Panpsychism, the Emergence Problem, and the Fractures Inside Mythicism with Dr. Skrbina
Today’s conversation isn’t just about whether Jesus existed.
It’s about something sitting underneath that entire debate.
Most mythicist conversations, meaning scholars and skeptics who argue that Jesus may be a literary or constructed figure, operate inside a philosophical framework called materialism.
Materialism in this sense doesn’t simply mean “trust science.” It’s a deeper metaphysical claim: that everything that exists is ultimately physical. Matter is fundamental, and consciousness is something the brain produces when matter is arranged in the right way.
Revisit a past episode where we discussed the dogma of materialism further
In that picture, mind comes after matter. Meaning comes after biology. Religion becomes a byproduct of social evolution.
But there’s a philosophical tension hiding inside that assumption.
Evolution can explain how biological bodies change. It can describe how organisms adapt and diversify. What it does not explain is something much more basic:
Why is there subjective experience at all? Why does pain actually hurt? Why does the color red look like something?
If matter is completely mindless at the ground level, how does experience suddenly appear?
Philosophers call this the emergence problem.
One alternative view (panpsychism) proposes that consciousness isn’t produced by matter at all. Instead, consciousness may be fundamental to reality itself.
That’s where philosopher Dr. David Skrbina enters the conversation.
His book Panpsychism in the West traces this idea across centuries of philosophical thought, showing that the notion of a mind-infused cosmos has appeared again and again throughout Western intellectual history.
But Skrbina has also stepped directly into the mythicist debate with his book The Jesus Hoax. More recently, he published a sharp response to criticism from fellow skeptics David Fitzgerald and Richard Carrier.
Add to that Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception, which approaches early Christianity from yet another angle, and something interesting starts to appear:
Mythicism isn’t a unified theory. It’s fracturing into camps.
So, this conversation moves across several layers at once:
• consciousness and materialism • the emergence problem • whether panpsychism overlaps with Neoplatonism • Paul: historical strategist or literary construct? • and how The Jesus Hoax differs from The Jesus Deception
Let’s start with the philosophical ground beneath it all.
Consciousness and the Return of Panpsychism
Panpsychism is one of those philosophical ideas that sounds strange the first time you hear it but becomes harder to dismiss the more you think about the alternatives.
In plain terms, the idea is simple: mind or experience may exist at some level throughout reality.
That doesn’t mean rocks are thinking thoughts. Rather, it suggests that the basic constituents of the universe may possess extremely simple forms of experience.
The reason this idea keeps resurfacing across centuries of philosophy is precisely because of the emergence problem.
If consciousness appears only when matter becomes sufficiently complex, we still have to explain how completely mindless matter suddenly gives rise to subjective experience.
Panpsychism flips that question around. Instead of asking how consciousness emerges from matter, it proposes that matter itself may already possess proto-mental properties.
Skrbina’s historical work traces this idea from ancient Greek philosophy through early modern thinkers and into contemporary debates in philosophy of mind.
The interesting thing is that the idea never quite disappears. Even in periods dominated by strict materialism, it keeps resurfacing whenever philosophers run into the same problem: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical processes.
Materialism and the Emergence Problem
Materialism has been extraordinarily successful as a scientific framework.
It assumes that the universe is composed of physical entities governed by consistent laws. That assumption has allowed science to model everything from particle physics to molecular biology.
But when we apply that framework to consciousness, something unusual happens.
If matter is entirely mindless at the fundamental level, then at some point in the evolutionary process subjective experience must suddenly appear.
But where?
There’s no obvious “magic neuron” where awareness switches on. There’s no clear moment in development when matter transforms from non-experiencing to experiencing.
This is the emergence problem in its most basic form: explaining how subjective experience arises from purely physical systems.
Some scientists have attempted to address this by looking deeper into physics itself. Theories like Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff’s Orch-OR model propose that consciousness may be connected to quantum processes occurring inside neurons.
Whether or not those models succeed, they reveal something important: even within science, researchers are exploring ways to rethink the relationship between mind and matter.
Panpsychism is one such attempt.
Is Panpsychism Just Neoplatonism?
Because panpsychism proposes a cosmos infused with mind, people often assume it’s simply a modern version of Neoplatonism.
But the two traditions aren’t identical.
Neoplatonism describes reality as a hierarchical structure flowing from the One— a metaphysical unity that gives rise to intellect and soul. It carries strong teleological and ethical implications about how humans align themselves with the structure of reality.
Panpsychism, by contrast, is often framed as a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of matter and consciousness, without necessarily including the moral or spiritual framework found in Neoplatonic thought.
Still, the overlap is hard to ignore. Both challenge the idea that the universe is purely mechanical.
Both suggest that mind and reality may be deeply intertwined.
The Mythicism Debate Fractures
Another interesting tension here is that some of the things Skrbina is criticized for aren’t that far from ideas that already exist in mythicist literature.
One of the central claims in The Jesus Hoax is that St Paul and a small cabal of early Christians may have functioned as a kind of non-military strategy within the Roman world. Instead of armed revolt, the movement theologically conquered by the spread through ideas, theology, and cultural influence.
Skrbina frames this as a kind of ideological or narrative strategy that could reshape behavior across the empire.
What makes the criticism somewhat puzzling is that a similar concept appears in Richard Carrier’s own work.
In Not the Impossible Faith, Carrier describes early Christianity as a movement that spread not through military rebellion but through cultural transformation. Rome could defeat armed revolts, but it could not easily suppress ideas that moved through communities, texts, and belief.
Carrier even characterizes this as a kind of revolutionary strategy. If Rome would always win a military conflict, the only rebellion that could succeed would be a cultural one— a war ofideas rather than armies. (Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, Ch. 9).
In that sense, the notion that early Christianity functioned as a non-military cultural movement is not controversial. It is widely recognized that the early Jesus movement spread through persuasion, networks, and theology rather than organized violence.
Where the real disagreement emerges is over intent and origin.
Skrbina interprets this cultural transformation as something that may have been deliberately constructed or strategically shaped. His critics tend to view it as an organic religious development rather than a coordinated narrative project.
Another point raised in the exchange concerns the authorship of the gospels, particularly the question of whether Luke was a Gentile writer. Skrbina notes that even if certain details of authorship were revised, for example: if Luke were ultimately shown to be Gentile, the core structure of his argument would not collapse. It would simply require refinement.
That willingness to concede smaller points while maintaining the broader model is something he addresses repeatedly in his response.
The broader takeaway from this debate is that mythicism itself is not a single theory. It is a field where scholars often agree that the traditional gospel narrative is historically unreliable but disagree sharply about what actually replaced it.
One of the most important figures in this entire discussion is Paul of Tarsus.
Skrbina’s model treats Paul as a strategic actor who played a central role in shaping early Christian theology.
But other scholars have raised a more radical possibility: that the Pauline corpus itself may not represent a stable first-century historical figure at all.
Research such as Nina Livesey’s work on the Roman literary context of the Pauline letters suggests that some of these texts may reflect later second-century developments.
If Paul himself were partly a literary construct, it would reshape the debate considerably.
Yet even in that scenario, Skrbina argues, the broader thesis of deliberate narrative construction would not necessarily collapse. It would simply require revision.
Adam Green and the Midrashic Jesus
Adam Green’s recent book The Jesus Deception adds another dimension to the conversation.
Green emphasizes the possibility that the gospel narratives were crafted through midrashic techniques, weaving together Hebrew scriptures to construct the story of Jesus.
This raises a broader question about how religious narratives function historically.
Are they simply stories? Or do they operate as cultural scripts that shape behavior across entire societies?
Green invokes a concept from cultural theory called hyperstition: the idea that beliefs can begin to influence reality because people act as if those beliefs are true.
In other words, a prophecy doesn’t need to be literally true to become historically powerful.
It only needs to be believed strongly enough that people start behaving in ways that bring it about.
That possibility becomes particularly interesting when we look at modern geopolitics.
Some recent reports have suggested that military personnel have framed conflicts in the Middle East through apocalyptic biblical language, describing events as part of a divine plan leading toward Armageddon.
Whether or not such interpretations reflect official policy, they illustrate how powerful religious narratives can be in shaping political imagination.
For readers who want to explore the topics discussed in this episode more deeply, the following books and research have shaped the ideas discussed in this conversation. These works cover philosophy of consciousness, panpsychism, early Christianity, and the intellectual history of the ancient world.
Philosophy of Consciousness & Panpsychism
Panpsychism in the West – David Skrbina A comprehensive historical survey tracing the idea that mind or experience may be fundamental to reality across centuries of Western philosophy.
Science Set Free – Rupert Sheldrake A critique of the assumptions underlying modern scientific materialism and an exploration of alternative ways of thinking about nature, consciousness, and scientific inquiry.
The Emperor’s New Mind – Roger Penrose A physicist’s investigation into the nature of consciousness, the limits of artificial intelligence, and the possibility that consciousness is tied to deeper physical processes in the universe.
The Jesus Hoax – David Skrbina Explores the possibility that early Christian narratives functioned as a strategic cultural movement within the Roman world.
The Jesus Deception – Adam Green Argues that the story of Jesus may have been constructed through Jewish midrashic storytelling traditions.
Not the Impossible Faith – Richard Carrier Carrier’s argument that Christianity’s success in the Roman Empire was historically improbable given the cultural environment of the time.
The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context – Nina Livesey A scholarly examination of whether the Pauline letters reflect later Roman literary production and rhetorical conventions.
The Opening of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman A history of classical Greek and Roman intellectual traditions and the philosophical foundations of the ancient world.
The Closing of the Western Mind – Charles Freeman Examines how classical philosophical traditions were gradually replaced by Christian orthodoxy in late antiquity.
A historical documentary blended with a personal reckoning and a cultural warning
This one has been sitting with me for a long time.
Six months, maybe more. Notes in the book margins. Tons of screenshots. Quotes stacked in my notes folder. Books half-highlighted and folded pages revisited. Every time I thought I was ready to write it, I wasn’t…
Because this isn’t just about history. It’s about a story we keep repeating with confidence: that Christianity saved the West and what happens when you actually slow down to examine that claim.
The claim that Christianity civilized Europe. Christianity gave us human rights, pluralism, rational inquiry, restraint. And if Western civilization feels unstable today, the prescription is simple— return to Christian moral supremacy.
I find myself increasingly tired of hearing it.
