness or prolonged stress. The body often shifts into energy conservation, prioritizing survival overweight regulation.
Weight gain became another source of grief. Roughly thirty pounds over the next five years. I feel embarrassed and avoid photographs. I often worry about how others will perceive me.
If this experience resonates, it is important to say this clearly: your body is not betraying you. It is responding to stress, illness, and prolonged strain in the way bodies are designed to respond.
When years of restriction, intense exercise, chronic stress, illness, hormonal shifts, and emotional trauma accumulate, the body often enters a protective state. Metabolism slows. Hormonal signaling shifts. Hunger cues become unreliable. Weight gain or resistance to weight loss can occur even during periods of low intake, because energy regulation is being driven by survival physiology rather than simple calorie balance.
This is not failure. It is physiology.
The calories-in, calories-out model does not account for thyroid suppression, nervous system activation, sleep disruption, pain, trauma, or metabolic adaptation. It reduces a complex biological system to arithmetic.
Women are not machines. We are adaptive systems built for survival. Sometimes resilience looks like holding onto energy when the body does not feel safe.
Despite this biological reality, we live in a culture that ties women’s value to discipline and appearance. When women gain weight, even under extreme circumstances, we blame ourselves before questioning the system.
Diet culture frames shrinking as virtue.
Toxic positivity encourages acceptance without context.
Industrial food environments differ radically from those our ancestors evolved in.
Medical systems often dismiss women’s pain and metabolic complexity.
Social media amplifies comparison and moralizes body size.
None of this is your fault. And all of it shapes your experience.
This is why understanding the science matters. This is why telling the truth matters. This is why sharing stories matters.
In the book, More Than a Body, Lindsay and Lexie Kite describe how women are taught to relate to themselves through constant self-monitoring. Instead of living inside our bodies, we learn to watch ourselves from the outside. We assess how we look, how we are perceived, and whether our bodies are acceptable in a given moment.
This constant self-surveillance does real harm. It pulls attention away from hunger, pain, fatigue, and intuition. It trains women to override bodily signals in favor of appearance management. And over time, it creates a split where the body is treated as a project to control rather than a system to understand or care for.
When you layer this kind of self-objectification on top of chronic stress, restriction, illness, and trauma, the result is not empowerment. It is disconnection. And disconnection makes it even harder to hear what the body needs when something is wrong.
Weight gain is not just a biological response. It becomes a moral verdict. And that is how women end up fighting bodies that are already struggling to keep them alive.
The Inheritance Ends Here
For a long time, I believed that breaking generational cycles only applied to mothers and daughters. I do not have children, so I assumed what I inherited would simply end with me, unchanged.
Brumberg’s work helped me see this differently.
What we inherit is not passed down only through parenting. It moves through tone, silence, and self-talk. It appears in how women speak about their bodies in front of others. It lives in the way shame is normalized.
I inherited a legacy of body shame. Even on the days when I still feel its weight, I am choosing not to repeat it.
For me, the inheritance ends with telling the truth about this journey and refusing to speak to my body with the same cruelty I absorbed growing up. It ends here.
Closing the Circle: Your Body Is Not Broken
I wish I could end this with a simple story of resolution. I cannot. I am still in the middle of this. I still grieve. I still struggle with eating and movement. I am still learning how to inhabit a body that feels unfamiliar.
But I know this: my body is not my enemy. She is not malfunctioning. She is adapting to a lifetime of stress, illness, restriction, and emotional weight.
If you are in a similar place, I hope this offers permission to stop fighting yourself and start understanding the patterns your body is following. Not because everything will suddenly improve, but because clarity is often the first form of compassion.
Your body is not betraying you. She is trying to keep you here.
And sometimes the most honest thing we can do is admit that we are still finding our way.
References
Brumberg, J. J. (1997). The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls. Random House.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2011). Why Women Need Fat: How “Healthy” Food Makes Us Gain Excess Weight and the Surprising Solution to Losing It Forever. Hudson Street Press.
Kite, L., & Kite, L. (2020). More Than a Body: Your Body Is an Instrument, Not an Ornament. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Scientific and academic sources
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2006). Changes in body fat distribution in relation to parity in American women. Evolution and Human Behavior, 27(3), 173–185.
Lassek, W. D., & Gaulin, S. J. C. (2008). Waist–hip ratio and cognitive ability. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 275(1644), 193–199.
Dulloo, A. G., Jacquet, J., & Montani, J. P. (2015). Adaptive thermogenesis in human body-weight regulation. Obesity Reviews, 16(S1), 33–43.
Fothergill, E., et al. (2016). Persistent metabolic adaptation after weight loss. Obesity, 24(8), 1612–1619.
Kyle, U. G., et al. (2004). Body composition interpretation. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 79(6), 955–962.
Simopoulos, A. P. (2016). Omega-6/omega-3 balance and obesity risk. Nutrients, 8(3), 128.
Trauma, stress, and nervous system context
Sapolsky, R. M. (2004). Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Henry Holt and Company.
Walker, P. (2013). Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving. Azure Coyote Books.
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.
How Suppression Shapes Our Bodies, Minds, and the World We Live In
Hey hey, Welcome back! Today’s episode connects beautifully to something many of you resonated with in my earlier show, Science or Stagnation? The Risk of Unquestioned Paradigms. In that episode, we talked about scientism… not science itself, but the dogma that forms around certain scientific ideas.
That’s why voices like Rupert Sheldrake have always fascinated me. Sheldrake, for those unfamiliar, isn’t a fringe crank. He’s a Cambridge-trained biologist who dared to question what he calls the “ten dogmas of modern science”: that nature is mechanical, that the mind is only the brain, that the laws of nature are fixed, that free will is an illusion, and so on.
When he presented these questions in a TED Talk, it struck such a nerve that the talk was quietly taken down. And that raised an obvious question: If the ideas are so wrong… why not let them stand and fall on their own? Why censor them unless they hit something tender? All of this sets the stage for today’s conversation.
Because the theory we’re exploring, Social Miasm Theory, fits right inside that tension between mainstream assumptions and the alternative frameworks we often dismiss too quickly.
My friend Stephinity Salazar just published a fascinating piece of research arguing that suppression (of toxins, trauma, emotion, and truth) is the root pattern underlying both chronic illness and our wider social dysfunction. It’s a theory that steps outside the materialist worldview and challenges the mechanistic lens we’ve all been taught to see through.
Dr. Stephinity Salazar
Hoop Camp Retreat
Yarmony Grass 2008
You don’t have to agree with everything…that’s not the goal here.
What I love is the chance to explore, to ask good questions, and to stay grounded while examining ideas that stretch our understanding.
This blog is your guide to the episode, so you can track the concepts, explore the references, and dive deeper while you listen.
So, with that, let’s dive into Social Miasm Theory: what it is, where it comes from, why it matters, and what it might reveal about the world we’re living in today.
What Are Miasms, Anyway?
To anchor our conversation, Stephinity starts by grounding the concept of “miasms” in its homeopathic roots. Historically, Samuel Hahnemann (founder of homeopathy) described three primary miasms:
Psora, linked to scabies or skin conditions
Syphilis, associated with destructive disease
Sycosis, with overgrowth and tissue proliferation
Since then, the theory has expanded. Many modern homeopaths now talk about five chronic miasms, adding:
Tubercular (linked to tuberculosis, respiratory issues) Homeopathy 360
Psychological suppression: denial, cognitive dissonance, fear-driven attachment to ideology
Truth suppression: propaganda, censorship, disinformation, scientific dogma
When these forms of suppression accumulate, she argues, they create a “social miasm”: a pathological field that shapes everything from public health to political polarization.
Even if you don’t buy every mechanism she proposes, the metaphor works. And the patterns are hard to ignore.
Evidence, Epistemology, and Skeptics: What Counts as “Real”?
This is the part my skeptical listeners will perk up for.
In the interview, I asked her the question I knew many of you were thinking: “How do you define evidence within this framework? What would you want skeptical listeners to understand before judging it?”
Stephinity argues that the modern scientific lens is too narrow. Not wrong—but incomplete. She sees value in:
case studies
pattern recognition
field effects
resonance models
historical cycles
experiential knowledge
Whether or not you agree, her challenge to mechanistic materialism echoes thinkers like Rupert Sheldrake, IONS researchers, and even physicists questioning entropic cosmology.
And she’s not claiming this replaces science. She’s asking what science misses when it refuses to look beyond the physical.
Suppression: What It Looks Like in Real Life
Stephinity’s paper covers how suppression shows up on multiple levels. Here are a few examples she explores:
Overuse of symptom-suppressive medications
Emotional avoidance that pushes trauma deeper
Social pressure to conform
Institutional censorship
Environmental toxins that overwhelm the microbiome
Radiation and electromagnetic exposures
She frames suppression as a terrain problem: when the body or society becomes too acidic, stressed, toxic, or disconnected, the miasm takes root.
This is where we start to cross into the biological, psychological, and social layers—which brings us to one of my favorite parts of her theory.
Neuroparasitology: When Parasites Change Behavior
The concept of a new branch of science of neuroparasitology. Study of the influence of parasites on the activity of the brain.
This is the section I teased in the podcast because it’s both wild and backed by real research.
Stephinity references studies showing that parasites can alter host behavior not just in insects or rodents, but potentially in humans too. Her paper cites examples like helminths, nematodes, mycotoxins, and other microorganisms (McAuliffe, 2016; Colaiacovo, 2021). These organisms are everywhere, not just in “developing countries” (Yu, 2010).
Researchers have documented parasites that:
influence mood
shift risk-taking
modify sexual attraction
impair impulse control
change social patterns
This is what Dawkins called the extended phenotype (1982): the parasite’s genes expressing themselves through the host’s behavior. Neuroparasitologists Hughes & Libersat (2019) and Johnson (2020) have shown how certain infections can shift personality traits in specific, predictable ways.
Stephinity ties this into terrain: parasites tend to thrive in acidic, low-oxygen, stressed, radiative environments (Clark, 1995; Tennant, 2013; Cerecedes, 2015). In her view, chronic suppression creates exactly that kind of internal ecosystem.
But there’s another layer here. One that isn’t biological at all.
This is where philosopher Daniel Dennett enters the chat.
In Breaking the Spell, Dennett describes “parasites of the mind”: ideas that spread not because they’re true, but because they’re incredibly good at hijacking human psychology. These mental parasites latch onto our cognitive wiring the same way biological one’s latch onto the nervous system. They survive by exploiting:
fear
moral impulses
tribal loyalty
the desire for certainty
social pressure
existential insecurity
According to Dennett, religious dogmas, conspiracy theories, and ideological extremes act like memetic parasites: they replicate by using us, encouraging us to host them and then pass them on.
In other words: not all parasites live in the gut. Some live in the mind.
And…..we even discussed how billionaire Les Wexner once publicly described having a “dybbuk spirit” a kind of parasitic entity in Jewish folklore known for influencing personality. Whether symbolic or literal, the analogy fits. 🫨😮
Her point is simple: When the terrain is weak, something else will fill the space.
Whether that “something” is trauma, ideology, toxicity, or a literal parasite… the mechanism rhymes.
