On Medium: Is the Catholic’s God a Politician?

Read on about Catholic centrism, the countercultural ideals of Jewish monotheism, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and Leo Strauss's elitist, double truth doctrine.

On Medium: If You’re Conscious, You’re Alienated

Here's an article about how alienation is at the root of sentience and of modelling a pristine environment, and how cultures channel that alienation in their myths and practices.

On Medium: Stories Are Our Shields Against Life’s Absurdity

Read on about the stories we tell in the face of our mortality, and whether science counts as purely objective and thus as an exception to that rule.

On Medium: How Modernity Alienates Us from Nature and from Ourselves

Here's an article about individualism, the downside of secular progress, and how modernity alienates us from the environment we dominate and from ourselves for dominating badly.

On Medium: The Levelheadedness of Chinese Religions

Read on about the surprising lack of alienation in Chinese religions, the downside of Chinese pragmatism, and the potential for a disastrous synergy between atheism and amorality.

On Medium: The Tension Between Winners and Losers in Life

Here's an article about the threat of the introverted, melancholy, or mentally ill person's outsider perspective on society, and why some uncool losers are quarantined to perpetuate mainstream delusions and frauds.

On Medium: Ancient India: The Citadel of Disaffection

Read on about how Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism trump Western monotheistic religions in promoting religious alienation from the apparent world. 

On Medium: Islam’s Retcon of Jewish Monotheism

Here's an article about Islam's twist on Jews' therapeutic handling of their alienation, or how the security blanket of the conquered became the mascot of conquerors.

On Medium: Muddled Christianity and Jewish Alienation

Here's an article about how opposite histories produced conflicting theologies, as Christianity's compromises with paganism betrayed the authenticity of Jewish alienation.

On Medium: Yahweh, the God of Alienation

Here's an article about monotheism, God’s hiddenness, Jewish resentment, and the therapeutic role of religion for a people "chosen" to be perennially conquered and persecuted.

On Medium: Meet the Three Stooges of Monotheism

Read on about how the three transcendent deities of monotheism amount to cultural mascots for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, reflecting their founding historical contexts and environments. 

On Medium: Are We Slaves to Nature or Rogue Actors?

Here's an article about natural cycles, metaphysical dichotomies, the ultimate status of personhood, and whether people are genuine anomalies in nature.

On Medium: When You’re Too Refined to “Clap” on Social Media

Read on about how an algorithm promotes mediocrity when audiences don't all want to participate in social media's parasocial niceties such as "clapping" for content.

On Medium: How Gods Hide in Plain Sight as Cultural Brands

Read on about egregores, the fictions that take on an independent life, and how we take the new gods for granted whereas the ancients naively worshiped their cultural brands.

List of My Earlier Writings

My "Map of the Articles" has grown too long to edit. It crashes my internet browser, so I've had to break up the list into two parts: before and after Medium. 

Here are the older articles, the ones I wrote before I switched to writing on Medium.

On Medium: Seeing Through Religion’s Branding of the Sublime

Read on about religious experience, why religion’s take on the numinous isn’t the thing itself, and the benefits of a secular sense of the sublime.

On Medium: Reckoning with the Horrors of God and Nature

Read on about the hopeless hero’s existential task of reconciling herself with the inevitable horror of reality, regardless of whether the latter's God or Nature.

On Medium: Why There are No Philistines in Foxholes

Here's an article about myth-making, the existential leap of faith in life’s meaning, and why our core convictions are no mere assumptions, opinions, or theories. 

On Medium: Our Hubristic Theories of Everything

Read on about how the talk of “gods” and “objects” humanizes the vast, alien wilderness, and how our ultimate, cosmological questions may be futile and hubristic.

On Medium: The Vanity of Cosmological Questions

Read on about the weakness of the design argument for God's existence, and why we should be humble in asking cosmological questions about the universe's origin.

On Medium: Why We Protect Society from the Ravages of Capitalism

Here's an article on the sovereignty of money; why we protect medicine, the law, the military, and democracy from capitalism; and the call for outgrowing personal greed.

On Medium: The Mystery of Religion’s Persistence

Here's an article that explains how religion and secular delusions persist despite the modern education system that counters religious indoctrination and teaches us how to think.

On Medium: Religious and Secular Myths as Conspiracy “Theories”

Here's an article that asks what makes conspiracy theories so intriguing, and how do they differ from science such that the conspiracies end up being comparable to theologies.

On Medium: Nietzsche’s Politicizing of Schopenhauer’s Pantheism

Read on about Schopenhauer's pantheism, Nietzsche's Darwinian conservatism, and the liberal’s dismissal of nature’s divine creativity.

On Medium: How Jesus Refuted Christianity

Here's an article about the simple test of godliness: Can the theist prove she loves God more than worldly things such as material possessions, an earthly family, or social conventions? If not, the proper response to her proselytization is to laugh at it.