Tired of watching “Judeo-Christian values” invoked as shorthand for liberty. Tired of hearing that our freedoms, our intellectual life, our legal architecture all flow directly from the Bible. Tired of the way paganism is casually used as a synonym for barbarism, ego, domination — while Christianity is cast as the moral counterweight, the conscience that civilizes power.
A recent example sharpened that fatigue. Leighton Woodhouse published an opinion piece in The New York Times titled Donald Trump, Pagan King. The framing was familiar and rhetorically smooth. Paganism was associated with appetite, force, and unchecked authority. Christianity appeared as restraint, humility, moral seriousness. The implication was subtle but unmistakable: whatever is broken in our politics represents a departure from Christian virtue.
The structure of this narrative is ancient. Pagan equals raw power. Christian equals moral discipline.
But that framing rests on an assumption that deserves far more scrutiny than it receives. It assumes that Christianity is the moral software of the West. Before it, there was chaos; after it, civilization.
The deeper I have gone into late antiquity, through Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age, Charles Freeman’s analysis of intellectual narrowing, Ramsay MacMullen’s documentation of coercive conversion, and through primary sources from both Christian and pagan voices— the more that tidy civilizational story begins to unravel.
Because when Christianity gained institutional dominance, what followed was not the natural flowering of pluralism and inquiry. It was very opposite.
And for us to truly understand, we have to begin this story before Christianity held power.
A World Before Monopoly
The Greco-Roman world was not a utopia. It had power structures, that were often violent, and deeply unequal. But it operated within a religious and intellectual framework that functioned very differently from exclusive monotheism.
Roman religion was additive rather than subtractive. One could honor household gods, civic gods, the imperial cult, foreign deities, and philosophical conceptions of the divine without renouncing the others. Orthopraxy mattered more than orthodoxy. What counted was correct ritual performance, not exclusive belief. The pax deorum (the peace with the gods) was maintained through observance, not doctrinal conformity.
Philosophically, multiplicity was the norm. Stoics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Platonists argued openly about cosmology, ethics, and the nature of reality. Protagoras could admit uncertainty about the gods without being erased from the record. Cicero articulated natural law grounded in reason and universality long before Christianity gained political authority. Debate was public. Rhetorical training was a civic skill. Argument was like oxygen at the time.
Cicero
The Roman legal system developed sophisticated structures of administration and legislation that would profoundly shape Western law. None of this depended on exclusive revelation. It depended on human reasoning operating within a plural environment.
Rome suppressed what it perceived as politically dangerous. It was capable of cruelty. But structurally, it tolerated metaphysical competition. Truth was not framed as singular and jealous in the way later Christian orthodoxy would insist.
Christianity did not enter this world as one more school of thought among many. It entered with a different moral architecture. Not “add Christ to the pantheon.”
But “burn down the rest.”
That distinction is not merely cosmetic. It is foundational to understanding the real history.
The Architecture of Exclusivity
The Hebrew scriptures that Christianity inherited contain a recurring moral posture toward rival worship. Altars are to be broken down. Sacred groves burned. Idols smashed. “You shall have no other gods before me” is not a suggestion of preference; it is a declaration of exclusivity. Rival worship is not seen as a mere mistake; it is corrupting.
When confined to private devotion, this posture functions as identity formation. When fused with state power, it moves from conviction to coercion.
For the first three centuries of its existence, Christianity lacked imperial authority. It survived in the margins of society. The decisive shift came when Christianity aligned with imperial power under Constantine and his successors.
Estimates vary, but many scholars place Christians at roughly ten percent of the empire around the year 300. The exact percentage is debated (ancient demographic modeling is necessarily approximate) but the trajectory is clear. Within a few generations, that minority became the ruling faith. By the end of the fourth century, imperial law assumed Christianity as normative and increasingly treated rival ritual as illegal.
This demographic reversal was not merely theological. It was political.
Once exclusivist theology acquired enforcement capacity, differences in beliefs was no longer merely error. It was threat.
In the 380s and 390s, imperial edicts against non-Christian ritual multiplied. In 399, a Christian emperor issued a decree stating:
“If there should be any temples in the country districts, they shall be torn down without disturbance or tumult. For when they are torn down and removed, the material basis for all superstition will be destroyed.”
The language is bureaucratic. The effect was not.
These edicts provided legal cover for demolition. Bishops lobbied rulers for stricter laws. Congregations became demolition crews. Rival worship was framed as superstition whose material foundation had to be eradicated.
As Ramsay MacMullendemonstrates, once rival belief is conceptualized as spiritually dangerous, compromise becomes morally suspect. In a plural system, rivals are mistaken. In an exclusivist system, rivals are demonic. And demons are not debated. They are expelled.
This is the mechanism. And it becomes visible in stone.
Once theology fused with imperial authority, enforcement did not remain theoretical. It moved outward into public space. It moved into cities. It moved into stone.
Catherine Nixey opens The Darkening Age not with doctrine but with an image. The choice is deliberate. Arguments can be abstract. Statues cannot.
The Temple of Athena in Palmyra had stood for centuries. It was not a relic in a museum. It was part of a living civic landscape. Its columns had watched merchants pass through the city, soldiers march under banners, pilgrims move between worlds. Within it stood Athena— goddess of wisdom, of strategic intelligence, of disciplined thought. She represented more than devotion. She embodied the classical inheritance itself: philosophy, rhetoric, ordered reasoning, the cultivation of mind.
When the destroyers arrived, what they attacked was not simply stone.
Nixey describes a man entering the temple with a weapon and striking the back of Athena’s head with such force that the goddess was decapitated. The violence did not stop there. Her nose was sliced off. Her cheeks crushed. Her once composed face mutilated with intention.
And yet her eyes were left intact.
Those eyes still exist.
They look out from a ruined face that once symbolized wisdom.
This was not accidental vandalism. It was theology enacted physically. The old gods were not to be debated, not to be reinterpreted, not to be absorbed into new meaning. They were to be neutralized. Their presence was dangerous. Their very material existence was a threat to salvation.
The word often used for this period is triumph. Christianity triumphed over paganism. But triumph over what? Over multiplicity? Over a world in which philosophical disagreement could exist without annihilation? Over the idea that wisdom might not belong exclusively to one revelation?
The violence at Palmyra was not isolated. Temples across the empire were damaged, repurposed, stripped of ornament, or demolished. Some were converted into churches. Others were dismantled entirely. Sacred spaces that had structured civic and religious life for centuries were rendered spiritually illegitimate almost overnight.
What makes the image of Athena more destabilizing is its repetition.
In 2015, Islamic State militants bulldozed the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud because it was deemed idolatrous. The reconstructed remnants of Athena were attacked again. Beheaded again. An arm sheared off again.
Different century. Different scripture. Different empire.
Same logic. When rival sacred presence is conceptualized as contamination, destruction becomes purification.
This is not about equivalence between traditions. It is about structure. When any Abrahamic framework defines truth as singular, exclusive, and threatened by proximity to rivals, pluralism becomes fragile. Once that framework acquires political power, fragility becomes enforcement.
And enforcement does not stop at statues.
Hypatia and the Enforcement of Certainty
If Athena represents symbolic erasure, Hypatia represents human cost.
Hypatia of Alexandria was not an obscure mystic. She was a philosopher, mathematician, and teacher in a city long known for intellectual life. Alexandria had been home to the great library and to competing schools of thought for centuries. Hypatia occupied a visible position within that tradition.
By the early fifth century, Alexandria was also home to a group known as the parabalani — often translated as “the reckless ones.” Officially devoted to acts of charity, they functioned in practice as muscle for ecclesiastical authority. By some estimates there were hundreds of them in the city. Roman legal documents describe them using the word terror.
Hypatia lived in the same civic space as these enforcers.
Her murder was not random street violence. It occurred within an atmosphere already shaped by escalating Christian authority and shrinking tolerance for rival influence. When exclusivist theology defines truth as singular and civic order as dependent upon that truth, intellectual figures outside that structure become destabilizing.
Hypatia was stripped, beaten, and killed by a mob associated with Christian zeal.
Her death did not mark the beginning of violence. It marked the normalization of it.
Once difference is framed as corruption and corruption as emergency, elimination becomes defensible.
This pattern appears again and again in late antiquity. Pagan philosophers were exiled. Schools were closed. Public debate narrowed. The emperor Justinian would eventually close the philosophical schools of Athens entirely. Inquiry did not vanish overnight, but the atmosphere changed. What had once been competition became suspicion.
And suspicion reshapes a civilization quietly before it reshapes it violently.
Fear as Teacher
One of the most revealing threads in the historical record is not the destruction itself but the emotional atmosphere that made it possible.
Demonology was not marginal superstition. It structured perception. Pagan temples were described as inhabited by malevolent spirits. Sacrifices were not merely mistaken rituals but demonic feasts. The world itself became morally charged terrain.
The Devil Belial before the Gates of Hell, from Das Buch Belial, published in Augsburg, 1473
Christians wrote anxious letters asking whether they could sit in places pagans had sat, use baths used on feast days, drink from wells near deserted temples, eat food that might have been associated with sacrifice. The fear was not symbolic. It was visceral.
Augustine’s response: that it was better to refuse contaminated food with Christian fortitude even if one starved, reveals a hierarchy of values. Survival could be negotiable. Purity could not.
John Chrysostom’s sermons described eternal punishment in sensory detail: rivers of fire, venomous worms, inescapable bonds, exterior darkness. Fear was not incidental rhetoric. It trained the imagination to view error as catastrophe and proximity to rival belief as existential threat.
When fear becomes formative, pluralism becomes psychologically intolerable.
And when that psychology is paired with law, narrowing becomes institutional.
The Disappearance of Thought
The destruction of statues is visible. The destruction of thought is quieter.
One of the most devastating aspects of late antique Christianization was not merely the smashing of temples but the narrowing of what was considered worth preserving.
The ancient Mediterranean world once contained the greatest concentration of written knowledge humanity had yet assembled. The Library of Alexandria, even allowing for scholarly debate about its exact size, symbolized an ambition toward accumulation. Knowledge was not singular. It was expansive. It was contradictory. It was messy.
Scholars selecting and reading scrolls in the Great Library of Alexandria hall
What remains of that intellectual inheritance is fragmentary.
By some estimates, only about one percent of Latin literature survives from antiquity. Entire authors are known only by name. Entire schools of philosophy survive only in hostile summaries written by opponents. Whole lines of speculation disappeared not because they were refuted but because they were not copied.
Copying is survival.
In the late antique world, the people doing the copying increasingly operated within Christian institutions.
And institutions preserve selectively.
