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.