Collective Delusion and Mass Psychosis
Drawing on Jung and Dostoevsky, Stephinity explores the idea that societies can enter “psychic epidemics.”
You’ve seen this. We all have…
The last decade has been a masterclass in how fear, propaganda, and emotional suppression create predictable patterns:
polarization
tribal thinking
moral panics
ideological possession
scapegoating
censorship
intolerance of nuance
She argues these are symptoms of a cultural miasm—not failures of individual character.
Whether you lean left, right, or somewhere out in the wilderness, you’ve likely felt this rising tension. And it’s hard not to see how unresolved collective trauma feeds it.
COVID as a Catalyst: What the Pandemic Revealed
Another part of her paper dives into how the pandemic brought hidden patterns to the surface.
Some of her claims are controversial, especially around EMFs and environmental co-factors. In the episode, we unpack these with curiosity, not blind acceptance.
Her larger point is that COVID exposed:
institutional fragility
scientific gatekeeping
public distrust
trauma-based responses
authoritarian overreach
the psychological toll of suppression
Whether you agree with the specific mechanisms or not, the last decade made one thing undeniable: something in our social terrain is deeply dysregulated.
8. Healing Forward: What Do We Do With All This?
If suppression drives miasms, then healing means unsuppressing. Gently, not chaotically.
Stephinity suggests practices like:
emotional honesty
reconnecting with nature
releasing stored trauma
nutritional and detoxification support
reducing exposure to chronic stressors
restoring community and meaning
opening space for spiritual or intuitive insight
She’s not prescribing a protocol. She’s offering a map.
The destination is what the Greeks called sophrosyne: a state of balance between wisdom and sanity. Not blissful ignorance, not paranoid awakening. Just grounded clarity.
And I think we could all use a bit more of that.
Key Evidence and Arguments
Stephinity critiques materialist science, calling out what she terms “entropic cosmology.” She argues that by assuming nature is strictly mechanistic, mainstream science misses field-based phenomena, non-local consciousness, and deeper systemic patterns.
She draws on historical and homeopathic sources (Hahnemann, Kent) to build her theoretical foundation but also argues for newer forms of evidence: resonance, case studies, and pattern detection in social systems.
On the environmental front, she explores links between toxins, EMF / 5G, biotech, and chronic disease, not just as correlation, but as evidence of suppression dynamics.
Psychologically, she invokes mass delusion or collective repression (drawing from Jung, Dostoevsky) seeing societal crises as expressions of buried collective shadow.
Ultimately, her call to action isn’t just for individual healing, but for systemic awakening: more transparency, alternative medical paradigms, and restored connection with nature.
Why This Matters for You
Even if homeopathy isn’t your jam, Social Miasm Theory offers a metaphor (and potentially a map) for understanding how inner repression becomes external crisis. If this episode does anything, I hope it gives you permission to look a little closer and question the stuff we’re told not to touch.
Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All
Today’s episode is one I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I sat down with author and researcher David Fitzgerald, whose book Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All has stirred up both fascination and controversy in both historical and secular circles.
Before anyone clutches their pearls — or their study Bible — this conversation isn’t about bashing belief. It’s about asking how we know what we think we know, and whether our historical standards shift when faith enters the equation.
Fitzgerald has spent over fifteen years investigating the evidence — or lack of it — surrounding the historical Jesus. In this first part of our series, we cover Myth #1 (“The idea that Jesus being a myth is ridiculous”) and Myth #4 (“The Gospels were written by eyewitnesses”). We also start brushing up against Myth #5, which explores how the Gospels don’t even describe the same Jesus.
We didn’t make it to Myth #7 yet — the claim that archaeology confirms the Gospels…. so, stay tuned for Part Two.
And for my visual learners!! I’ve got you. Scroll below for infographics, side-by-side Gospel comparisons, biblical quotes, and primary source references that make this episode come alive.
🧩 The 10 Myths About Jesus — According to Nailed
Myth #1:“The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous!” → Fitzgerald argues that the assumption of Jesus’ historicity persists more from cultural tradition than actual historical evidence, and that questioning it isn’t fringe. It’s legitimate historical inquiry.
Myth #2:“Jesus was wildly famous — but somehow no one noticed.” → Despite claims that Jesus’ miracles and teachings drew massive crowds, there’s an eerie silence about him in the records of contemporaneous historians and chroniclers who documented far lesser figures.
Myth #3:“Ancient historian Josephus wrote about Jesus.” → The so-called “Testimonium Flavianum” passages in Josephus’ work are widely considered later Christian insertions, not authentic first-century testimony.
Myth #4:“Eyewitnesses wrote the Gospels.” → The Gospels were written decades after the events they describe by unknown authors relying on oral traditions and earlier written sources, not firsthand experience.
Myth #5:“The Gospels give a consistent picture of Jesus.” → Each Gospel portrays a strikingly different version of Jesus — from Mark’s suffering human to John’s divine Logos — revealing theological agendas more than biographical consistency.
Myth #6:“History confirms the Gospels.” → When examined critically, historical records outside the Bible don’t corroborate the key events of Jesus’ life, death, or resurrection narrative.
Myth #7:“Archaeology confirms the Gospels.” → Archaeological evidence supports the general backdrop of Roman-era Judea but fails to verify specific Gospel claims or the existence of Jesus himself.
Myth #8:“Paul and the Epistles corroborate the Gospels.” → Paul’s letters — the earliest Christian writings — reveal no awareness of a recent historical Jesus, focusing instead on a celestial Christ figure revealed through visions and scripture.
Myth #9:“Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles.” → Fitzgerald argues that Christianity evolved from earlier Jewish sects and mystery religions, with “Jesus” emerging as a mythologized figure around whom older beliefs coalesced.
Myth #10:“Christianity was totally new and different.” → The moral teachings, rituals, and savior motifs of early Christianity closely mirror surrounding pagan traditions and Greco-Roman mystery cults.
📘 Myth #1: “The Idea That Jesus Being a Myth Is Ridiculous”
This one sets the tone for the entire book — because it’s not even about evidence at first. It’s about social pressure.
Fitzgerald opens Nailed by calling out how the mythicist position (the idea that Jesus might never have existed) gets dismissed out of hand…even by secular historians. As he points out, the problem isn’t that the evidence disproves mythicism. The problem is that we don’t apply the same historical standards we would to anyone else.
Case in point: Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon at the head of his army, 49 BC. Illustration from Istoria Romana incisa all’acqua forte da Bartolomeo Pinelli Romano (Presso Giovanni Scudellari, Rome, 1818-1819).
When historians reconstruct that event, we have:
Multiple contemporary accounts from major Roman historians like Suetonius, Plutarch, Appian, and Cassius Dio.
Physical evidence — coins, inscriptions, and monuments produced during or shortly after Caesar’s lifetime.
Political and military documentation aligning with the timeline.
In contrast, for Jesus, we have:
No contemporary accounts.
No archaeological or physical evidence.
Gospels written decades later by anonymous authors who never met him.
That’s the difference between history and theology.
Even historian Bart Ehrman, who does believe Jesus existed, has called mythicists “the flat-earthers of the academic world.” Fitzgerald addresses that in the interview (not defensively, but critically) asking why questioning this one historical figure provokes so much emotional resistance.
As he puts it, if the same level of evidence existed for anyone else, no one would take it seriously.
✍️ Myth #4: “The Gospels Were Written by Eyewitnesses”
We dive into the authorship problem — who actually wrote the Gospels, when, and why it matters.
🔀 Myth #5: “The Gospels Don’t Describe the Same Jesus”
⚖️ Contradictions Between the Gospels
1. Birthplace of Jesus — Bethlehem or Nazareth?
Matthew 2:1 – “Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king.” Luke 2:4–7 – Joseph travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem for the census, and Jesus is born there. John 7:41–42, 52 – Locals say, “The Messiah does not come from Galilee, does he?” implying Jesus was known as a Galilean, not from Bethlehem.
🔍 Mythicist take: Bethlehem was retrofitted into the story to fulfill the Messianic prophecy from Micah 5:2. In early Christian storytelling, theological necessity (“he must be born in David’s city”) trumps biographical accuracy.
2. Jesus’ Genealogy — Two Lineages, Zero Agreement
Matthew 1:1–16 – Jesus descends from David through Solomon. Luke 3:23–38 – Jesus descends from David through Nathan. Even Joseph’s father differs: Jacob (Matthew) vs. Heli (Luke).
🔍 Mythicist take: Two contradictory genealogies suggest not historical memory but theological marketing. Each author tailors Jesus’ lineage to fit symbolic patterns — Matthew emphasizes kingship; Luke, universality.
3. The Timing of the Crucifixion — Passover Meal or Preparation Day?
Mark 14:12–17 – Jesus eats the Passover meal with his disciples before his arrest. John 19:14 – Jesus is crucified on the day of Preparation — before Passover begins — at the same time lambs are being slaughtered in the Temple.
🔍 Mythicist take: This isn’t a detail slip; it’s theology. John deliberately aligns Jesus with the Paschal lamb, turning him into the cosmic sacrifice — a theological metaphor, not an eyewitness timeline.
4. Jesus’ Last Words — Four Versions, Four Theologies
Mark 15:34 – “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” → human anguish. Luke 23:46 – “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” → serene trust. John 19:30 – “It is finished.” → divine completion. Matthew 27:46 – Echoes Mark’s despair, but adds cosmic drama (earthquake, torn veil).
🔍 Mythicist take: Each Gospel shapes Jesus’ death to reflect its theology — Mark’s suffering human, Luke’s faithful martyr, John’s omniscient divine being. This isn’t eyewitness diversity; it’s evolving mythmaking.
5. Who Found the Empty Tomb — and What Did They See?
Mark 16:1–8 – Three women find the tomb open, see a young man in white, flee in fear, tell no one. Matthew 28:1–10 – Two women see an angel descend, roll back the stone, and tell them to share the news. Luke 24:1–10 – Several women find the stone already rolled away; two men in dazzling clothes appear. John 20:1–18 – Mary Magdalene alone finds the tomb, then runs to get Peter; later she meets Jesus himself.
🔍 Mythicist take: If this were a consistent historical event, we’d expect some harmony. Instead, we see mythic escalation: from a mysterious empty tomb (Mark) → to heavenly intervention (Matthew) → to divine encounter (John).
6. The Post-Resurrection Appearances — Where and to Whom?
Matthew 28:16–20 – Jesus appears in Galilee to the eleven. Luke 24:33–51 – Jesus appears in Jerusalem and tells them to stay there. Acts 1:4–9 – Same author as Luke, now extends appearances over forty days. Mark 16 (longer ending) – A later addition summarizing appearances found in the other Gospels.
🔍 Mythicist take: The resurrection narrative grows with time — geographically, dramatically, and theologically. Early silence (Mark) gives way to detailed appearances (Luke/John), mirroring the development of early Christian belief rather than eyewitness memory.
🌿 Final Thought
Whether you end up agreeing with Fitzgerald or not, the point isn’t certainty… it’s curiosity. The willingness to look at history without fear, even when it challenges what we’ve always been told.