“Stay clear of all pagan books!” reads the Apostolic Constitution. The warning is not casual. It reflects a moral anxiety about contamination. Texts are not neutral. They are spiritually charged. Exposure to the wrong argument is dangerous.
Celsus, one of the few pagan critics whose voice survives, accused Christians of discouraging inquiry. He mocked the posture: “Do not ask questions; just believe.” His tone is sharp, even sarcastic, but the anxiety is real. In Greek philosophy, reason was virtue. Inquiry was sacred. Faith, as unexamined assent, was the lowest epistemic posture.
Even Origen, writing within the Christian tradition, conceded the problem with striking bluntness, remarking that “the stupidity of some Christians is heavier than the sand of the sea.” The anti-intellectual reputation of early Christianity was not a later invention. It was noted by contemporaries.
The tragedy of Democritus crystallizes this narrowing.
Democritus — the philosopher often described as the father of atomic theory — wrote extensively across cosmology, mathematics, and ethics. He proposed a universe composed of atoms and void centuries before modern physics. And yet none of his works survive intact.
Not one.
What we know of his thought survives because it was partially preserved inside a single poem, Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, which itself survived precariously through a single manuscript discovered in a German monastery centuries later.
The physicist Carlo Rovelli has called the total loss of Democritus’s writings “the greatest intellectual tragedy to ensue from the collapse of the old classical civilisation.”
An entire philosophical lineage survived by accident.
That should unsettle anyone who claims Christianity simply “preserved learning.”
Yes, monasteries copied texts. But copying is filtration. Texts deemed dangerous, frivolous, obscene, or spiritually corrupt were less likely to be preserved. When a civilization narrows its moral boundaries, its archive narrows with it.
Charles Freeman, in The Closing of the Western Mind, argues that the most significant shift was not physical destruction but the narrowing of acceptable modes of thought. Public philosophical debate gradually gave way to appeals to authority and revealed certainty. Disputes were settled by councils backed by imperial power. Orthodoxy was defined not by open inquiry but by boundary enforcement.
The world did not stop thinking overnight. But the conditions for free competition of ideas shifted.
And once intellectual diversity contracts, recovery takes centuries.
The Martyr Myth and Moral Insulation
The martyr narrative sits at the emotional center of Christian self-understanding. It does more than preserve memory. It defines identity.
The story is familiar: early Christians were persecuted by a pagan empire. They were imprisoned, tortured, executed for their faith. They endured without retaliation. They did not conquer. They survived.
There is truth in this. The Great Persecution under Diocletian was real and brutal. Scriptures were burned. Churches destroyed. Christians were imprisoned and executed. No serious historian denies that.
What modern scholarship questions is scale and continuity. The most severe empire-wide persecution lasted roughly a decade. Other persecutions were local, sporadic, and uneven across regions. They were not a continuous three-century campaign of systematic eradication.
Martyr literature itself expanded over time. Detailed analysis of saints’ calendars reveals duplication, embellishment, and narrative layering. Some figures appear under multiple names. Some accounts contain anachronisms or miraculous flourishes that complicate their historical reliability.
The historian G. E. M. de Ste. Croix observed that later martyr literature increasingly displayed what he called “a contempt for historicity.”
That line matters. Because it signals a shift: suffering was not only remembered. It was shaped.
And shaped suffering serves a purpose.
Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian is an Italian Renaissance Tempera Painting created by Andrea Mantegna in c.1480.
Once Christianity aligned with imperial authority, the martyr narrative did not recede. It hardened into interpretive insulation. The same tradition that now authorized temple closures and school shuttings still understood itself as historically persecuted.
The story generates moral asymmetry: whatever Christians do can be framed as response, not domination.
And the function of the martyr narrative did not end in late antiquity. In modern apologetics, it often operates as proof. The logic runs like this: the apostles would not have died for something they knew was false; early Christians endured torture rather than recant; therefore, their testimony must be true.
But willingness to suffer proves sincerity, not metaphysical accuracy. People across religions have died for beliefs that contradict one another. Martyrdom establishes conviction. It does not establish truth.
This is why the martyr story is so stabilizing. It allows a movement to wield authority while retaining the self-image ofinnocence. It transforms power into protection and critique into persecution.
When temples were outlawed and philosophical schools shuttered, the tradition exercising authority did not see itself as conqueror. It saw itself as guardian of truth under threat.
If you are always defending truth, enforcement feels righteous.
The Last Pleas for Coexistence
One of the tragedies of this period is that the archive becomes overwhelmingly Christian. The winners preserved their own voices. The losing side survives in fragments.
But some fragments remain.
Libanius, a pagan orator in the fourth century, watched as temples across the empire were damaged, repurposed, or destroyed. His speeches are not the rantings of a fanatic. They are the anxious observations of a man watching his world contract. He describes sacred spaces falling into ruin, rituals forbidden, property seized. He notes opportunists dividing temple lands for personal gain under the cover of piety. What Christian historians later frame as triumph, Libanius experiences as loss.
Then there is Symmachus.
In 382 CE, the Christian emperor Gratian ordered the removal of the Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate House. For centuries, senators had offered ritual observances there before conducting civic business. It was not merely religious decoration; it was part of Rome’s public identity.
Symmachus wrote an appeal for its restoration.
His language is remarkable for its restraint. He does not demand dominance. He does not threaten revolt. He argues for coexistence.
“We look on the same stars,” he writes. “The sky is common. The same world surrounds us. What difference does it make by what pains each seeks the truth? We cannot attain to so great a secret by one road alone.”
It is difficult to imagine a clearer articulation of pluralism in the ancient world.
He closes not with hostility but with humility: “We offer now prayers, not conflict.”
He lost. The altar was not restored. The plea for multiplicity was overridden by certainty.
This moment matters because it reveals a collision between two moral architectures. One sees truth as approached through many paths. The other sees truth as singular and threatened by rival proximity.
Symmachus represents not pagan decadence but civic pluralism. He is not asking to suppress Christianity. He is asking for coexistence.
The answer he receives is enforcement. The narrowing was not accidental. It was structural.
The Long Return of Pluralism
The narrowing of late antiquity did not permanently extinguish intellectual life. But it did change its conditions. For centuries, inquiry moved within theological boundaries defined by ecclesiastical authority. Councils determined orthodoxy. Deviation could be punished. Philosophical speculation survived, but often cautiously, often cloaked.
What we now call the Enlightenment did not arise as a natural extension of Christian supremacy. It arose within tension — sometimes quiet, sometimes explosive — with religious monopoly.
Beginning in the Renaissance, Europe experienced a gradual rediscovery of classical texts. Manuscripts long buried in monastic libraries re-entered circulation. Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, preserving echoes of Democritus’s atomism, resurfaced. Greek philosophy was studied not merely as commentary on theology but as intellectual inheritance in its own right.
The recovery of classical thought did not instantly dissolve Christian authority. But it reintroduced plurality into the bloodstream of European intellectual life.
The Enlightenment sharpened that reintroduction.
Thinkers like John Locke articulated natural rights grounded not in revelation but in reason and shared human nature. Locke’s arguments for religious toleration did not emerge from biblical exclusivity; they emerged from a recognition that coercion in matters of belief corrupts both faith and civic peace.
Montesquieu analyzed the separation of powers not as a theological doctrine but as a structural safeguard against concentration of authority. His framework was explicitly concerned with preventing tyranny — whether monarchic or clerical.
These ideas did not descend seamlessly from medieval orthodoxy. They developed alongside, and often in resistance to, religious entanglement with state power.
When we reach the American founding, the tension becomes explicit.
The framers of the Constitution were deeply literate in classical thought. They read Cicero. They read Tacitus. They studied Roman republicanism. They were steeped in Enlightenment political theory. They feared concentrated power, including ecclesiastical power.
The Constitution contains no reference to Jesus Christ. It prohibits religious tests for office. The First Amendment forbids establishment of religion and protects free exercise. This was not a casual omission. It was intentional architecture.
The American experiment was not a biblical republic.
It was a republic designed to prevent religious monopoly.
Thomas Jefferson provides a particularly revealing case. Jefferson famously produced his own edited version of the Gospels, physically cutting out miracles and supernatural elements. The result, often referred to as the Jefferson Bible, retained ethical teachings while discarding divine intervention.
This was not the act of a man seeking to found a theocracy.
It was the act of a man separating moral philosophy from revealed absolutism.
Jefferson’s project reflects a broader Enlightenment impulse: to preserve ethical insight while disentangling it from exclusivist authority.
Roger Olson’s theological scholarship further complicates the claim that Christianity simply “gave us” pluralism. Olson emphasizes that Christianity was never doctrinally uniform in its early centuries. Orthodoxy was consolidated through contest, suppression, and boundary enforcement. The unity later invoked as civilizational foundation was itself the product of narrowing.
The Enlightenment did not grow naturally from that narrowing. It reopened debate.
It reintroduced skepticism as virtue.
It separated church and state not to destroy religion but to protect civic plurality.
If Christianity had already secured pluralism, the Enlightenment would have been unnecessary.
The fact that it was necessary tells us something profound.
Pluralism survived not because exclusivity reigned, but because exclusivity was restrained.
Did Christianity Give Us Human Rights?
At this point, the most common objection surfaces.
Even if there were excesses. Even if there was narrowing. Even if temples fell and texts disappeared. Christianity still gave us the concept of human dignity. Christianity laid the groundwork for human rights.
The claim sounds intuitive because Christian theology does contain a powerful moral idea: humans are made in the image of God. That idea has inspired reformers and abolitionists and activists. It matters.
But the existence of moral language is not the same thing as institutional pluralism.
The Stoics articulated a form of universal human rationality centuries before Christianity held power. Roman law developed ideas of legal personhood and universality that would influence later legal systems. Cicero’s natural law did not depend on revelation.
Christianity contributed to moral discourse. That is true.
But the institutional protection of dissent: the right to disagree publicly, to publish heterodox ideas, to worship differently without legal annihilation… did not emerge during periods of Christian monopoly. Those protections developed when religious authority was structurally limited.
Rights require restraint of power.
And historically, the moments when Christianity was most fused with state authority were not the moments when pluralism expanded.
What This Feels Like From the Inside
What unsettles me most about this history is not simply that it happened. It is that I recognize the mechanism.
I have lived the internal version of it.
Burn the books. Throw away the tarot cards. Remove your new age spirituality material. Avoid contamination of demonic entities. Guard the mind. Monitor the thoughts. Stay pure.