On Medium: Economics and Physics Envy

Here's an article about monetary objectification, the unnaturalness of societies,  the bureaucratic mindset, and the economist's scientistic temptations.

On Medium: How Dead Gods can Live on as Zombies

Read on about the fickle literary taste in gods, and how outdated myths and deities survive in vestigial traditions even as society is governed by more contemporary, often secular idols.

On Medium: Economic Canards and the Reality of Capitalism

Here's an article about economists' equivocations, rational self-interest, happiness, and a bogus pedagogical problem for economics.

On Medium: The Many Quaint Masks of God

Read on about the history of religion and of our inventive personifications, and how nature's creativity outshines the symbols of our tribal identities.

On Medium: Charlatans of the Self-Help Hoax

Read on as I question the self-help industry’s assumptions about intelligence and happiness, and uncover a charlatan's conflicts of interest.

On Medium: The Futility of Arguing About God

Read on about the social underpinnings of the "great debate" between theists and atheists, religion's ongoing existential purpose, and why our descendants will be pantheists.

On Medium: What is a Wasted Life?

Here's an article about consumerism's impact on our social functions and dysfunctions, the loss of freedom in society, and the reckoning with life’s cosmic absurdity.

On Medium: Why Disneyland and Heaven are for Children

Read on to compare the childlike aspects of spirituality and consumerism, and to see how secular society co-opts religious ideals with a degraded form of childishness.

On Medium: Britain’s Libertarian Catastrophe and the “Science” of Economics

Here's an article about Prime Minister Liz Truss's libertarian catastrophe, and how the economists’ reaction to her failure in office reveals something about the nature of economics.

On Medium: Psychedelics: Forgotten Foundations of the Human Condition

Read on as I chart how psychoactive plants have shaped our species through history, religion, elitism, and the political divide between liberals and conservatives. 

On Medium: The Bogus Laws of Orthodox Economics

Read on about natural functions, economic casuistry, how sociality emerges from nature, and why the laws of orthodox, physics-envying economics are bogus.

On Medium: The Platitudes of Reconstructed Christianity

Read on about the superficiality of reconstructed, liberal Christianity, and about a modern spiritual counterculture that withstands scrutiny.

On Medium: Ploys for Exaggerating the Scientific Status of Economics

Read on about economic rationality, subjective value, and the neoclassical economist’s magic tricks that made her discipline seem more scientific than it could be.

On Medium: The Fake Stoicism of Ryan Holiday’s Self-Help Advice

Here's a critique of Ryan Holiday's pseudo-Stoic self-help advice, and an explanation of why his books nevertheless dominate the bookstore’s philosophy section.

On Medium: The Cluelessness of Jordan Peterson’s “Conservative Manifesto”

Read on about Jordan Peterson's incoherent manifesto and where his “conservativism” lands in the struggle between humanism and barbarism.

On Medium: The Last Laugh of the Intellectuals

Read on to reflect on the full scope of humanistic progress, and on how intellectuals might have the last laugh in the pessimistic version of liberal societies' future. 

On Medium: Deconstructed Faith and the Comeuppance of Americanized Christianity

Read on about how spiritual bedrock is corrosive to organized religion, and how the Christianity that survives its deconstruction may no longer be needed or relevant.

On Medium: Mind and Civilization as Simulacra

Here's an article about Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the hyperreal, some harbingers of hyperreality, and how the prevalence of simulacra fits into progressive history. 

On Medium: Is Economics a Pseudoscience?

Here's an article that asks whether economists' mathematical models are sufficiently scientific or whether economics needs also a humanistic culture of critical thinking that's lacking due to the field's politicization.

On Medium: The Age-old Catholic Mastery of Disneyfication

Read on about how the Church sanitized Roman polytheism, neutralized esoteric Christianity, and practiced Disneyfication long before Walt Disney co-created Mickey Mouse.

On Medium: Mass Society’s Triumph Over Intellectuals

Here's an article about modern skirmishes in the ancient cold war between deep thinkers and the unreflective masses, and how liberalism gives the masses the upper hand.

On Medium: Tribalism and the Open Question of Love’s Moral Impact

Here's an article that contrasts the animality of family bonds with the unnaturalness of the moral perspective, to question whether romantic love has an overall moral impact.

On Medium: Christianity’s Kafkaesque Hell

Read on about how a Catholic apologist attempts to defend the indefensible, rationalizing the absurd problem that Jesus's sacrificial death is supposed to have solved.

On Medium: The Ancient Cold War Between Intellectuals and the Unreflective Masses

Here's an article about modern equality, Leo Strauss, and how thought leaders have always been torn between helping and withdrawing from the less reflective society.

On Medium: What it Means to Say Life is Absurd

Read on for a simple analogy that bypasses pretentious existential jargon, and shows how absurdity is about the clash between objective and subjective perspectives.