And here’s the fun part! David actually wants to hear from you. If you’ve got questions, pushback, or something you want him to unpack next time, drop it in the comments or send it my way. I’ll collect your submissions and bring a few of them into Part Two when we dig into Myth #7 — “Archaeology Confirms the Gospels.”
and as always, maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️
📖 Further Reading 📖
Foundational Mythicist Works:
Richard Carrier – On the Historicity of Jesus
Robert M. Price – The Christ-Myth Theory and Judaizing Jesus
The Bible Isn’t History and Trump Isn’t Your Savior
It’s Been a Minute… Let’s Get Real
Hey Hey, welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays! it’s been over a month since my last episode, and wow—a lot has happened. Honestly, I’ve been doing some serious soul-searching and education, especially around some political events that shook me up.
I was firmly against Trump’s strikes on Iran. And the more I dug in, the more I realized how blind I’d been completely uneducated and ignorant about the massive political power Zionism holds in this country. And it’s clear now: Trump is practically bent over the Oval Office for Netanyahu. The Epstein files cover-up only confirms that blackmail and shadow control are the real puppet strings pulling at the highest levels of power. Our nation has been quietly occupied since Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency and that’s a whole other episode I’ll get into later.
Once I saw that, the religious right’s worship of him stopped looking like misguided patriotism and started looking like mass delusion. Or complicity. Either way, I couldn’t unsee it.
And that’s when I started asking the bigger questions: What else have we mistaken for holy? What else have we accepted as truth without scrutiny?
For now, I want to cut to the heart of the matter: the major problem at the root of so much chaos: the fact that millions of Christians still believe the Bible is a literal historical document.
This belief doesn’t just distort faith-it fuels political agendas, end-times obsession, and yes, even foreign policy disasters. So, let’s dig into where this all began, how it’s evolved, and why it’s time we rethink everything we thought we knew about Scripture.
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For most Christians, the Bible is more than a book-it’s the blueprint of reality, the inspired Word of God, infallible and untouchable. But what if that belief wasn’t original to Christianity? What if it was a reaction…. a strategic response to modern doubt, historical criticism, and the crumbling authority of the Church?
In this episode, we’re pulling back the veil on the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, the rise of dispensationalism, and the strange marriage of American politics and prophetic obsession. From the Scofield Bible to the belief that modern-day Israel is a fulfillment of God’s plan, we’re asking hard questions about the origins of these ideas.
As Dr. Mark Gregory Karris said when he joined us on a previous episode: “Can you imagine two different families? One, the Bible is the absolute inerrant word of God every.Word, every jot and title, so to speak, is meant to be in there due to the inspiration of God. And so every story you read, you know, God killing Egyptian babies and God flooding the entire planet and thinking, well yeah, there’s gonna be babies gasping for air and drowning grandmothers and all these animals. And that is seen as absolute objective truth. But then in another family, oh, these are, these are myths. These are sacred myths that people can learn from. No, that wasn’t like God speaking and smiting them and burning them alive because they touch this particular arc or now that this is how they thought given their minds at the time, given their understandings of and then like you talked about oh look at that aspect of humanity interesting that they portrayed god and not like it becomes like wow that’s cool instead of like oh my gosh i need 3-4 years of therapy because I was taught the bible in a particular way.”
Once you trace these doctrines back to their roots, it’s not divine revelation you find: it’s human agendas.
Let’s get uncomfortable. Was your faith formed by sacred truth… or centuries of strategic storytelling?
How Literalism Took Over
In the 19th century, biblical literalism became a kind of ideological panic room. As science, archaeology, and critical scholarship began to chip away at traditional interpretations, conservative Christians doubled down. Instead of exploring the Bible as a complex, layered anthology full of metaphor, moral instruction, and mythology, they started treating it like a divine press release. Every word had to be accurate. Every timeline had to match. Every contradiction had to be “harmonized” away.
The Myth of Inerrancy
One of the most destructive byproducts of this era was the invention of biblical inerrancy. Yes, invention. The idea that the Bible is “without error in all that it affirms” isn’t ancient…. it’s theological propaganda, most notably pushed by B.B. Warfield and his peers at Princeton. Rogers and McKim wrote extensively about how this doctrine was manufactured and not handed down from the apostles as many assume. We dive deeper into all that—here.
Inerrancy teaches that the Bible is flawless, even in its historical, scientific, and moral claims. But this belief falls apart under even basic scrutiny. Manuscripts don’t agree. Archaeological timelines conflict with biblical ones. The Gospels contradict each other. And yet this doctrine persists, warping believers’ understanding and demanding blind loyalty to texts written by fallible people in vastly different cultures.
That’s the danger of biblical inerrancy: it treats every verse as historical journalism rather than layered myth, metaphor, or moral instruction. But what happens when you apply that literalist lens to ancient origin stories?
📖 “Read as mythology, the various stories of the great deluge have considerable cultural value, but taken as history, they are asinine and absurd.” — John G. Jackson, Christianity Before Christ
And yet, this is the foundation of belief for millions who think Noah’s Ark was a literal boat and not a borrowed flood myth passed down and reshaped across Mesopotamian cultures. This flattening of myth into fact doesn’t just ruin the poetry-it fuels bad politics, end-times obsession, and yes… Zionism.
And just to be clear, early Christians didn’t read the Bible this way. That kind of rigid literalism didn’t emerge until centuries later…long after the apostles were gone. We’ll get to that.
When we cling to inerrancy, we’re not preserving truth. We’re missing it entirely.
Enter: Premillennial Dispensationalism
If biblical inerrancy was the fuel, C.I. Scofield’s 1909 annotated Bible was the match. His work made premillennial dispensationalism a household belief in evangelical churches. For those unfamiliar with the term, here’s a quick breakdown:
Premillennialism: Jesus will return before a literal thousand-year reign of peace.
Dispensationalism: History is divided into distinct eras (or “dispensations”) in which God interacts with humanity differently.
When merged, this theology suggests we’re living in the “Church Age,” which will end with the rapture. Then comes a seven-year tribulation, the rise of the Antichrist, and finally, Jesus returns for the ultimate battle after which He’ll rule Earth for a millennium. Sounds like the plot of a dystopian film, right? And yet, this became the dominant lens through which American evangelicals interpret reality.
The result? A strange alliance between American evangelicals and Zionist nationalism. You get politicians quoting Revelation like it’s foreign policy, pastors fundraising for military aid, and millions of Christians cheering on war in the Middle East because they think it’ll speed up Jesus’ return.
But here’s what I want you to take away from this episode today: none of this works unless you believe the Bible is literal, infallible, and historically airtight.
How This Shaped Evangelical Culture and Politics
The Scofield Bible didn’t just change theology. It changed culture. Dispensationalist doctrine seeped into seminaries like Dallas Theological Seminary and Moody Bible Institute, influencing generations of pastors. It also exploded into popular culture through Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series. Fiction, prophecy, and fear blurred into one big spiritual panic attack.
But perhaps the most alarming shift came in the political realm. Dispensationalist belief heavily influences evangelical support for the modern state of Israel. Why? Because many believe Israel’s 1948 founding was a prophetic event. Figures like Jerry Falwell turned theology into foreign policy. His organization, the Moral Majority, was built on an unwavering belief that supporting Israel was part of God’s plan. Falwell didn’t just preach this, he traveled to Israel, funded by its government, and made pro-Israel advocacy a cornerstone of evangelical identity.
This alignment between theology and geopolitics hasn’t faded. In the 2024 election cycle, evangelical leaders ranked support for Israel on par with anti-abortion stances. Ralph Reed, founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, explicitly said as much. Donald Trump even quipped that “Christians love Israel more than Jews.” Whether that’s true or not, it reveals just how deep this belief system runs.
And the propaganda doesn’t stop there…currently Israel’s Foreign Ministry is funding a week-long visit for 16 prominent young influencers aligned with Donald Trump’s MAGA and America First movements, part of an ambitious campaign to reshape Israel’s image among American youth.
But Let’s Talk About the Red Flags
This isn’t just about belief-it’s about control. Dispensationalist theology offers a simple, cosmic narrative: you’re on God’s winning team, the world is evil, and the end is near. There’s no room for nuance, no time for doubt. Just stay loyal, and you’ll be saved.
This thinking pattern isn’t exclusive to Christianity. You’ll find it in MLMs, and some conspiracy theory communities. The recipe is the same: create an in-group with secret knowledge, dangle promises of salvation or success, and paint outsiders as corrupt or deceived. It’s classic manipulation-emotional coercion wrapped in spiritual language.
And let’s not forget the date-setting obsession. Hal Lindsey made a career out of it. People still point to blood moons, earthquakes, and global politics as “proof” that prophecy is unfolding. If you’ve ever been trapped in that mindset, you know how addictive and anxiety-inducing it can be.
BY THE WAY, it’s not just dispensationalism or the Scofield Bible that fuels modern Zionism. The deeper issue is, if you believe the Bible is historically accurate and divinely orchestrated, you’re still feeding the ideological engine of Zionism. Because at its core, Christianity reveres Jewish texts, upholds Jewish chosenness, and worships a Jewish messiah. That’s not neutrality it’s alignment.
If this idea intrigued you, you’re not alone. There’s a growing body of work unpacking how Christianity’s very framework serves Jewish supremacy, whether intentionally or not. For deeper dives, check out Adam Green’s work over at Know More News on Rumble, and consider reading The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years. You don’t have to agree with everything to realize: the story you were handed might not be sacred it might be strategic.
Why This Matters for Deconstruction
For me, one of the most painful parts of deconstruction was realizing I’d been sold a false bill of goods. I was told the Bible was the infallible word of God. That it held all the answers. That doubt was dangerous. But when I began asking real questions, the entire system started to crack.
The doctrine of inerrancy didn’t deepen my faith… it limited it. It kept me from exploring the Bible’s human elements: its contradictions, its cultural baggage, and its genuine beauty. The truth is that these texts were written by people trying to make sense of their world and their experiences with the divine. They are not divine themselves.
Modern Scholarship Breaks the Spell
Modern biblical scholarship has long since moved away from the idea of inerrancy. When you put aside faith-based apologetics and look honestly at the evidence, the traditional claims unravel quickly:
Moses didn’t write the Torah. Instead, the Pentateuch was compiled over centuries by multiple authors, each with their own theological agendas (see the JEDP theory).
King David is likely a mythic figure. Outside of the Bible, there’s no solid evidence he actually existed, much less ruled a vast kingdom.
The Gospels weren’t written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Those names were added later. The original texts are anonymous and they often contradict each other.
John didn’t write Revelation. Not the Apostle John, anyway. The Greek and style are completely different from the Gospel of John. The real author was probably some unknown apocalyptic mystic on Patmos, writing during Roman persecution.
And yet millions still cling to these stories as literal fact, building entire belief systems and foreign policies on myths and fairy tales.
🧠 Intellectual Starvation in Evangelicalism
Here’s the deeper scandal: it’s not just that foundational Christian stories crumble under modern scrutiny. It’s that the church never really wanted you to think critically in the first place.