When you inhabit Christianity long enough, the anxiety internalizes. You become your own enforcer. You police your curiosity. You treat rival ideas not as intellectual challenges but as spiritual threats.
When I read about Christians in late antiquity asking whether they could sit where pagans had sat or drink from wells near deserted temples, it was too relatable.
The narrowing does not begin with demolition crews. It begins with fear.
Fear reshapes perception. Fear shrinks curiosity. Fear frames difference as danger.
Scale that fear across institutions and you have late antiquity.
Scale it across a nation and you have something far more consequential.
The Warning
This is why the rhetoric of Christian supremacy unsettles me.
Not because Christianity has contributed nothing to Western civilization. It has shaped art, music, law, charity, moral imagination. That is undeniable.
Much of this period is still narrated as civilizational triumph rather than suppression. As the academic John Pollini notes, “modern scholarship, influenced by a Judeo-Christian cultural bias, has frequently overlooked or downplayed such attacks and even at times sought to present Christian desecration in a positive light.”
But the claim that Christianity saved the West collapses complexity into myth. It erases the plural foundations of Greco-Roman thought. It erases the Enlightenment’s deliberate separation of church and state. It erases the long struggle to restrain religious monopoly.
Reformers like John Calvin did not argue for a secular state. In his Institutes, Calvin insisted that magistrates had a duty to suppress blasphemy and false worship.
Pluralism did not emerge from supremacy.
It survived by limiting it.
When modern commentators frame Christianity as the sole guardian of civilization and paganism as barbaric force, they repeat a frame older than they realize. They invoke a story in which exclusivity is equated with order and multiplicity with chaos.
History suggests something different.
Civilizations are stabilized not by monopoly but by constraint. Not by erasing rivals but by tolerating them. Not by conflating revelation with law but by separating the two.
If we forget that, if we mythologize exclusivity as the foundation of freedom, we risk mistaking that narrowing for renewal.
And that is not a mistake history makes gently.
aaaand that’s all I have for you today folks. If you’ve been here for a while, you know this is what Taste of Truth Tuesdays is about. Not tearing down for sport. Not defending tradition out of reflex. But slowing down long enough to ask: Is the story we’re repeating actually true?
and As always…
Maintain your curiosity. Embrace skepticism. And keep tuning in.
Endnotes
Leighton Woodhouse, “Donald Trump, Pagan King,” The New York Times, February 11, 2026. (Referenced as an example of contemporary framing of paganism versus Christianity.)
Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason (New York: Knopf, 2002). Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–400) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). See also Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).
On Roman religion as orthopraxic and plural in structure, see: Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jörg Rüpke, Religion of the Romans (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
Cicero’s articulation of natural law appears in De Re Publica and De Legibus. See: Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge University Press, 1999).
On late fourth-century anti-pagan legislation, see: Theodosian Code 16.10 (various edicts restricting sacrifice and authorizing temple closures). For analysis: Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2002). Ramsay MacMullen, Christianizing the Roman Empire.
On the debated scope and frequency of early Christian persecutions: Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution (HarperOne, 2013). G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, Christian Persecution, Martyrdom, and Orthodoxy (Oxford University Press, 2006). These works challenge the traditional narrative of continuous empire-wide persecution and note embellishment in later martyr literature.
On the parabalani and Hypatia: Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, Book VII. Christopher Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher (Oxford University Press, 2017). Roman legislation regulating the parabalani appears in Theodosian Code 16.2.42 and related laws.
On the Altar of Victory controversy and Symmachus: Symmachus, Relatio 3 (Petition for the Restoration of the Altar of Victory). Ambrose of Milan’s response in Epistle 17–18. See also: Michele Renee Salzman, The Making of a Christian Aristocracy.
On demonology and late antique Christian perceptions of paganism: Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Blackwell, 1996). Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age. Brown discusses the moralization of the inner life and late antique anxiety regarding contamination and spiritual danger.
On the survival rate of classical literature: It is widely acknowledged among classicists that only a small fraction of ancient literature survives. See: Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Harvard University Press, 1997). James J. O’Donnell, Avatars of the Word (Harvard University Press, 1998). The exact percentage is debated, but the scale of loss is undisputed.
On Democritus and the loss of his works: Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Book IX). Carlo Rovelli, Reality Is Not What It Seems (Riverhead Books, 2016), where Rovelli refers to the loss of Democritus as a major intellectual tragedy. Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, as the principal ancient source preserving atomist philosophy.
On the closure of pagan philosophical schools under Justinian: Procopius, Secret History. Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation (University of California Press, 2015).
On Enlightenment political theory and religious toleration: John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689). Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748).
On Thomas Jefferson’s edited Bible: Thomas Jefferson, The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (commonly known as the Jefferson Bible), completed in 1820. See also: Edwin Gaustad, Sworn on the Altar of God: A Religious Biography of Thomas Jefferson (Eerdmans, 1996).
On early Christian theological diversity and consolidation of orthodoxy: Roger E. Olson, The Story of Christian Theology (InterVarsity Press, 1999). Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford University Press, 2003) (for broader context on early doctrinal diversity).
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.
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
Are we wearing poison? Let’s talk the Hidden Chemistry of Modern Clothing
We obsess over what goes into our bodies (the food we eat, the supplements we take) but what about what touches our skin every day? From Victorian gowns to modern period underwear, the history of fashion is riddled with invisible chemicals that make us sick, sometimes quietly, sometimes catastrophically.
In this week’s Taste of Truth Tuesdays, we explore the hidden chemistry in the fabrics we wear, the cultural stories that taught us to hide what’s natural, and small steps we can take to reclaim autonomy over our own bodies.
I sat down with Arielle, founder of Flower Girl, a brand reimagining period underwear with natural, breathable fibers— no toxic coatings, no gimmicks. But this episode isn’t just about a product. It’s about the invisible chemistry that touches our skin, and the cultural stories that taught us to hide what’s natural while normalizing what’s toxic.
🧵 A Brief History of Poisonous Fashion
From Victorian gowns to modern athleisure, fashion has a long history of exposing us (sometimes invisibly) to chemicals that affect our health. Here’s a quick dive:
Victorian Era: Those green dresses weren’t just a statement— they were laced with arsenic, and mercury-based pigments were common. The result? Rashes, lung damage, even death. Fashion literally killed.
Early 1900s: Factory workers handled lead, aniline dyes, and formaldehyde finishes. Mercury made hat-makers insane, while young women painting radium watch dials suffered bone decay and radiation poisoning.
Mid-20th century: Synthetic fabrics like nylon and polyester promised convenience and comfort — but chemical coatings for stain-proofing, wrinkle-free finishes, and flame retardants added a new layer of invisible toxins.
Modern Toxic Threads
Fast-forward to today, and the chemical story hasn’t improved much:
Plastic fibers (polyester, nylon, spandex): Shed microplastics into waterways and can absorb and re-release toxins through skin contact with these substances. And yes— even period products aren’t safe from the chemical experiment.
PFAS (“forever chemicals”): Used for stain- and water-resistance in yoga pants, athleisure, and some period underwear. Linked to hormone disruption, infertility, thyroid disease, and cancer.
Formaldehyde finishes: Wrinkle-free clothing often contains formaldehyde, a known skin irritant and probable carcinogen.
Azo dyes & heavy metals: Cheap and fast-fashion fabrics often use dyes with heavy metals, which can trigger allergic reactions and long-term organ toxicity.
Some of the most publicized cases show just how pervasive these risks are:
Thinx Period Underwear (2023): Independent testing revealed PFAS in products marketed as organic and “clean,” sparking lawsuits and class-action settlements. Even items sold as safe aren’t always free from hidden chemicals.
Flight Attendant Uniforms: Airlines like Alaska, Delta, and American faced reports of workers developing rashes, respiratory issues, and thyroid problems after new uniforms were treated with PFAS or formaldehyde coatings.
Outdoor & Athleisure Brands:Major brands like Patagonia, Lululemon, and REI have been scrutinized for PFAS in waterproof or sweat-wicking gear, showing that convenience and performance often come at a chemical cost.
Globally, more than 40,000 chemicals are used in textiles and apparel, yet only a fraction have been tested for safety— for humans, animals, or the environment. These scandals aren’t isolated; they reflect a system where toxic exposure is often invisible, normalized, and poorly regulated.
A 2024 study from UC Berkeley and Columbia found 16 different metals (including lead and arsenic) in tampons across both organic and non-organic brands. The levels were low, but researchers warned that the vaginal route is especially absorbent— a reminder that what we wear inside our bodies matters as much as what we eat.
💬 From Ritual Impurity to Hygiene Marketing
Over the last century, the cultural messaging around menstruation has shifted in a few distinct stages and each one carried the same underlying expectation: women should hide and control their bodies.
Ritual or moral framing (ancient to early modern): In many societies, including biblical times, periods were treated as a matter of ritual purity. Women were temporarily “unclean” in religious or social terms, meaning they couldn’t participate in certain activities. The focus was spiritual or moral, not about hygiene or appearance.
Hygiene framing (early 20th century): With industrialization and the rise of consumer products, periods were recast as a hygiene problem. Ads emphasized cleanliness and odor control, implying that menstruation was inherently messy or dangerous. Women were encouraged to conceal their cycles, but the emphasis was still largely about avoiding germs and embarrassment.
Performance framing (mid-to-late 20th century onward): Marketing and media shifted the conversation again, this time framing periods as an obstacle to a woman’s ability to perform socially, professionally, and physically. Products promised to let women stay active, go to work, exercise, and socialize “normally”, without anyone noticing their period. The message became: your body is natural, but it shouldn’t interfere with the image of a controlled, capable, and flawless woman.
In other words, the period itself didn’t change, but what society demanded of women did. “Performance” here doesn’t mean athletics alone— it means the expectation that women should navigate daily life seamlessly, keeping their bodies’ natural processes invisible, as if menstruation were a glitch in an otherwise perfect system.
🌍 The New Awareness
Today’s “wellness” world loves to market empowerment but secretly it’s still selling control. Arielle’s work with Flower Girl pushes against that. Her goal isn’t fearmongering about chemicals; it is about helping women rebuild trust with their own bodies, starting with the fabrics that touch them daily.
Because true control over your body is about sovereignty, not ideology.
What we wear, what we absorb, and how we relate to our cycles all tell a deeper story about modern womanhood…. one that’s overdue for rewriting.
Next Steps: What You Can Do
Read Labels Critically: Seek out brands that disclose fabric treatments and avoid PFAS, formaldehyde, or undisclosed chemical finishes. Wicker highlights the challenge in identifying safe clothing due to the lack of ingredient transparency, urging consumers to demand more disclosure from manufacturers.
Prioritize Natural Fibers: Opt for materials like cotton, bamboo, or other certified breathable fabrics to reduce your chemical load. Wicker notes that while natural fibers are generally safer, it’s crucial to ensure they are not treated with harmful chemicals during processing.
Wash New Clothes: Especially synthetics- washing before first wear can remove some surface chemicals. Wicker advises washing new garments to reduce initial chemical exposure, particularly from dyes and finishes.
Choose Sustainable Period Products: Brands like Flower Girl use body-safe fabrics designed for comfort, breathability, and longevity— and are tested for safety. Wicker emphasizes the importance of selecting period products that are free from toxic chemicals, as these items are in close contact with sensitive areas of the body.
Advocate for Transparency: Demand that brands tell you what’s in your clothing. Knowledge is power, and the more we ask, the more companies will act. Wicker encourages consumers to be vocal about their concerns, as increased demand for transparency can drive industry-wide change.
🎧 Listen In
Tune in to this week’s Taste of Truth Tuesdays episode, “What’s Really in Our Clothes (and What That Says About Us)”, where Arielle and I unpack the hidden toxins in textiles, the myths around “clean” wellness marketing, and what it really means to live in a body that’s free— not just from chemicals, but from shame.
Let’s discuss what Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, & The New Jerusalem Reveal About Power and Media
Hey Hey Welcome back to Taste of Truth Tuesdays.
At the end of last month, we started unpacking a big question: where does real power sit in our country? And how does understanding history & theology change the way we see what’s happening today?
Well, the timing couldn’t be more perfect, because right now there’s a viral clash unfolding that brings all those threads together in real time.
I just finished reading the book The New Jerusalem by Michael Collins Piper, which was written way back in 2004 and it discussed a lot of the same individuals and key information that Fuentes said during this 2-part attack on Tucker. The book is a deep dive into decades of political and financial influence shaping America. As I’m reading it, this public duel emerges between two of the loudest voices in the alt-right media: Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. And I really appreciated what Ian Carroll had to say about the subject while he reminded us why these kinds of debates aren’t just entertainment: they’re essential for discussing the truth & the health of our nation.
This isn’t gossip or drama. It’s about understanding the invisible lines drawn around what we’re allowed to talk about, what gets filtered out, and what’s shut down. If we pay attention, this moment could help move the conversation forward in ways we desperately need.
The New Jerusalem: Mapping Influence Behind the Scenes
In our previous episode, I mentioned how I truly believe that we have been an occupied nation since 1960s and Michael Piper (author of The New Jerusalem) totally agrees. He wrote a 768 page book called The Final Judgment The missing link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy and so that is just a whole nother rabbithole.
He also wrote a book called The High Priest of War which was the first full length work examining the little known history of the hardline pro Israel neoconservative movement which Nick Fuentes was really breaking down for us in his part two series (in particular).
It is starting to make so much sense… So I’m just trying to point you guys into resources not to propose myself as someone who can connect all the dots like Michael Collins Piper can. He traces the networks, deals, and consolidations of power that have shaped the American political and financial landscape over the last century.
It’s definitely a lot shorter and more entertaining than Whitney’s Webs books Nation Under Blackmail I couldn’t get through them to be honest with you they were so dry so if you read them mad props to you.
So, for me, what stands out is the gradual centralization of influence: from banking to media to government appointments. These connections have profound effects on policy, public opinion, and international alliances.
You know you can say connecting the dots is anti-Semitic
The esteemed Websters dictionary has now broadened the definition of antisemitism to include: “opposition to Zionism” which is definitely a lot of what I speak about and “sympathy for the opponents of Israel”.
Those two categories alone would probably include literally billions of people across the face of this planet. We need to understand that when people label folks as “white-supremacists”, “Nazi”, “antisemitic”…. you know cancel culture is over so if y’all aren’t picking up on that like do you need to go to primary sources and listen specifically to what people were saying try to read books try to listen to different sides of the story so you can grasp the truth (if you can).
This isn’t wild conspiracy. It’s a careful look at decades of patterns and documented facts (most of the sources were from Jewish resources). Our current political reality didn’t just appear by chance. It’s the product of generations of social engineering, strategic moves and powerful leverage.
Without this historical lens, it’s easy to see today’s media as an organic mess of voices. But with it, you realize just how much of what we hear (and don’t hear) is carefully shaped, and rarely talked about openly.
Tucker Carlson vs. Nick Fuentes: A Public Clash Over Boundaries
What kicked all of this off was an interview on August 1st, 2025, when Tucker Carlson sat down with Candace Owens. During that 15-minute segment, they launched a personal character attack on Nick Fuentes. The spark? Tucker claimed he didn’t know his dad was in the CIA until after his father’s death in March 2025 — a claim most of us know was a blatant lie.
That lie set off a firestorm. In response, Nick Fuentes dropped a two-part viral series on Rumble, calling out Tucker for being dishonest and, more importantly, for not pushing far enough on certain topics. Fuentes argues there are clear lines Tucker won’t cross — and those lines shape what millions of people get to hear.
Whether you agree with Fuentes or not, this public clash is rare. Usually, these kinds of disputes stay behind the scenes or get smoothed over. But this time, it’s happening in front of us, giving the audience a rare look at the invisible boundaries of public discourse — the unspoken rules about what topics are “safe” and which ones are off limits.
Once you notice those lines, it’s natural to ask: who drew them? And why?
If you want to see the full exchange and judge for yourself, Nick Fuentes’ two-part response is available on Rumble:
Watching these gives a clearer picture of why this clash has grabbed so much attention and why the boundaries of public discourse matter now more than ever.
Now, this ties into something I’ve been noticing from some corners of the conversation: people who’ve moved away from Protestant Church and embraced Orthodox Christianity, rightly pushing back against things like Zionism and dispensationalism.
On our last episode, I talked about how it’s not just dispensationalism or the Schofield Bible fueling this whole machine — it’s that Christianity itself is built on Jewish roots.
“Inside ever Christian is a Jew” —Pope Francis (June 16, 2014)
Reading from The Jesus Hoax:
Consider, first of all, the ancient origins of Judaism and the corresponding events of the Old Testament (OT) otherwise known as the Jewish (or Hebrew Bible). The original Patriarch, Abraham, (originally called ‘Abram’—strange how so many people in the Bible have two names), allegedly lived sometime between 1800 and 1500 BC; he was the traditional father of not only Judaism and thus Christianity but centuries later, of Islam as well. Thus, one sometimes reads that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all viewed as the “Abrahamic” religions.
Simply put: Christians believe in a Jewish God, read Jewish Scriptures, and worship a Jewish rabbi. If you take those origin stories as literal history, you’re often reinforcing the very narratives that prop up modern Zionism.
But here’s where my beef 🥩comes in: In a recent clip, one such voice claimed that Jesus wasn’t really a Jew — just ‘an Israelite from Judah’ — as if that somehow changes His identity or the core of the faith. Here is the clip:
This is a good point to take a short detour to explain some very relevant terminology Much confusion exists around three apparently interchangeable terms Hebrew Israelite and Jew. In the book of Genesis 14:13 Abram/Abraham is the first referred to as the “Hebrew”—a term of ambiguous origin and no clear meaning. Regardless, Abraham was the original “Hebrew”, and this designation came to be attached to his son Isaac (but not Ishmael) and to Isaac’s son Jacob (but not Esau) and to Jacob’s 12th sons and their descendants—all of whom would be called “Hebrews”
The term “Israel” as noted above, has been in existence since at least 1200 BC. In Hebrew language, “Israel” means ‘he who strives with God’, and thus is a term of honor. It first appears in the BIble in Genesis 32:28 when Jacob is renamed Israel. Therefore, Jacob and his 12 sons and all their heirs are called Israelites.
But what about ‘Jew’? We See above that one of Jacob’s 12 sons was Judah-or in Hebrew, Jehudah. Judah was Jacob/Israel’s 4th son, but as it turns out, the first three (Reuben, Simeon and Levi) ended up in his disfavor and so Judah takes a leading role. Speaking to his sons, Jacob says: Genesis 49:10
This idea that Jesus wasn’t a Jew feels more like a way to cope or sidestep with the uncomfortable historical and theological realities than a true insight. And it’s important to recognize when narratives intended to clarify actually end up muddying the waters…..
Any case, as the 12 tribes and their descendants became established in Palestine, the 10 northern-most tribes became known as ‘Israel’ and the southern-most two, as ‘Judah.’ At some point, the ‘man of Judah’ or descendant of Judah’ became a Yehudia Jew.
After the Babylonian exile and return (597 to 538 BC), the 12 tribes became known collectively as both ‘Israel’ and ‘men of Judah’ or Yehu-dim. We see a variation on this term appear on a coin minted around 120 BC, with the word Hayehudim (“of Judah” or “of the Jews”). Yehudi, or plural Yehudim, appear several times in the OT; typically this is translated into English as ‘Jew’ or ‘Jews’., although sometimes as ‘man of Judah’
The first appearance is in 2 Kings (16:6 and 25:25), and then several times later in Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Jeremiah, Daniel (twice), and Zecharia (8:23). ‘Jew’ is not in the first five books (Pentateuch) like He-brew’ and ‘Israel’ are, which suggests that it is not quite as ancient within Jewish culture; but still, its presence throughout the remainder of the OT shows its importance to the Jewish authors, who, of course, were writing strictly to a Jewish audience. When Jews were writing to their fellow Jews, they had no compunction about using the word ‘Jew.’
As the OT spread into Greek and (later) Latin culture, Yehudi became translated as Ioudaios and Iudaeus, respectively. The Latin term lost its ‘d’ when moving into the region of modern-day France, and the people there created a contracted version, giu. This then worked its way into Old English around the year 1000, where it took a variety of forms:
Gyu, Giu, lew, luu, and so on. By the late 1300s, Chaucer was using the word Jewes. And by the late 1500s, playwrights like Marlowe and Shakespeare were writing, simply, ‘Jews.’
So, the 12 tribes became the nation of Israel, but after exile and time, the term “Jew” came to specifically mean someone from the tribe of Judah or the people of that southern kingdom.
Let’s set the record straight: The Orthodox tradition affirms that Jesus was Jewish by both lineage and practice. For example, the OrthodoxWiki notes that Jesus is the Messiah prophesied by Jewish prophets, and the Gospel of Matthew is written especially for a Jewish audience, emphasizing His fulfillment of Jewish prophecy.