Mark Noll, a respected evangelical historian, didn’t mince words when he wrote:
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”
In The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Noll traces how American evangelicalism lost its intellectual life. It wasn’t shaped by a pursuit of truth, but by populist revivalism, emotionalism, and a hyper-literal obsession with “the end times.” The same movements that embraced dispensationalism and biblical inerrancy also gutted their communities of academic rigor, curiosity, and serious theological reflection.
The result? A spiritually frantic but intellectually hollow faith—one that discourages questions, mistrusts scholarship, and fears nuance like it’s heresy.
Noll shows that instead of grappling with ambiguity or cultural complexity, evangelicals often default to reactionary postures. This isn’t just a relic of the past. It’s why so many modern Christians cling to false authorship claims, deny historical context, and accept prophecy as geopolitical fact. It’s why Revelation gets quoted to justify Zionist foreign policy without ever asking who actually wrote the book or when, or why.
This anti-intellectualism isn’t an accident. It was baked in from the start.
But Noll doesn’t leave us hopeless. He offers a call forward: for a faith that engages the world with both heart and mind. A faith that can live with tension, welcome complexity, and evolve beyond fear-driven literalism.
What Did the Early Church Actually Think About Scripture?
Here’s what gets lost in modern evangelical retellings: the earliest Christians didn’t treat Scripture the way today’s inerrantists do.
For the first few centuries, Christians didn’t even have a finalized Bible. There were letters passed around, oral traditions, a few widely recognized Gospels, and a whole lot of discussion about what counted as authoritative. It wasn’t until the fourth century that anything close to our current canon was even solidified. And even then, it wasn’t set in stone across all branches of Christianity.
Church fathers like Origen, Clement of Alexandria, and Irenaeus viewed Scripture as spiritually inspired but full of metaphor and mystery. They weren’t demanding literal accuracy; they were mining the texts for deeper meanings. Allegory was considered a legitimate, even necessary, interpretive method. Scripture was read devotionally and theologically, not scientifically or historically. In other words, it wasn’t inerrancy that defined early Christian engagement with Scripture, it was curiosity and contemplation.
For a deeper dive, check out The Gnostic Informant’s incredible documentary that uncovers the first hundred years of Christianity, a period that has been systematically lied about and rewritten. It reveals how much of what we take for granted was shaped by political and theological agendas far removed from the original followers of Jesus.
If you’re serious about understanding the roots of your faith or just curious about how history gets reshaped, this documentary is essential viewing. It’s a reminder that truth often hides in plain sight and that digging beneath the surface is how we reclaim our own understanding.
Protestantism: A Heretical Offshoot Disguised as Tradition
The Protestant Reformation shook things up in undeniable ways. Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged the Catholic Church’s abuses and rightly demanded reform. But what’s often missed (or swept under the rug) is how deeply Protestantism broke with the ancient, historic Church.
By insisting on sola scriptura—Scripture alone—as the sole authority, the Reformers rejected centuries of Church tradition, councils, and lived community discernment that shaped orthodox belief. They didn’t invent biblical inerrancy as we know it today, but their elevation of the Bible above all else cracked the door wide open for literalism and fundamentalism to storm in.
What began as a corrective movement turned into a theological minefield. Today, Protestantism isn’t a single coherent tradition; it’s a sprawling forest of over 45,000 different denominations, all claiming exclusive access to “the truth.”
This fragmentation isn’t accidental…. it’s the logical outcome of rejecting historic continuity and embracing personal interpretation as the final authority.
Far from preserving the faith of the ancient Church, Protestantism represents a fractured offshoot: one that often contradicts the early Church’s beliefs and teachings. It trades the richness of lived tradition and community wisdom for a rigid, literalistic, and competitive approach to Scripture.
The 20th century saw this rigid framework perfected into a polished doctrine demanding total conformity and punishing doubt. Protestant fundamentalism turned into an ideological fortress, where questioning is treated as betrayal, and theological nuance is replaced by black-and-white dogma.
If you want to understand where so much of modern evangelical rigidity and end-times obsession comes from, look no further than this fractured legacy. Protestantism’s break with the ancient Church set the stage for the spiritual and intellectual starvation that Mark Noll so powerfully exposes.
Rethinking the Bible
Seeing the Bible as a collection of human writings about God rather than the literal word from God opens up space for critical thinking and compassion. It allows us to:
Study historical context and cultural influences.
Embrace the diversity of perspectives in Scripture.
Let go of rigid interpretations and seek core messages like love, justice, and humility.
Move away from proof-texting and toward spiritual growth.
Reconcile faith with science, reason, and modern ethics.
When we stop demanding that the Bible be perfect, we can finally appreciate what it actually is: a complex, messy, beautiful attempt by humans to understand the sacred.
This shift doesn’t weaken faith…. I believe it strengthens it.
It moves us away from dogma disguised as certainty and into something deeper…. something alive. It opens the door for real relationship, not just with the divine, but with each other. It makes space for growth, for disagreement, for honesty.
And in a world tearing itself apart over whose version of truth gets to rule, that kind of open-hearted spirituality isn’t just refreshing-it’s essential.
Because if your faith can’t stand up to questions, history, or accountability… maybe it was never built on truth to begin with.
Let’s stop worshiping the paper and start seeking the presence.
🔎 Resources Worth Exploring:
“The Jesus Hoax: How St. Paul’s Cabal Fooled the World for Two Thousand Years” by David Skrbina
“Christianity Before Christ” by John G. Jackson
The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind” by Mark Noll – A scathing but sincere critique from within the evangelical tradition itself. Noll exposes how anti-intellectualism, biblical literalism, and cultural isolationism have gutted American Christianity’s ability to engage the world honestly.
Check out Adam Green’s work at Know More News on Rumble for more on the political and mythological implications of Christian Zionism
And don’t miss my interview with Dr. Mark Gregory Karris, author of The Diabolical Trinity: Wrathful God, Sinful Self, and Eternal Hell, where we dive deep into the psychological damage caused by toxic theology
Between Liberation and Collapse: Why We Need to Talk About the Middle Path
Welcome back to Taste Test Thursdays, where we explore health, culture, belief, and everything in between. I’m your host, Megan Leigh and today, we’re asking a question that’s bound to make someone uncomfortable:
What if the very institutions we tore down as oppressive… were also protecting us?
We live in a time of extremes. On one side, you’ve got Quiverfull-style fundamentalists preaching hyper-fertility and wifely submission like it’s the only antidote to modern decay. On the other, we’ve got a postmodern buffet of “do what you want, gender is a vibe, all structures are violence.”
And if you’re like me—having navigated the high-control religion pipeline but also come out the other side—you might be wondering…
“Wait… does anyone believe in guardrails anymore?”
Because spoiler: freedom without form becomes chaos. And chaos isn’t empowering. It’s destabilizing.
I truly believe that structure and boundaries can actually serve a purpose—especially when it comes to sex, gender, and human flourishing.
This isn’t a call to go backward. It’s a call to pause, zoom out, and ask: what’s been lost in our so-called progress? Let’s dig in.
The Panic Playbook
This past summer, the media went full apocalyptic. You couldn’t scroll, stream, or tune in without hearing it: Christian nationalism is taking over.Project 2025 is a fascist manifesto.Trump is a theocratic threat to democracy itself. The narrative was everywhere—breathless Substacks, viral TikToks, and cable news countdowns to Gilead.
But while progressives were busy hallucinating handmaids and framing every Republican vote as the end of America, they were also helping cover up the biggest political scandal since Watergate: Biden’s cognitive decline.
This blog isn’t a right-wing defense or a leftist takedown. It’s a wake-up call. Because authoritarian creep doesn’t wear just one team’s jersey. If we’re serious about resisting tyranny, we need to stop fearmongering about theocracy and start interrogating the power grabs happening under our own banners—especially the ones cloaked in compassion, inclusion, and “equity.”
Not All “Christian Nationalism” Is the Same—Let’s Break It Down
The term “nationalism” gets thrown around a lot, but it actually has different meanings:
🔸 1. The Theocratic Extreme This is the version everyone fears—and with good reason.
Belief: Government should follow biblical law.
Goal: A Christian theocracy where dissent is treated as rebellion.
Associated with: Christian Reconstructionism, Dominionism, and groups hostile to pluralism. 📍 Reality: This is fringe. Most evangelicals don’t support this, but it’s the go-to boogeyman in media and deconstruction circles.
🔸 2. Civic or Cultural Nationalism More common, less scary.
Belief: Shared culture—language, customs, even religion—can create unity.
Goal: Strong national identity and cohesion, not exclusion.
Seen in: France’s secularism, Japan’s cultural pride, and even Fourth of July BBQs. 📍 Reality: This is where most “Christian nationalists” actually land. They believe in the U.S.’s Christian roots and want to preserve those values—not enforce a theocracy.
🔸 3. Patriotism (Often Mislabeled as Nationalism) Here’s where it gets absurd.
Belief: Loving your country and its traditions.
Goal: A moral, thriving republic. 📍 Reality: Critics lump this in with extremism to discredit conservatives, centrists, or people of faith.
Why It Matters
Lumping everyone—from flag-waving moderates to dominionist hardliners—into one “Christian nationalist” category fuels moral panic. It shuts down real dialogue and replaces nuance with hysteria.
You can:
✅ Love your country ✅ Value strong families ✅ Want morality in public life
…without wanting a theocracy.
Let’s Define the Terms Critics Confuse:
Dominionism: A fringe movement pushing for Christian control of civic life. Exists, but not mainstream.
Quiverfull: Ultra-niche belief in having as many kids as possible for religious reasons. Rare and extreme.
Christian Nationalism: Belief that the U.S. has a Christian identity that should shape culture and law. Vague, often misapplied.
And What It Isn’t:
Pro-natalism: A global concern over falling birth rates—not just a religious thing.
Conservative Feminism: Belief in empowerment through family and tradition. Dismissing it as brainwashing is anti-feminist.
Family Values: Often demonized, but for many, it just means prioritizing marriage, kids, and legacy.
Not all traditionalism is fascism. Not all progressivism is liberation. Let’s keep the conversation honest.
Hillary’s “Handmaid” Moment
Hilary Clinton🎧 “Well, first of all, don’t be a handmaiden to the patriarchy. Which kind of eliminates every woman on the other side of the aisle, except for very few. First, we have to get there, and it is obviously so much harder than it should be. So, if a woman runs who I think would be a good president, as I thought Kamala Harris would be, and as I knew I would be, I will support that woman.”
This quote from Hillary Clinton caused predictable outrage—but what’s more disturbing than the clip is the sentiment behind it.
In one breath, she managed to dismiss millions of women—mothers, caretakers, homemakers, conservative politicians, religious traditionalists—as unwitting slaves to male domination. Clinton doesn’t leave room for the idea that a woman might freely choose to prioritize home, faith, or family—not because she’s brainwashed, but because she’s pragmatic, thoughtful, and in tune with her own values.
To Clinton, there’s one legitimate type of woman in politics: the woman who governs like Hillary Clinton.
This framework—that conservative, traditional, or religious women are “handmaidens”—isn’t new. It’s a familiar talking point in progressive circles. And lately, it’s been weaponized even more boldly, as Clinton revealed in another recent statement:
“…blatant effort to basically send a message, most exemplified by Vance and Musk and others, that, you know, what we really need from you women are more children. And what that really means is you should go back to doing what you were born to do, which is to produce more children. So this is another performance about concerns they allegedly have for family life. Return to the family, the nuclear family. Return to being a Christian nation. Return to, you know, producing a lot of children, which is sort of odd because the people who produce the most children in our country are immigrants and they want to deport them, so none of this adds up.”
This is where modern feminism loses its plot. If liberation only counts when women make certain kinds of choices, it’s not about freedom then.
The Pro-Natalism Panic—and the Projection Problem
🎧 “Although the Quiverfull formal life isn’t necessarily being preached, many of the underlying theological and practical assumptions are elevated… and now, you know, they’re in the White House.” – Emily Hunter McGowin, guest on In the Church Library podcast with Kelsey Kramer McGinnis and Marissa Franks Burt
There’s a subtle but dangerous trend happening in the deconstruction space: lumping all traditional Christian views of family into the Quiverfull/Dominionist bucket.
In a recent episode of In the Church Library, the hosts and guest reflected on the rise of pro-natalist ideas and Christian influence in politics. Marissa asks whether the ideology behind the Quiverfull movement might be getting a new rebrand—and Emily responds with what sounds like a chilling observation: echoes of that movement are now in the White House.
But let’s pause.
❗ The Quiverfull movement is real—but it’s fringe. It’s not representative of all evangelicals, conservatives, or even Christian pro-family thinking.
Yet increasingly, any policy or belief that values marriage, child-rearing, or generational stability gets painted with that same extremist brush. This is where projection replaces analysis.
Take J.D. Vance, often scapegoated in these conversations. He’s frequently accused of trying to turn America into Gilead—even though he has three children, supports working-class families, and hasn’t once called for a theocracy. His concern? America’s birthrate is in freefall.
That’s not theocracy. That’s math.
Pro-natalism isn’t about forcing women to give birth. It’s about grappling with a demographic time bomb. Countries like South Korea, Hungary, and Italy are facing societal collapse because too few people are having children. This isn’t moral panic—it’s math.
Even secular thinkers are sounding the alarm:
Lyman Stone, an economist and demographer, emphasizes: “Lower fertility rates are harbingers of lower economic growth, less innovation, less entrepreneurship, a weakened global position, any number of factors… But for me, the thing I worry about most is just disappointment. That is a society where most people grow old alone with little family around them, even though they wanted a family.”
Paul Morland, a British demographer, warns: “We’ve never seen anything like this kind of population decline before. The Black Death wiped out perhaps a third of Europe, but we’ve never seen an inverted population pyramid like the one we have today. I can’t see a way out of this beyond the supposedly crazy notion that people should try to have more kids.”
We have to be able to separate structure from subjugation. There’s a world of difference between saying “families matter” and forcing women into barefoot-and-pregnant obedience.
When we flatten every traditional idea into a fundamentalist threat, we not only lose clarity—we alienate people who are genuinely seeking meaning, stability, and community in a fragmented culture.
If we want to be intellectually honest, we must distinguish:
Extremism vs. Order
Oppression vs. Structure
Religious Tyranny vs. Social Cohesion
And we should probably stop pretending that every road leads to the Handmaid’s Tale.
Protective Powers: What Louise Perry and Joan Brumberg Reveal About Institutions
Let’s talk about The Case Against the Sexual Revolution by Louise Perry. Perry is a secular feminist. She’s not nostalgic for 1950s housewife culture—but she is asking: what did we actually get from the sexual revolution?
Here’s her mic-drop:
“The new sexual culture didn’t liberate women. It just asked them to participate in their own objectification with a smile.”
We built an entire culture around the idea that as long as it’s consensual, it’s empowering. But Perry argues that consent—without wisdom, without boundaries, without institutional protection—leaves women wide open to harm.
She points to:
Porn culture
Casual hookups
The normalization of sexual aggression and coercion in dating
These aren’t signs of liberation—they’re signs of a society that privatized female suffering and told us to smile through it.
Perry doesn’t say “go full tradwife.” But she does say maybe marriage, sexual restraint, and even modesty functioned as protective constraints—not just patriarchal tools of oppression.
We traded one form of pressure (be pure, stay home) for another (be hot, work hard, never need a man). Neither version asked what women actually want.
Now flip over to The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg. This one blew my mind.
She traces how, a century ago, girls were taught to cultivate inner character: honesty, kindness, self-control.
By the late 20th century? That inner moral development had been replaced by bodily self-surveillance: thigh gaps, clear skin, flat stomachs. Girls now focus on looking good, not being good.
She writes:
“The body has become the primary expression of self for teenage girls.”
Think about that. We went from teaching virtue to teaching girls how to market themselves. We told them they were free—and then handed them Instagram and said, “Good luck.”
So again, maybe some of those “oppressive” structures were also serving as cultural scaffolding. Not perfect. Not painless. But they gave young people—especially girls—a script that wasn’t just: “Be hot, be available, and don’t catch feelings.”
Brumberg isn’t saying go back to corsets and courtship. But she is saying we’ve lost our moral imagination. We gave up teaching self-restraint and purpose and replaced it with branding. With body projects. And now we wonder why depression and anxiety are through the roof??
We dive deeper into these subjects in these two podcasts:
Why the Fear Feels Real—And Why It’s Still Misguided
Look, I get it.
If you’ve escaped religious trauma, purity culture, or spiritual abuse, the sight of a political figure talking about motherhood as a virtue can feel like a threat. Your nervous system registers it as a return to oppression. The media confirms your panic. And suddenly, a call for demographic survival starts sounding like a demand for forced birth.
But your trauma doesn’t make every policy that triggers you authoritarian. It just means you need to slow down and check the data.
Because ironically, the real threats to bodily autonomy and family structure? They might not be coming from traditionalists at all.
🏛 The Progressive Power Grab You’re Not Supposed to Question
Another frustrating comment made by Kelsey Kramer McGinnis in a recent podcast was the need to “decenter nuclear families” and the dismissal of concerns about an “attack on nuclear families” as mere panic. But here’s the thing—this fear isn’t fabricated. It’s not fringe. It’s rooted in observable cultural trends and policy shifts. You can’t just wave it away with smug academic detachment.
Whether you support the traditional family structure or not, the erosion of it has real consequences—especially for children, social stability, and intergenerational resilience. Calling that out isn’t fearmongering. It’s an invitation to discuss the stakes honestly.
Let’s set the record straight: The desire to shape culture, laws, and education systems is not the sole domain of religious conservatives. Dominionist Christians aren’t the only ones with blueprints for a theocratic society. Progressive activists also seek to remake the world in their image—one institution at a time.
This isn’t a right-wing “whataboutism.” It’s an honest observation about how ideological movements—regardless of political lean—operate when they gain influence.
Let’s take a look at what this looks like on both ends of the spectrum:
🏛 Dominionism (Far-Right Christian Nationalism)
Core Belief: Christians are mandated by God to bring every area of life—government, education, business—under biblical authority.
Tactics:
Homeschool curricula promoting biblical literalism and creationism.
Campaigns for Christian prayer in public schools or Ten Commandments monuments in courthouses.
Promoting the idea that America was founded as a Christian nation and must return to those roots.
Electing openly Christian lawmakers with the explicit goal of reshaping law and public policy to reflect “biblical values.”
Supporting the Quiverfull movement, which encourages large families to “outbreed the left” and raise up “arrows for God’s army.”
Core Belief: Society must be dismantled and rebuilt to eliminate systemic oppression, centering race, gender, and identity as primary moral lenses.
Tactics:
Embedding DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) frameworks into public schools, universities, and corporate policy.
Redefining gender and sex in school curricula while often sidelining parental input or community values.
Elevating “lived experience” over objective standards in hiring, curriculum design, and academic research.
Weaponizing social media and institutional policies to punish dissenting views (labeling them as “harmful,” “unsafe,” or “hateful”).
Using activist lingo to obscure government overreach (“gender-affirming care” vs. irreversible medical intervention for minors).
🔄 Shared Behaviors: The Race to Capture Institutions
Despite their stark differences in values, both dominionists and far-left activists behave in eerily similar ways:
They seek cultural dominance through schools, law, media, and public policy.
They view their moral framework as not just legitimate but necessary for a just society.
They suppress dissent by pathologizing disagreement—branding critics as “anti-Christian,” “bigoted,” “transphobic,” “groomers,” or “domestic extremists.”
The battleground is no longer just the ballot box. It’s the school board meeting. The state legislature. The HR department. The university curriculum. The TikTok algorithm.
Colorado’s HB25-1312 — The “Kelly Loving Act”
Signed in May 2025, this law expands protections for transgender individuals. Fine on the surface. But here’s the fine print:
It redefines coercive control to include misgendering and deadnaming.
In custody cases, a parent who refuses to affirm a child’s gender identity could now be framed as abusive—even if that child is a minor in the midst of rapid-onset gender dysphoria.
Is it protecting kids? Or is it using identity to override parental rights?
Washington State’s HB 1296
This bill guts the Parents’ Bill of Rights (which was approved by voters via Initiative 2081). It:
Eliminates mandatory parental access to children’s health records (including mental health).
Enshrines gender identity and sexual orientation in a new “Student Bill of Rights.”
Allows state-level monitoring of school boards that don’t comply.
And the cherry on top? It was passed with an emergency clause so it would take effect immediately, bypassing normal legislative scrutiny.
This isn’t some abstract culture war. These are real laws, passed in real states, stripping real parents of their authority.
A Marxist Framework Masquerading as Compassion
Some of these changes echo critical theory more than constitutional liberty.
Historically, Marxist and Maoist ideologies viewed the family unit as an oppressive structure that needed dismantling. Parental authority was often seen as an extension of capitalist control. In its place? State-affirmed loyalty, reeducation, and ideological uniformity.
Now, it’s not happening with red stars and gulags—it’s happening through rainbow flags and DEI seminars. But the power dynamics are the same:
The family becomes secondary to the state. Dissent becomes dangerous. Disagreement becomes “violence.”
This is how authoritarianism creeps in—wrapped in the language of safety and inclusion.
What Real Theocracy Looks Like
If you need a reality check, read Yasmine Mohammed’s Unveiled. Raised in a fundamentalist Muslim home, where women had no autonomy, no basic rights, and no freedom. She was forced into hijab at age 9, married off to an al-Qaeda operative, and beaten for asking questions. Women cannot see a doctor without a male guardian, they are forced to cover every inch of their bodies and are denied access to education and even the right to drive. That’s theocracy. That is TRUE oppression.
Now contrast that with the freedom that women enjoy in the West today. In modern America, women have more rights and freedoms than at any point in history. Women can run around naked at Pride parades, express their sexuality however they choose, and redefine what it means to be a woman altogether. The very idea of a “dystopia” here is laughable when we consider the actual freedom women in the West enjoy.
Yet, despite these freedoms, many liberal women still cry oppression. They whine about having to pay for their student loans, birth control or endure debates over abortion restrictions. This level of cognitive dissonance—claiming victimhood while living in unprecedented freedom—is a slap in the face to women who actually suffer under real patriarchal oppression.