The Orthodox Church in America points out that Jesus was the long-awaited Jewish Messiah, who lived fully within the Jewish covenant community — even though some of His contemporaries refused to recognize Him as such. Orthodox catechism reminds us that Jesus’ divine incarnation took place in a fully human, Jewish context.
Historical records in the Gospels show Jesus was born of the tribe of Judah, descended from David, circumcised according to Jewish law, and faithfully observed Jewish festivals and customs. He taught in synagogues and affirmed the Torah and the Prophets (Luke 4:16; John 7:2, 10; Matthew 5:17–18).
That’s why I’m bringing on Dr. David Skrbina, author of The Jesus Hoax, in an upcoming episode. Because when you start questioning who Jesus really was — beyond the narratives handed down or pushed by certain agendas — you begin to see how much history, theology, and culture have been carefully shaped. And as with political power and media, the truth often lives just beyond the boundaries we’re allowed to explore.
Why This Moment Matters
This isn’t just about one book, or two media figures, or a particular platform. It’s a rare opening — a crack in the matrix — that lets us see where conversation gets shut down, and maybe even push those limits back.
Agree or disagree with Piper, Fuentes, or Carlson… that’s your right. But the bigger question remains: who decides what’s okay to say? And if those decisions are made without our awareness, how free are we really?
That question feels especially urgent today, as laws around hate speech and anti-Semitism shape what can be discussed publicly — in ways that limit honest dialogue. Efforts like DEI programs aimed at protecting Jewish students completely contradict how most conservatives feel about identity politics.
My hope is that we take this moment seriously. We stop treating these boundaries as natural or unchangeable. We start asking who benefits from keeping the conversation so tightly controlled — and whether that control is helping or harming our society.
Because once you see where the conversation ends, you realize how much more there is beyond — and often, that’s where the truth really lives.
Why Trump’s new executive order deserves close scrutiny
President Trump signed an executive order on July 24, 2025, calling on states and cities to clear homeless encampments and expand involuntary psychiatric treatment, framed as a move to improve public safety and compassion
At first glance, it seems reasoned: address the homelessness crisis in many progressive cities, restore order, & help those with severe mental illness. But when I read it closely, and the language….phrases like “untreated mental illness,” “public nuisance,” and “at risk of harm”is vague enough, subjective enough, and feels ripe for misuse 😳
This goes beyond homelessness. It marks a shift toward normalizing forced institutionalization, a trend with deep roots in American psychiatric history.
We explored this dark legacy in a recent episode, Beneath the White Coats 🥼 and if you listened to that episode, you’ll know that
compulsory commitment isn’t new.
Historically, psychiatric institutions in the U.S. served not just medical needs but social control. Early 20th-century asylums housed the poor, the racially marginalized, and anyone deemed “unfit.”
The International Congress of Eugenics’ Logo 1921
The eugenics movement wasn’t a fringe ideology….it was supported by mainstream medical groups, state law, and psychiatry. Forced sterilization, indefinite confinement, and ambiguous diagnoses like “moral defectiveness” were justified under the guise of public health.
Now, an executive order gives local governments incentives (and of course funding 💰 is always tied to compliance) to loosen involuntary commitment laws and redirect funding to those enforcing anti-camping and drug-use ordinances instead of harm reduction programs
Once states rewrite their laws to align with the order’s push toward involuntary treatment and if “public nuisance” or “mental instability” are to be interpreted broadly…
Now, you don’t have to be homeless to be at risk. A public disturbance, a call from a neighbor, even a refusal to comply with treatment may trigger involuntary confinement.
Is it just me, or does this feel like history is repeating?
We’ve seen where badly defined psychiatric authority leads: disproportionate targeting, loss of civil rights, and institutionalization justified as compassion. Today’s executive order could enable a similar expansion of psychiatric control.
So.. what do you think? Is this just a homelessness policy? or is it another slippery slope?
We like to believe science is self-correcting—that data drives discovery, that good ideas rise, and bad ones fall. But when it comes to mental health, modern society is still tethered to a deeply flawed framework—one that pathologizes human experience, medicalizes distress, and often does more harm than good.
Psychiatry has long promised progress, yet history tells a different story. From outdated treatments like bloodletting to today’s overprescription of SSRIs, we’ve traded one form of blind faith for another. These drugs—still experimental in many respects—carry serious risks, yet are handed out at staggering rates. And rather than healing root causes, they often reinforce a narrative of victimhood and chronic dysfunction.
The pharmaceutical industry now drives diagnosis rates, shaping public perception and clinical practice in ways that few understand. What’s marketed as care is often a system of control. In this episode, we revisit the dangers of consensus-driven science—how it silences dissent and rewards conformity.
Because science, like religion or politics, can become dogma. Paradigms harden. Institutions protect their power. And the costs are human lives.
But beneath this entire structure lies a deeper, more uncomfortable question—one we rarely ask:
What does it mean to be a person?
Are we just bodies and brains—repairable, programmable, replaceable? Or is there something more?
Is consciousness a glitch of chemistry, or is it a window into the soul?
Modern psychiatry doesn’t just treat symptoms—it defines the boundaries of personhood. It tells us who counts, who’s disordered, who can be trusted with autonomy—and who can’t.
But what if those definitions are wrong?
We’ve talked before about the risks of unquestioned paradigms—how ideas become dogma, and dogma becomes control. In a past episode,How Dogma Limits Progress in Fitness, Nutrition, and Spirituality, we explored Rupert Sheldrake’s challenge to the dominant scientific worldview—his argument that science itself had become a belief system, closing itself off to dissent. TED removed that talk, calling it “pseudoscience.” But many saw it as an attempt to protect the status quo—the high priests of data and empiricism silencing heresy in the name of progress. We will revisit his work later on in our conversation.
We’ve also discussed how science, more than politics or religion, is often weaponized to control behavior, shape belief, and reinforce social hierarchies. And in a recent Taste Test Thursday episode, we dug into how the industrial food system was shaped not just by profit but by ideology—driven by a merger of science and faith.
This framework—that science is never truly neutral—becomes especially chilling when you look at the history of psychiatry.
To begin this conversation, we’re going back—not to Freud or Prozac, but further. To the roots of American psychiatry. To two early figures—John Galt and Benjamin Rush—whose ideas helped define the trajectory of an entire field. What we find there presents a choice: a path toward genuine hope, or a legacy of continued harm.
This story takes us into the forgotten corners of that history, a place where “normal” and “abnormal” were declared not by discovery, but by decree.
Clinical psychiatrist Paul Minot put it plainly:
“Psychiatry is so ashamed of its history that it has deleted much of it.”
And for good reason.
Psychiatry’s early roots weren’t just tangled with bad science—they were soaked in ideology. What passed for “treatment” was often social control, justified through a veneer of medical language. Institutions were built not to heal, but to hide. Lives were labeled defective.
We would like to think that medicine is objective, that the white coat stands for healing. But behind those coats was a mission to save society from the so-called “abnormal.” But who defined normal? And who paid the price?
The Forgotten Legacy of Dr. John Galt
Lithograph, “Virginia Lunatic Asylum at Williamsburg, Va.” by Thomas Charles Millington, ca.1845. Block & Building Files – Public Hospital, Block 04, Box 07. Image citation: D2018-COPY-1104-001. Special Collections.
Long before DSM codes and Big Pharma, the first freestanding mental hospital in America called Eastern Lunatic Asylum opened its doors in 1773—just down the road from where I live, in Williamsburg, Virginia. Though officially declared a hospital, it was commonly known as “The Madhouse.” For most who entered, institutionalization meant isolation, dehumanization, and often treatment worse than what was afforded to livestock. Mental illness was framed as a threat to the social order—those deemed “abnormal” were removed from society and punished in the name of care.
But one man dared to imagine something different.
Dr. John Galt II, appointed as the first medical superintendent of the hospital (later known as Eastern State), came from a family of alienists—an old-fashioned term for early psychiatrists. The word comes from the Latin alienus, meaning “other” or “stranger,” and referred to those considered mentally “alienated” from themselves or society. Today, of course, the word alien has taken on very different connotations—especially in the heated political debates over immigration. It’s worth clarifying: the historical use of alienist had nothing to do with immigration or nationality. It was a clinical label tied to 19th-century psychiatry, not race or citizenship. But like many terms, it’s often misunderstood or manipulated in modern discourse.
Galt, notably, broke with the harsh legacy of many alienists of his time. Inspired by French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel—often credited as the first true psychiatrist—Galt embraced a radically compassionate model known as moral therapy. Where others saw madness as a threat to be controlled, Galt saw suffering that could be soothed. He believed the mentally ill deserved dignity, freedom, and individualized care—not chains or punishment. He refused to segregate patients by race. He treated enslaved people alongside the free. And he opposed the rising belief—already popular among his fellow psychiatrists—that madness was simply inherited, and the mad were unworthy of full personhood.
Credit:The Valentine Original Author: Cook Collection Created: Late nineteenth to early twentieth century
Rather than seeing madness as a biological defect to be subdued or “cured,” Galt and Pinel viewed it as a crisis of the soul. Their methods rejected medical manipulation and instead focused on restoring dignity. They believed that those struggling with mental affliction should be treated not as deviants but as ordinary people, worthy of love, freedom, and respect.
Dr. Marshall Ledger, founder and editor of Penn Medicine, once quoted historian Nancy Tomes to summarize this period:
“Medical science in this period contributed to the understanding of mental illness, but patient care improved less because of any medical advance than because of one simple factor: Christian charity and common sense.”
Galt’s asylum was one of the only institutions in the United States to treat enslaved people and free Black patients equally—and even to employ them as caregivers. He insisted that every person, regardless of race, had a soul of equal moral worth. His belief in equality and metaphysical healing put him at odds with nearly every other psychiatrist of his time.
And he paid the price.
The psychiatric establishment, closely allied with state power and emerging medical-industrial interests, rejected his human-centered model. Most psychiatrists of the era endorsed slavery and upheld racist pseudoscience. The prevailing consensus was rooted in hereditary determinism—that madness and criminality were genetically transmitted, particularly among the “unfit.”
This growing belief—that mental illness was a biological flaw to be medically managed—was not just a scientific view, but an ideological one. Had Galt’s model of moral therapy been embraced more broadly, it would have undermined the growing assumption that biology and state-run institutions offered the only path to sanity. It would have challenged the idea that human suffering could—and should—be controlled by external authorities.
Instead, psychiatry aligned with power.
Moral therapy was quietly abandoned. And the field moved steadily toward the medicalized, racialized, and state-controlled version of mental health that would pave the way for both eugenics and the modern pharmaceutical regime.
“The Father of American Psychiatry”
Long before Auschwitz. Long before the Eugenics Record Office. Long before sterilization laws and IQ tests, there was Dr. Benjamin Rush—signer of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the first American medical school, and the man still honored as the “father of American psychiatry.” His portrait hangs today in the headquarters of the American Psychiatric Association.
Though many historians point to Francis Galton as the father of eugenics, it was Rush—nearly a century earlier—who laid much of the ideological groundwork. He argued that mental illness was biologically determined and hereditary. And he didn’t stop there.
Rush infamously diagnosed Blackness itself as a form of disease—what he called “negritude.” He theorized that Black people suffered from a kind of leprosy, and that their skin color and behavior could, in theory, be “cured.” He also tied criminality, alcoholism, and madness to inherited degeneracy, particularly among poor and non-white populations.
These ideas found a troubling ally in Charles Darwin’s emerging theories of evolution and heredity. While Darwin’s work revolutionized biology, it was often misused to justify racist notions of racial hierarchy and biological determinism.
Rush’s medical theories were mainstream and deeply influential, shaping generations of physicians and psychiatrists. Together, these ideas reinforced the belief that social deviance and mental illness were rooted in faulty bloodlines—pseudoscientific reasoning that provided a veneer of legitimacy to racism and social control within medicine and psychiatry.
The tragic irony? While Rush advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill in certain respects, his racial theories helped pave the way for the pathologizing of entire populations—a mindset that would fuel both American and European eugenics movements in the next century.
American Eugenics: The Soil Psychiatry Grew From
Before Hitler, there was Cold Spring Harbor. Founded in 1910, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) operated out of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York with major funding from the Carnegie Institution, later joined by Rockefeller Foundation money. It became the central hub for American eugenic research, gathering family pedigrees to trace so-called hereditary defects like “feeblemindedness,” “criminality,” and “pauperism.”
Between the early 1900s and 1970s, over 30 U.S. states passed forced sterilization laws targeting tens of thousands of people deemed unfit to reproduce. The justification? Traits like alcoholism, poverty, promiscuity, deafness, blindness, low IQ, and mental illness were cast as genetic liabilities that threatened the health of the nation.
The practice was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 in the infamous case of Buck v. Bell. In an 8–1 decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” greenlighting the sterilization of 18-year-old Carrie Buck, a young woman institutionalized for being “feebleminded”—a label also applied to her mother and child. The ruling led to an estimated 60,000+ sterilizations across the U.S.
And yes—those sterilizations disproportionately targeted African American, Native American, and Latina women, often without informed consent. In North Carolina alone, Black women made up nearly 65% of sterilizations by the 1960s, despite being a much smaller share of the population.
Eugenics wasn’t a fringe pseudoscience. It was mainstream policy—supported by elite universities, philanthropists, politicians, and the medical establishment.
And psychiatry was its institutional partner.
The American Journal of Psychiatry published favorable discussions of sterilization and even euthanasia for the mentally ill as early as the 1930s. American psychiatrists traveled to Nazi Germany to observe and advise, and German doctors openly cited U.S. laws and scholarship as inspiration for their own racial hygiene programs.
In some cases, the United States led—and Nazi Germany followed.
The International Congress of Eugenics’ Logo 1921
This isn’t conspiracy. It’s history. Documented, peer-reviewed, and disturbingly overlooked.
From Ideology to Institution
By the early 20th century, the groundwork had been laid. Psychiatry had evolved from a fringe field rooted in speculation and racial ideology into a powerful institutional force—backed by universities, governments, and the courts. But its foundation was still deeply compromised. What had begun with Benjamin Rush’s biologically deterministic theories and America’s eugenic policies now matured into a formalized doctrine—one that treated human suffering not as a relational or spiritual crisis, but as a defect to be categorized, corrected, or eliminated.
This is where the five core doctrines of modern psychiatry emerge.
The Five Doctrines That Shaped Modern Psychiatry
These five doctrines weren’t abandoned after World War II. They were rebranded, exported, and quietly absorbed into the foundations of American psychiatry.
1. The Elimination of Subjectivity
Patients were no longer seen as people with stories, pain, or meaning—they were seen as bundles of symptoms. Suffering was abstracted into clinical checklists. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) became the gold standard, not because it offered clear science, but because it offered utility: a standardized language that served pharmaceutical companies, insurance billing, and bureaucratic control. If you could name it, you could code it—and medicate it.
2. The Eradication of Spiritual and Moral Meaning
Struggles once understood through relational, existential, or moral frameworks were stripped of depth. Grief became depression. Anger became oppositional defiance. Existential despair was reduced to a neurotransmitter imbalance. The soul was erased from the conversation. As Berger notes, suffering was no longer something to be witnessed or explored—it became something to be treated, as quickly and quietly as possible.
3. Biological Determinism
Mental illness was redefined as the inevitable result of faulty genes or broken brain chemistry—even though no consistent biological markers have ever been found. The “chemical imbalance” theory, aggressively marketed throughout the late 20th century, was never scientifically validated. Yet it persists, in part because it sells. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)—still widely prescribed—were promoted on this flawed premise, despite studies showing they often perform no better than placebo and come with serious side effects, including emotional blunting, dependence, and sexual dysfunction.
4. Population Control and Racial Hygiene
In Germany, this meant sterilizing and exterminating those labeled “life unworthy of life.” In the U.S., it meant forced sterilizations of African-American and Native American women, institutionalizing the poor, the disabled, and the nonconforming. These weren’t fringe policies—they were mainstream, upheld by law and supported by leading psychiatrists and journals. Even today, disproportionate diagnoses in communities of color, coercive treatments in prisons and state hospitals, and medicalization of poverty reflect these same logics of control.
5. The Use of Institutions for Social Order
Hospitals became tools for enforcing conformity. Psychiatry wasn’t just about healing—it was about managing the unmanageable, quieting the inconvenient, and keeping society orderly. From lobotomies to electroshock therapy to modern-day involuntary holds, psychiatry has long straddled the line between medicine and discipline. Coercive treatment continues under new names: community treatment orders, chemical restraints, and state-mandated compliance.
These doctrines weren’t discarded after the fall of Nazi Germany. They were imported. Adopted. Rebranded under the guise of “evidence-based medicine” and “public health.” But the same logic persists: reduce the person, erase the context, medicalize the soul, and reinforce the system.
Letchworth Village: The Human Cost
I didn’t simply read this in a textbook. I stood there—on the edge of those woods—next to rows of numbered graves.
In 2020, while waiting to close on our New York house, my husband and I were staying in an Airbnb in Rockland County. We were walking the dogs one morning nearing the end of Call Hollow Road, there is a wide path dividing thick woodland when we came across a memorial stone:
“THOSE WHO SHALL NOT BE FORGOTTEN.”
We had stumbled upon the entrance to Old Letchworth Village Cemetery, and we instantly felt it’s somber history. Beyond it, rows of T-shaped markers each one a muted testament to the hundreds of nameless victims who perished at Letchworth. Situated just half a mile from the institution, these weathered grave markers reveal only the numbers that were once assigned to forgotten souls—a stark reminder that families once refused to let their names be known. This omission serves as a silent indictment of a system that institutionalized, dehumanized, and ultimately discarded these individuals.
When we researched the history, the truth was staggering.
Letchworth was supposed to be a progressive alternative to the horrors of 19th-century asylums. Instead, it became one of them. By the 1920s, reports described children and adults left unclothed, unbathed, overmedicated, and raped. Staff abused residents—and each other. The dormitories were overcrowded. Funding dried up. Buildings decayed.
The facility was severely overcrowded. Many residents lived in filth, unfed and unattended. Children were restrained for hours. Some were used in vaccine trials without consent. And when they died, they were buried behind the trees—nameless, marked only by small concrete stakes.
I stood among those graves. Over 900 of them. A long row of numbered markers, each representing a life once deemed unworthy of attention, of love, of dignity.
But the deeper horror is what Letchworth symbolized: the idea that certain people were better off warehoused than welcomed, that abnormality was a disease to be eradicated—not a difference to be understood.
This is the real history of psychiatric care in America.
The Problem of Purpose
But this history didn’t unfold in a vacuum. It was built on something deeper—an idea so foundational, it often goes unquestioned: that nature has no purpose. That life has no inherent meaning. That humans are complex machines—repairable, discardable, programmable.
This mechanistic worldview didn’t just shape medicine. It has shaped what we call reality itself.
As Dr. Rupert Sheldrake explains in Science Set Free, the denial of purpose in biology isn’t a scientific conclusion—it’s a philosophical assumption. Beginning in the 17th century, science removed soul and purpose from nature. Plants, animals, and human bodies were understood as nothing more than matter in motion, governed by fixed laws. No pull toward the good. No inner meaning.
By the time Darwin’s Origin of Species arrived in the 19th century 1859, this mechanistic lens was fully established. Evolution wasn’t creative—it was random. Life wasn’t guided—it was accidental.
Psychiatry, emerging in this same cultural moment, absorbed this worldview. Suffering was pathologized, difference diagnosed, and the soul reduced to faulty genetics and broken wiring.
Today, that mindset is alive in the DSM’s ever-expanding labels, in the belief that trauma is a chemical imbalance, that identity issues must be solved with hormones and surgery, and in the reflex to medicate children who don’t conform.
But what if suffering isn’t a bug in the system?
What if it’s a signal?
What if these so-called “disorders” are cries for meaning in a world that pretends meaning doesn’t exist?
The graves at Letchworth aren’t just a warning about medical abuse. They are a mirror—reflecting what happens when we forget that people are not problems to be solved, but souls to be seen.
Sheldrake writes, “The materialist denial of purpose in evolution is not based on evidence, but is an assumption.” Modern science insists all change results from random mutations and blind forces—chance and necessity. But these claims are not just about biology. They influence how we see human beings: as broken machines to be repaired or discarded.
As we said, in the 17th century, the mechanistic revolution abolished soul and purpose from nature—except in humans. But as atheism and materialism rose in the 19th century, even divine and human purpose were dismissed, replaced by the ideal of scientific “progress.” Psychiatry emerged from this philosophical soup, fueled not by reverence for the human soul but by the desire to categorize, control, and “correct” behavior—by any mechanical means necessary.