What’s even more Orwellian is how the left, in its quest for inclusivity and justice, is actively stripping others of their freedoms. They preach about fighting for freedom of speech while canceling anyone who disagrees with them. They claim to be champions of equality while weaponizing institutions to enforce ideological conformity.
Bottom line: If you think Elon Musk tweeting about birth rates is the same as what Yasmine went through? You’ve lost perspective.
If your feminism can’t handle dissent, it was never liberation—it was just a prettier cage.
We have to stop mistaking fear for wisdom. We have to stop confusing criticism with violence. And we absolutely must stop handing our power over to ideologies that infantilize us in the name of compassion.
Let’s be clear: Gilead isn’t coming. But if we’re not careful, something just as destructive might.
A world where parents are powerless. Where biology is negotiable but ideology is law. Where compliance is the only virtue, and questions are a crime.
The Courage to Be Honest
What I’m suggesting isn’t fashionable. It doesn’t fit neatly in a progressive or conservative box. But I’m tired of those boxes.
I’ve lived in Portland’s secular utopia and inside a high-control religious environment. I’ve seen how each side distorts truth in the name of “freedom” or “righteousness.”
But what if true liberation is found in the tension between the two?
The most revolutionary thing we can do today is refuse to become an extremist.
Not because we’re afraid. Not because we’re fence-sitters. But because we believe there’s a better way—one that honors the past without being imprisoned by it and faces the future with clear eyes and moral courage.
Maintain your curiosity, embrace skepticism, and keep tuning in. 🎙️🔒
— Megan Leigh
📚 Source List for Blog Post
1. Hillary Clinton Quotes
Quote 1 (on being a “handmaiden to the patriarchy”): [Reference: “Defending Democracy” podcast with historian Heather Cox Richardson, May 2024] No official transcript published — you’re using a direct audio clip for this one.
The Fatal Flaws of Calories In Calories Out and the Metabolism Model That Could Change Everything
Alright, let’s talk about the four most useless words in the history of weight loss advice: ‘Just eat less, move more.’ You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, and if this phrase actually worked the way people think it does, we wouldn’t have skyrocketing rates of obesity, metabolic dysfunction, and entire industries built around yo-yo dieting. But here’s the kicker—it sounds logical. Simple math, right? Calories in, calories out. Except the human body is not a bank account; it’s a biological orchestra, and the way we process energy is more like a symphony than a spreadsheet.
We’ve already tackled the oversimplified calorie-counting dogma in our Science Dogma episode, and we’ve explored how perception alone—like believing a milkshake is ‘indulgent’—can literally alter our hormonal response. That’s not woo-woo, that’s science. But today, we’re going deeper. Because beyond the CICO model, beyond the calorie obsession, there’s a much bigger, messier, and more fascinating reality about metabolism, obesity, and why diet advice keeps failing people.
And I know what some of you might be thinking—‘But Megan, are you saying calories don’t matter?’ No. I’m saying they don’t tell the whole story. The way we eat, when we eat, why we eat, our hormones, stress levels, metabolic adaptations, even our past dieting history—all of it plays into how our body responds to food.
So as we close out Season 3 of Taste of Truth Tuesday, I want to leave you with something foundational. Not another diet trend. Not another oversimplified soundbite. But a real, nuanced conversation about what actually influences metabolism, weight loss, and why some of the most popular strategies—like keto, intermittent fasting, and calorie counting—work for some people but absolutely wreck others.
And here’s the disclaimer—I’m not an advocate for low-carb dieting in general, especially as someone who’s recovered from disordered eating. But my guest today? He eats low-carb and keto. And here’s what I respect—he’s not dogmatic about it. He understands that the real answer to health and weight loss isn’t found in any one-size-fits-all approach. It’s about bio-individuality.
So grab your coffee, take a deep breath, and get ready to rethink everything you thought you knew about metabolism. Let’s do this.
The calorie, as a unit of measurement, has a fascinating history that ties directly into the calories in, calories out (CICO) debate. While many assume the calorie has always been the standard for measuring food energy, its adoption in nutrition is relatively recent and shaped by shifts in scientific understanding, industry influence, and public health narratives.
The Origin of the Calorie
The concept of the calorie originated in physics, not nutrition. In the early 19th century, Nicolas Clément, a French chemist, introduced the term calorie as a measure of heat energy. By the late 1800s, scientists like Wilbur Olin Atwater adapted this concept to human metabolism, conducting bomb calorimeter experiments to determine how much energy food provided when burned. Atwater’s Physiological Fuel Values established the foundation for modern caloric values assigned to macronutrients (fat = 9 kcal/g, carbohydrates and protein = 4 kcal/g, alcohol = 7 kcal/g).
The Rise of Caloric Nutrition
By the early 20th century, calories became central to dietary guidelines, especially in public health efforts to address malnutrition. During both World Wars, governments used calorie counts to ration food efficiently. However, as food abundance grew, the focus shifted from ensuring sufficient calorie intake to preventing excess, paving the way for weight-focused dietary interventions.
CICO and the Simplification of Weight Loss
The calories in, calories out model became dominant in the mid-20th century, driven by research showing that weight loss or gain depended on energy balance. The First Law of Thermodynamics—energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed—was applied to human metabolism, reinforcing the idea that a calorie surplus leads to weight gain and a deficit to weight loss.
This framework became the foundation of mainstream diet advice, but it often overlooked complexities such as:
Metabolic adaptation (how bodies adjust to calorie deficits)
The thermic effect of food (protein takes more energy to digest than fat or carbs)
Gut microbiome effects on calorie absorption
Psychological and behavioral aspects of eating
Criticism and the Evolution of the Debate
By the late 20th century, challenges to strict CICO thinking emerged. Researchers in endocrinology and metabolism, such as Dr. Robert Lustig and Dr. David Ludwig, highlighted that not all calories affect the body in the same way—insulin regulation, macronutrient composition, and food quality play crucial roles.
Low-carb and ketogenic diet advocates argued that carbohydrate restriction, not just calorie restriction, was key to weight management due to its impact on insulin and fat storage.
I personally think, it’s not just carbs or calories doing this. There are at least 42 factors that impact blood sugar and metabolism. This is something I’ve worked to educate my audience on for years. Carbs are just one piece of the puzzle. Stress, sleep, gut microbiome, meal timing, inflammation, hormonal balance—all of these influence the body’s metabolic “terrain.”
Where Are We Now?
Today, the calorie remains a useful measure, but the conversation has expanded beyond simple energy balance. Researchers acknowledge that while calories matter, factors like food quality, hormonal responses, and individual metabolic differences significantly impact how the body processes energy. The debate now leans toward a more nuanced view.
Now, let’s talk about why this matters.
Today, I’m joined by Adam Kosloff, an author and researcher who isn’t afraid to challenge conventional wisdom—especially when it comes to obesity and metabolism. A Substack post of his, A Righteous Assault on the Absolute Worst Idea in the History of Science, takes a sledgehammer to the dominant ‘calories in, calories out’ model, aka Move More, Eat Less? The Lie That Won’t Die, arguing that our understanding of fat storage is fundamentally broken. Instead, he presents a revolutionary new framework—the Farmer Model—that redefines how we think about metabolism, obesity, and weight loss.
For years, the dominant narrative around weight loss has been depressingly simple: “move more, eat less.” This slogan has been drilled into us by dietitians, doctors, and fitness gurus as if it were an unshakable law of physics. But if it were that simple, why has metabolic disease skyrocketed despite more people tracking their calories and increasing exercise?
Adam challenges the traditional CICO (calories in, calories out) model, not just by saying it’s wrong, but by arguing it is catastrophically misleading. His Farmer Model reframes obesity and metabolic dysfunction as a landscape issue rather than a simple calorie balance equation.
Think of your metabolism like farmland. The most obvious disruptor might be “acid rain”—high-carb, sweet, ultra-processed foods that erode the topsoil, flood the land, and cause metabolic damage (fat storage, inflammation, insulin spikes). But not all disruptions look like a storm.
Sometimes, the changes are more insidious. Maybe those daily lattes weren’t a flood but a subtle shift in the terrain, like over-fertilizing a field. Too much of a good thing, whether dairy proteins or artificial sweeteners, can nudge the metabolic landscape in a way that leads to dysfunction over time.
And here’s the kicker: It’s not just carbs or calories doing this. There are at least 42 factors that impact blood sugar and metabolism. This is something I’ve worked to educate my audience on for years. Carbs are just one piece of the puzzle. Stress, sleep, gut microbiome, meal timing, inflammation, hormonal balance—all of these influence the body’s metabolic “terrain.”
Adam’s latest Substack post, 10 Smackdowns That Lay Waste to CICO, was an absolute banger. The line “Gaze upon these arguments, ye mighty gym bros, and despair…” had me cackling. But beyond the sass, the research was rock solid. In our conversation, we break down some of the most devastating smackdowns against CICO and discuss which ones tend to make the most die-hard calorie counters short-circuit.
The takeaway? The “move more, eat less” doctrine is outdated and incomplete. It’s time for a more sophisticated conversation about metabolism that acknowledges the complexity of the human body rather than reducing it to a basic math equation.
Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays. Today, we’re diving into a topic I’ve wanted to explore for a while now. Earlier this month, I came across a writer on Substack who posted something that really struck me. In his piece, he used dehumanizing language ‘assigned female at birth’. While his intention may have been to be inclusive, I found it to be exclusive and downright misogynistic.
It reminded me of back in 2021, I had a few people reach out to me on Instagram, pointing out that we had shifted from using the term ‘women’ to ‘AFAB’—’assigned female at birth.’ My gut reaction was intense—what the hell is going on here? It also reminds me of when I was living in Portland, I was constantly stressed, seeking external validation, and lacked the courage to speak up against gender ideology around 2013-2015. Little did I know, it would eventually take over the world.
Now, we’re going to dive into the consequences of transgenderism and its impact on children. And here’s the thing: I’m no longer afraid of being canceled or ridiculed. Honestly, I’ve already lost all my friends. But at this point, I’ve come to appreciate who I am, and standing for truth in today’s world has never been more important. It’s worth every consequence.
How We Got Here—The Origins of Gender Ideology
To understand how we went from recognizing biological sex as reality to debating whether we can even say the word “women” in medical journals, we have to look at where gender ideology came from.
This whole mess started with psychologist John Money in the 1950s. He was one of the first people to separate “gender” from “sex,” arguing that gender was a social construct, independent of biology. Expanding on John Money’s experiments is crucial because they expose the disturbing origins of gender ideology. Money, a psychologist and sexologist, was instrumental in pushing the idea that gender identity is entirely socially constructed, separate from biological sex. However, his most infamous experiment—the case of David Reimer—reveals the dark and unethical foundation of this belief system.
David Reimer was born male, alongside his identical twin brother, Brian. After a botched circumcision, Money convinced his parents to raise David as a girl, “Brenda,” after undergoing surgery and hormone treatments. Money believed this would prove that gender identity was purely a matter of socialization. However, David never truly identified as female. He struggled with severe psychological distress, eventually rejecting the imposed identity in his teenage years and transitioning back to male. His twin brother Brian also suffered severe emotional distress, and both tragically died by suicide in their 30s—a devastating consequence of Money’s reckless experiment.
The nature vs. nurture debate is at the heart of this issue. Money’s work attempted to prove that nurture—socialization and upbringing—could completely override biological sex. Yet, the failure of the Reimer case demonstrated the opposite: biology plays an undeniable role in identity and development. Attempts to force individuals into gender identities that contradict their biology often lead to severe psychological distress.
While John Money championed the idea that gender was purely a social construct, his ideological opponent, Dr. Milton Diamond, spent decades proving otherwise. Diamond, a biologist and sexologist, conducted extensive research showing that biological sex has an innate influence on identity. He exposed the flaws in Money’s work, particularly the David Reimer case, and argued that forcing an identity contrary to one’s biology leads to immense suffering. Diamond’s work underscored the importance of acknowledging biological sex while still allowing for individual gender expression—a stance completely at odds with today’s gender ideology, which seeks to erase biological realities altogether.
Intersex conditions are often misused as a justification for erasing sex-based distinctions. While intersex individuals exist, they make up a small fraction of the population and do not negate the binary nature of human sexual reproduction. Most intersex conditions result in variations of male or female biology, not a third sex. Using intersex as a reason to eliminate sex-based language ultimately harms both intersex and non-intersex individuals by denying the reality of biological differences.
Beyond David Reimer’s case, Money’s broader work was filled with moral controversies. His therapy sessions with young children were highly controversial and ethically disturbing by today’s standards. He conducted what he called “sexual rehearsal therapy,” which involved encouraging children to engage in sexual activities with their parents or siblings as a form of treatment for various psychological issues.
These sessions were intended to help children overcome sexual anxieties or developmental disorders, but they often crossed serious ethical boundaries and caused significant harm to the children involved. The lack of informed consent, the inappropriate nature of the activities, and the potential for long-term psychological damage have led to widespread criticism of Money’s methods.
Despite this, Money’s ideas laid the foundation for modern gender ideology. His theories, though discredited by cases like David Reimer’s, were absorbed into academia and later expanded upon by activists. The result? A cultural shift where subjective identity is prioritized over biological reality, and dissent is often met with backlash.
Understanding the origins of gender ideology is crucial because it reveals the shaky foundation upon which these ideas were built. Science, ethics, and real-world consequences all point to the same conclusion: biology matters, and attempts to erase it come at a significant human cost.
His theories were later expanded by Judith Butler in the ‘90s, who pushed the idea that gender is performative and entirely detached from biology. This philosophy has now morphed into the idea that sex itself is a “social construct.”
The Trans Flag’s Creator: A Window into Gender Ideology’s Evolution
Monica Helms, born Robert Hogge, designed the trans🏳️⚧️ pride flag in 1999.
According to researcher Dr. Sarah Goode, CEO of StopSO (Specialist Treatment Organization for the Prevention of Sexual Offending), pedophiles who organize online have developed their own culture, language, and symbols. One common symbol used in pedophile forums incorporates the colors baby blue, pink and white. In her lecture, ‘Hidden Knowledge: What We Ought to Know About Pedophiles,’ Dr. Goode shows a slide of the image, and says, “The pink half represents ‘girl lovers’ and the blue half represents ‘boy lovers.’”
The color code system appears to predate the initial design of the transgender flag and can be traced back to at least as early as 1997, according to online pro-pedophile forums.
Areas in Europe that advertise child trafficking to pedophile sex tourists have used the color code: “blue curtains mean a boy child prostitute and pink curtains a girl.”
It is unclear whether Helms was aware of this correlation at the time, but when discussing the symbolism behind the trans flag in an interview in 2017, Helms stated that blue represented young boys and pink represented young girls.
Whatever the case may be, his personal history and writings reveal disturbing patterns that echo the unsettling dynamics of gender ideology we’ve seen in figures like Dr. John Money. Helms, who now identifies as a woman, has long been involved in controversial and fetishistic behaviors, even writing “forced feminization” and erotic short stories. His writings include disturbing themes, such as the sexualization of minors, notably in a short story where a man marries a young girl who ages slowly, reflecting a disturbing fantasy that came to him in a dream.
In his memoir, More Than Just a Flag, Helms describes his “bigender” identity, as an “enlightened” being who floats between multiple identities, switching from male to female, sometimes simultaneously, or in an instant. He recalls times of experimentation, especially as an adult, where he would wear clothing inappropriate for his age and faced consequences for doing so at work.
Adding a deeply unsettling layer to the conversation, Helms, who was 70 at the time in 2022, made headlines by claiming to have changed his age to 25. Given the logic behind these transformations, this age shift sparked a viral conversation, with some commenters pointing out that his partner, Darlene Darlington Wagner, would now be “just 16 years old.” This raises questions about how fluid identity could extend beyond gender and into age.
As gender ideology increasingly became intertwined with political movements, it found its way into the mainstream, especially within the Democratic Party. Initially, intellectual discussions around gender began with French philosophers whose ideas about the body, power, and identity influenced later iterations of gender theory. But these complex theories have since been stripped of their nuance and rebranded into a political dogma that now dominates much of the left-leaning discourse.
The Democratic Party, which once championed civil rights and social justice, now finds itself navigating a fine line between advocating for freedom and accommodating forces that seek to change the very definition of identity itself. But at what cost? The more corporate interests and industries gain traction in shaping these ideologies, the more the left’s original values of anti-corporate resistance become a distant memory.
Which brings us to today’s nightmare.
From Fringe Theory to Political Dogma—How Gender Ideology Took Over the Democratic Party
How did academic theorizing become an institutionalized belief system within mainstream politics, particularly in the Democratic Party? This transformation happened through several key developments:
The Rise of Queer Theory in Academia – Universities became breeding grounds for gender ideology throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Gender studies departments, influenced by postmodernist philosophy, framed gender as entirely fluid, rejecting biological sex distinctions. As students trained in these theories graduated and took positions in media, education, and activism, they carried these ideas into broader society.
Institutional Capture and Activism – Activist organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) began pushing gender ideology into corporate policies, legal frameworks, and public schools. Their influence, combined with the rapid spread of social media, helped mainstream these concepts far beyond the academic world.
Legal and Policy Shifts – Under the Obama administration, gender ideology gained political traction, particularly through Title IX reinterpretations that mandated schools to accommodate self-declared gender identities. This was further expanded under the Biden administration, with policies requiring federally funded institutions to adopt gender-affirming policies in sports, healthcare, and education. Let’s talk about the hilarious double standards around the billionaires funding the LGBT movement. We’ve all seen the left melting down over the influence of billionaires—except, of course, when those billionaires are funding agendas they support. An article from First Things calls out some of the big names behind the LGBT movement, and guess what? It’s showcases this massive contradiction.
Big Tech and Media Reinforcement – Social media platforms, major news outlets, and entertainment industries began actively promoting gender ideology while censoring dissenting views. This created a cultural environment where questioning gender ideology was framed as hateful or bigoted, further entrenching it within left-wing politics.
The Redefinition of Civil Rights – Transgender identity was increasingly framed as the next major civil rights frontier, equating sex-based protections with racial and disability rights. This shifted the Democratic Party’s platform to fully embrace gender ideology, making skepticism or critique politically unacceptable within mainstream liberal discourse.
The Shift from ‘Women’ to ‘AFAB’—Erasing Women for Ideology
So why has the term “women” been replaced with “AFAB” (Assigned Female At Birth)? The justification is that saying “women” is “exclusionary” to trans-identified females. But in reality, it’s deeply misogynistic.
Jennifer Bilek, in her Dispatches from the 11th Hour essays, has done incredible work exposing how gender ideology isn’t some organic civil rights movement—it’s a well-funded social engineering project backed by billionaires and biotech companies. She points out that this linguistic shift isn’t just about “inclusion.” It’s about destabilizing categories of sex for the benefit of corporate and medical industries.
When you erase the words “women” or “woman,” you erase women’s ability to advocate for their needs. You make it harder to talk about female-specific health issues. And you make it easier for policies to prioritize ideology over science.
The Medical and Scientific Consequences of Erasing Sex
This isn’t just an abstract cultural issue. It has real, dangerous consequences for medicine and science.
Historically, women have been excluded from medical research—for decades, studies were conducted almost exclusively on male subjects, and the results were assumed to apply to women. The problem? Women are not small men. We have different hormonal cycles, different metabolic rates, and different responses to medications.
Here are just a few examples of how ignoring biological sex in medicine harms women:
Heart disease: Women’s symptoms are different from men’s, and because most research was done on men, women are more likely to be misdiagnosed.
ACL injuries: Women are at a significantly higher risk due to differences in hip structure and ligament laxity, yet training protocols are still modeled on male athletes.
Medication dosages: Women metabolize drugs differently, but dosages are often tested on male bodies, leading to overdoses or ineffective treatments for women.
In 2016, the NIH finally mandated that women be included in medical research, a huge step forward. But now, under gender ideology, we’re reversing that progress by saying we can’t acknowledge sex at all.
If we replace “women’s health” with “AFAB health,” how do we effectively study and treat female-specific conditions like PCOS, endometriosis, or pregnancy-related complications?
We don’t. Because that’s the point.
The Connection Between Transgenderism and Transhumanism
As the journalist, Stella Morabito, has written:
“Transgenderism is a vehicle for state power and censorship.”
It is tyranny dressed up in the clothes of what has become the carcass of the progressive left and it seeks absolute power and control over humanity and nature.
This is where things get dark.
Jennifer Bilek and other researchers have pointed out how gender ideology is just one arm of a larger movement: transhumanism—the belief that humanity should merge with technology, that our bodies are “obsolete,” and that we should ultimately move beyond biology altogether.
Think about what the transgender movement pushes:
The idea that our bodies are wrong and need to be medically altered
A reliance on synthetic hormones for life
The normalization of body modification to fit identity over reality
Now zoom out: Who benefits from this ideology? Pharmaceutical companies. The same billionaires pushing trans activism are also deeply invested in AI, biotech, and synthetic biology.
Oligarchs on both the political right like Peter Thiel and on the left like Jeff Bezos. JD Vance is the co-founder of Narya Capital and invested in Amplied Bio which has announced a strategic partnership RNAV8 to support MRNA therapeutic developers. Even MAHA’s hero RFK Jr has invested in Crispr technology. Financially disclosers released in Jan 2025 reveal he holds invested in Crispr therapeutics which specialists in gene editing technologies, as well as Dragon Fly Therapeutics which focuses on immunotherapies. So, despite his history of expressing concerns against gene-editing therapy. He did state he would divest from these companies if confirmed secretary of HHS. So, Mr. Secretary, we are keeping eyes on you. 👀
I haven’t even mentioned of Elon Musk with NeuraLink and who knows what else that guy has planned. I am a big fan of DODGE and the exposure of the corruption, YET I definitely keep a skeptical eye on him as well.
The goal is not just to let people “live as their authentic selves.” The goal is to dissolve sex-based reality entirely, making people dependent on medical interventions for life. This isn’t liberation—it’s medical enslavement.