What if that assumption is wrong? What if the people we label “disordered” are responding to something real? What if our suffering has meaning—and our biology is not destiny?
“Genetics” as the New Eugenics
Today, psychiatry no longer speaks in the language of race hygiene.
It speaks in the language of genes.
But the message is largely the same:
You are broken at the root.
Your biology is flawed.
And the only solution is lifelong medication—or medical intervention.
We now tell people their suffering is rooted in faulty wiring, inherited defects, or bad brain chemistry—despite decades of inconclusive or contradictory evidence.
We still medicalize behaviors that don’t conform.
We still pathologize pain that stems from trauma, poverty, or social disconnection.
We still market drugs for “chemical imbalances” that have never been biologically verified.
And we still pretend this is science—not ideology.
But as Dr. Rupert Sheldrake argues in Science Set Free, even the field of genetics rests on a fragile and often overstated foundation. In Chapter 6, he challenges one of modern biology’s core assumptions: that all heredity is purely material—that our traits, tendencies, and identities are completely locked in by our genes.
But this isn’t how people have understood inheritance for most of human history.
Long before Darwin or Mendel, breeders, farmers, and herders knew how to pass on traits. Proverbs like “like father, like son” weren’t based on lab results—they were based on generations of observation. Dogs were bred into dozens of varieties. Wild cabbage became broccoli, kale, and cauliflower. The principles of heredity weren’t discovered by science; they were named by science. They were already in practice across the world.
What Sheldrake points out is that modern biology took this folk knowledge, stripped it of its nuance, and then centralized it—until genes became the sole explanation for almost everything.
And that’s a problem.
Because genetics has been crowned the ultimate cause of everything from depression to addiction, from ADHD to schizophrenia. When the outcomes aren’t clear-cut, the answer is simply: “We haven’t mapped the genome enough yet.”
But what if the model is wrong?
What if suffering isn’t locked in our DNA?
What if genes are only part of the story—and not even the most important part?
By insisting that people are genetically flawed, psychiatry sidesteps the deeper questions:
What happened to you?
What story are you carrying?
What environments shaped your experience of the world?
It pathologizes people—and exonerates systems.
Instead of exploring trauma, we prescribe pills.
Instead of restoring dignity, we reduce people to diagnoses.
Instead of healing souls, we treat symptoms.
Modern genetics, like eugenics before it, promises answers. But too often, it delivers a verdict: you were born broken.
We can do better.
We must do better.
Because healing doesn’t come from blaming bloodlines or rebranding biology.
It comes from listening, loving, and refusing to reduce people to a diagnosis or a gene sequence.
The Hidden Truth About Trauma and Diagnosis
As Pete Walker references Dr. John Briere’s poignant observation: if Complex PTSD and the role of early trauma were fully acknowledged by psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) could shrink from a massive textbook to something no larger than a simple pamphlet.
We’ve previously explored the crucial difference between PTSD and complex PTSD—topics like trauma, identity, neuroplasticity, stress, survival, and what it truly means to come home to yourself. This deeper understanding exposes a vast gap between real human experience and how mental health is often diagnosed and treated today.
Instead of addressing trauma with truth and compassion, the system expands diagnostic categories, medicalizes pain, and silences those who suffer.
The Cost of Our Silence
Many of us know someone who’s been diagnosed, hospitalized, or medicated into submission.
Some of us have been that person.
And we’re told this is progress. That this is compassion. That this is care.
But when I stood at the edge of those graves in Rockland County—row after row of anonymous markers—nothing about this history felt compassionate.
It felt buried. On purpose.
We must unearth it.
Not to deny mental suffering—but to reclaim the right to define it for ourselves.
To reimagine what healing could look like, if we dared to value dignity over diagnosis.
Because psychiatry hasn’t “saved” the abnormal.
It has often silenced, sterilized, and sacrificed them.
It has named pain as disorder.
Difference as defect.
Trauma as pathology.
The DSM is not a Bible.
The white coat is not a priesthood.
And genetics is not destiny.
We need better language, better questions, and better ways of relating to each other’s pain.
And that brings us full circle—to a man most people have never heard of: Dr. John Galt II.
Nearly 200 years ago, in Williamsburg, Virginia, Galt ran the first freestanding mental hospital in America. But unlike many of his peers, he rejected chains, cruelty, and coercion. He embraced what he called moral treatment—an approach rooted in truth, love, and human dignity. Galt didn’t see the “insane” as dangerous or defective. He saw them as souls.
He was influenced by Philippe Pinel, the French physician who famously removed shackles from asylum patients in Paris. Together, these early reformers dared to believe that healing began not with force, but with presence. With relationship. With care.
Galt refused to segregate patients by race. He treated enslaved people alongside the free. And he opposed the rising belief—already popular among his fellow psychiatrists—that madness was simply inherited, and the mad were unworthy of full personhood.
But what does it mean to recognize someone’s personhood?
Personhood is more than just being alive or having a body. It’s about being seen as a full human being with inherent dignity, moral worth, and rights—someone whose inner life, choices, and experiences matter. Recognizing personhood means acknowledging the whole person beyond any diagnosis, disability, or social status.
This question isn’t just philosophical—it’s deeply practical and contested. It’s at the heart of debates over mental health care, disability rights, euthanasia and even abortion. When does a baby become a person? When does someone with a mental illness or cognitive difference gain full moral consideration? These debates all circle back to how we define humanity itself.
In Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine Is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality, Charles C. Camosy warns that secular, mechanistic medicine can strip people down to biological parts—genes, symptoms, behaviors—rather than seeing them as full persons. This reduction risks denying people their dignity and the respect that comes with being more than the sum of their medical conditions.
Galt’s approach stood against this reduction. He saw patients as complex individuals with stories and struggles, deserving compassion and respect—not just as “cases” to be categorized or “disorders” to be fixed.
To truly recognize personhood is to honor that complexity and to affirm that every individual, regardless of race, mental health, or social status, has an equal claim to dignity and care.
But… Galt’s approach was pushed aside.
Why?
Because it didn’t serve the state.
Because it didn’t serve power.
Because it didn’t make money.
Today, we see a similar rejection of truth and compassion.
When a child in distress is told they were “born in the wrong body,” we call it gender-affirming care.
When a woman, desperate to be understood, is handed a borderline personality disorder label instead.
When medications with severe side effects are pushed as the only solution, we call it science.
But are we healing the person—or managing the symptoms?
Are we meeting the soul—or erasing it?
We’ve medicalized the human condition—and too often, we’ve called that progress.
We’ve spoken before about the damage done by Biblical counseling programs when therapy is replaced with doctrine—how evangelical frameworks often dismiss pain as rebellion, frame anger as sin, and pressure survivors into premature forgiveness.
But the secular system is often no better. A model that sees people as nothing more than biology and brain chemistry may wear a lab coat instead of a collar—but it still demands submission.
Both systems can bypass the human being in front of them.
Both can serve control over compassion.
Both can silence pain in the name of order.
What we truly need is something deeper.
To be seen.
To be heard.
To be honored in our complexity—not reduced to a diagnosis or a moral failing.
It’s time to stop.
It’s time to remember that human suffering is not a clinical flaw. It’s time to remember the metaphysical soul/psyche.
Our emotional pain is not a chemical defect.
That being different, distressed, or deeply wounded is not a disease.
It’s time to recover the wisdom of Dr. John Galt II.
To treat those in pain—not as problems to be solved—but as people to be seen.
To offer truth and love, not labels, not sterilizing surgeries and lifelong prescriptions.
Because if we don’t, the graves will keep multiplying—quietly, behind institutions, beneath a silence we dare not disturb.
But we must disturb it.
Because they mattered.
And truth matters.
And the most powerful medicine has never been compliance or chemistry.
It’s being met with real humanity.
Being listened to. Believed.
Not pathologized. Not preached at. Not controlled.
But loved—in the deepest, most grounded sense of the word.
The kind of love that doesn’t look away.
The kind that tells the truth, even when it’s costly.
The kind that says: you are not broken—you are worth staying with.
Because to love someone like that…
is to recognize their personhood.
And maybe that’s the most radical act of all.
SOURCES:
“Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics from 1927 to 1942, [Eugen] Fischer authored a 1913 study of the Mischlinge (racially mixed) children of Dutch men and Hottentot women in German southwest Africa. Fischer opposed ‘racial mixing, arguing that “negro blood” was of ‘lesser value and that mixing it with ‘white blood’ would bring about the demise of European culture” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race,” HMM Online: https://www.ushmm.org/exhibition/deadly-medicine/ profiles/). See also, Richard C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon J. Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature 2nd edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 207.
Gonaver, The Making of Modern Psychiatry
Saving Abnormal-The Disorder of Psychiatric Genetics-Daneil R Berger II
📘 General History of American Eugenics Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (2008) This book is the definitive account of Buck v. Bell and American eugenics law. It documents how widespread sterilizations were and provides legal and historical context. Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003) Covers the U.S. eugenics movement in depth, including funding by Carnegie and Rockefeller, Cold Spring Harbor, and connections to Nazi Germany. Kevles, Daniel J. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (1985) A foundational academic history detailing how early American psychiatry and genetics were interwoven with eugenic ideology.
🧬 Institutions & Funding Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives https://www.cshl.edu Documents the history of the Eugenics Record Office (1910–1939), its funding by the Carnegie Institution, and its influence on U.S. and international eugenics. The Rockefeller Foundation Archives https://rockarch.org Shows how the foundation funded eugenics research both in the U.S. and abroad, including programs that influenced German racial hygiene policies.
⚖️ Sterilization Policies & Buck v. Bell Supreme Court Decision: Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927) https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/274/200/ Includes Justice Holmes’ infamous quote and the legal justification for forced sterilization. North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation https://www.ncdhhs.gov Reports the disproportionate targeting of Black women in 20th-century sterilization programs. Stern, Alexandra Minna. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2005) Explores race, sterilization, and medical ethics in eugenics programs, with data from states like California and North Carolina.
🧠 Psychiatry’s Role & Nazi Connections Lifton, Robert Jay. The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (1986) Shows how American eugenics—including psychiatric writings—helped shape Nazi ideology and policies like Aktion T-4 (the euthanasia program). Wahl, Otto F. “Eugenics, Genetics, and the Minority Group Mentality” in American Journal of Psychiatry, 1985. Traces how psychiatric institutions were complicit in promoting eugenic ideas. American Journal of Psychiatry Archives 1920s–1930s issues include articles in support of sterilization and early euthanasia rhetoric. Available via https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org
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