Brave New World Revisited: The Synthetic Creation of Culture
Earlier this year I read Huxley’s Brave New World, and it didn’t read as fiction, it read as he had a crystal ball into the future. In his dystopia, human reproduction was industrialized, the family unit was obsolete, and people were engineered for compliance under the guise of “progress.” Sound familiar? The push for synthetic reproduction, the erasure of sex-based identity, and the growing narrative that biology itself is a problem all mirror Huxley’s warning.
Jennifer Bilek exposes how transhumanism is the real endgame. The same corporate interests promoting gender ideology are also pioneering artificial wombs, genetically modified embryos, and bioengineered organ harvesting. This is a world where human beings are no longer conceived but manufactured. Where the natural, biological family is replaced by state-sanctioned, lab-grown “life.”
Huxley warned us about a future where people would love their servitude—where the loss of freedom would be reframed as liberation. That future is unfolding now. The question is: Are we resisting dehumanization, or are we embracing it under a new name?
The Erasure of Women Illustration by Greg Groesch
Fighting Back Against the Erasure of Women
So what do we do?
Refuse to comply with ideological language. Women are women—not AFABs.
Call out the erasure of sex in medicine and policy. We must advocate for sex-based language in healthcare.
Expose the billionaires funding this movement. This is not grassroots activism—it’s top-down social engineering.
The fight to protect reality isn’t just about ideology. It’s about protecting women, safeguarding science, and ensuring future generations don’t grow up in a world where “female” is a forbidden word.
How Media Manipulation and Pseudo-Intellectualism Are Undermining Independent Thought
In today’s episode of Taste of Truth Tuesdays, I sit down with Franklin O’Kanu, also known as The Alchemik Pharmacist, to unpack one of the most pressing issues of our time: the erosion of critical thinking. Franklin, founder of Unorthodoxy, brings a unique perspective that bridges science, spirituality, and philosophy. Together, we explore how media narratives, pseudo-intellectualism, and societal conditioning have trained people to ignore their inner “Divine BS meter” and simply accept what they’re told.
The Death of Critical Thinking
As Franklin points out, we’ve lost the ability to thoughtfully absorb and analyze information. The past few years have conditioned individuals to disregard anything that doesn’t align with mainstream sources, experts, or consensus. Instead of engaging with information critically, many have been taught to dismiss it outright. The result? A culture that values conformity over curiosity and blind acceptance over intellectual rigor.
We discuss how this shift has been accelerated by media bombardment, especially during the pandemic. The New York Times even published an article on critical thinking, but instead of encouraging intellectual engagement, it suggested that questioning mainstream narratives is dangerous. This is narrative warfare at its finest—manipulating public perception to ensure that only “approved” ideas are given legitimacy.
The Power of Narratives: How Ideological Echo Chambers Shape Reality
Franklin O’Kanu often cites James Corbett’s work on media’s role in shaping public perception as a major inspiration behind his Substack. Corbett’s central thesis is simple: narratives build realities—and whoever controls the dominant narrative controls public thought. Nowhere is this clearer than in the nihilistic messaging that dominates left-leaning social media platforms like Meta. The idea that humans are an irredeemable blight on the planet has been mainstreamed, despite evidence to the contrary.
This same unquestioning adherence to an ideological narrative played out during the pandemic with phrases like “Trust the science” and “Don’t do your own research.”I explored this trend in my Substack, particularly through the lens of so-called ‘cult expert’ Steven Hassan. Hassan built his career exposing ideological manipulation, branding himself as the foremost authority on cult mind control. But here’s the irony: while he calls out high-control religious groups, he seems completely blind to the cult-like tactics within his own political ideology.
Information Control: Censoring ‘Dangerous’ Ideas
Hassan’s BITE model—which stands for Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotional control—is designed to help people recognize manipulation.
In cults, leaders dictate what information followers can access. The extreme left does the same.
Censorship of Opposing Views – Deplatforming, banning books, firing professors—if an idea threatens the ideology, it’s labeled “harmful” and shut down.
Historical Revisionism – Complex events are reframed to fit simplistic oppression narratives, ignoring inconvenient facts.
Selective Science – Only research that supports the ideology gets funding and visibility. Studies on biological sex differences, IQ variations, or alternative climate models? Silenced or retracted—not because they’re disproven, but because they’re inconvenient.
Discouraging Exposure to Counterarguments – Followers are taught that listening to the other side is “platforming hate” or “giving oxygen to fascism.”
This is exactly what happened when Franklin challenged the mainstream climate change narrative. The moment he questioned NetZero policies, he wasn’t just hit with the usual accusations: “climate denier,” “science denier,” and the ever-expanding list of ideological insults meant to discredit rather than debate, but he was blocked. This is how bad ideas survive—by shutting down the people who challenge them.
Franklin warns that if you’re not careful, these narratives can take you down a dark rabbit hole built on lies. Once an ideological framework is built around selective truth, it becomes a self-reinforcing system—one that punishes dissent and rewards conformity. And once you let someone else dictate what information is “safe” for you to consume, you’re already in the first stages of ideological capture.
The Rise of the Fake Intellectual
Platforms like Facebook/Instagram/YouTube have perfected the illusion of intellectual discourse while actively suppressing opposing voices. This has led to what Franklin calls the fake intellectual—individuals or organizations that present themselves as champions of knowledge but ultimately serve to shut down real dialogue.
Fake intellectuals don’t invite discussion; they police it. They rely on appeals to authority, groupthink, and censorship to maintain an illusion of correctness. True intellectualism, on the other hand, is rooted in curiosity, openness, and the willingness to engage with challenging perspectives.
Reclaiming Intellectual Integrity
One of the most powerful insights from our discussion is the role belief plays in shaping our world. Franklin warns that when we accept narratives without scrutiny, we risk being deceived. This applies across industries—medicine, science, finance, and even religion. These systems function because people believe in them, often without verifying their claims. But if we fail to question these narratives, we become passive participants in a game where only a select few control the rules.
So, how do we resist narrative warfare and reclaim critical thinking? Franklin suggests:
Cultivating intellectual humility—being open to the possibility that we might be wrong.
Recognizing media manipulation—understanding how information is curated to shape public perception.
Engaging with diverse perspectives—actively seeking out voices that challenge our beliefs.
Trusting our own discernment—developing the confidence to think independently instead of outsourcing our opinions to authority figures.
Franklin expands on this in his writings, particularly in his two articles, How to See the World and How to Train Your Mind. As he puts it, “We all have these voices in our heads. Philosophy is really just understanding the reality of the world, and there’s a principle in philosophy—keep things as simple as possible.” He breaks it down like this:
You are a soul. That’s the foundation. If every child grew up knowing this, it would change the way we see ourselves.
You have a body. Your body exists to experience the physical reality of the world.
You have a mind. Your mind is an information processor that collects input from your senses. But it also generates thoughts—sometimes helpful, sometimes misleading.
Franklin uses a simple example: Is my craving for ice cream coming from my body, my mind, or my soul? That question highlights the need to discern where our impulses originate. He extends this concept to online interactions: How many thoughts do we have just from seeing something online? How many narratives do we construct before our soul even has a chance to process reality?
Online spaces, Franklin argues, give rise to what he calls the “inner troll.”🧌 He connects this to the spiritual concept of demons—forces that seek to provoke, enrage, and divide. “Think about the term ‘troll,’” he says. “What is that, really? It’s an inner demon that gets let loose online. The internet makes it easy for our worst instincts to take over.”
So, what’s the antidote? Franklin emphasizes the importance of the pause. Before reacting to something online, before getting swept into outrage, take a step back. Ask: What is happening here? What am I feeling? Is this a real threat, or is my mind generating a reaction?
“It’s extremely hard to do online,” Franklin admits. “But when we practice stepping back, we can respond more humanely—more divinely. That’s the key to reclaiming critical thinking in a world that thrives on emotional manipulation.”
The digital age bombards us with narratives designed to capture our attention, manipulate our emotions, and direct our beliefs. But we are not powerless.
On an episode last season, we discussed a concept I learned from Dr. Greg Karris—something he calls narcissistic rage in fundamentalist ideologies.It helped me understand why people react so viscerally when their beliefs are challenged. My friend Jay described a similar idea as emotional hijacks, tying it to the amygdala’s response. This concept also appears in Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Daniel Goleman and is expanded upon in Pete Walker’s Complex PTSD.
When the amygdala gets triggered—exactly what Franklin was describing—we have to learn to recognize the physical sensations that come with it. Elevated heart rate. Sweaty palms. That’s your body sounding the alarm. But in that moment, your prefrontal cortex—the part responsible for logic and rational thinking—is offline. Your biology is overriding your soul’s intention. And that’s why taking a step back is so crucial.
The best way to get your higher reasoning back online? Create space. Pause. Let the emotional surge settle before you engage. As simple as it sounds, it’s one of the hardest things to do. But in a world where reactionary thinking is the default, practicing this skill is an act of rebellion—and a path to reclaiming our intellectual and emotional sovereignty.
Next, Franklin and I dive into a pressing issue: The Coddling of the Mind in society—a theme I’ve explored numerous times on the podcast and in my blogs. Franklin brings up a fascinating point, saying, “One thing that’s happened with COVID, though it started before, is the softening of humanity. We’ve become so soft that you can’t say anything anymore. And what that’s done is pushed away true intellectual rigor. We used to be able to sit and share ideas, but now we’re obsessed with safe spaces. And this started on college campuses.”
Franklin’s observation taps into a broader cultural shift that has eroded the foundations of intellectual engagement. In the past, people could engage in discussions where the goal wasn’t necessarily to convince others, but to explore ideas, challenge assumptions, and learn. The push for safe spaces—often an attempt to shield individuals from discomfort or offense—has inadvertently led to the silencing of open debate. In this environment, people have become more focused on avoiding offense than on confronting difficult ideas or engaging in intellectual rigor. This dynamic, Franklin argues, has stripped away the very essence of what it means to debate, discuss, and learn.
This idea echoes themes explored in Gad Saad’s The Parasitic Mind, where Saad delves into how certain ideologies undermine intellectual diversity and critical thinking. Franklin builds on this, urging that true intellectual growth comes from understanding where someone is coming from, even if their views differ from your own. “Learn what happened to individuals to understand how they arrived at their conclusions,” he says. “Remove personal bias and avoid attacks. Only then can you critique the point effectively, offering counterpoints that strengthen both arguments and allow experiences from both sides to shine.” This approach, Franklin explains, fosters a more nuanced understanding of each other’s perspectives, allowing both sides to learn and grow rather than simply entrenched in opposing views.
This fragility encourages echo chambers and groupthink, where dissent is silenced, and alternative perspectives are rejected outright. Ironically, in the pursuit of empathy, freedom, and inclusivity, movements like deconstruction can end up mirroring the same intellectual and moral rigidity they sought to escape.
I could continue typing out the entire conversation, or you could just listen. 🙂
In an age where the appearance of truth is often prioritized over truth itself, our ability to think critically is more important than ever. This episode is an invitation to break free from intellectual complacency and reclaim the power of questioning.
Taste0ftruth Tuesdays 