Cinemorphosis

Tag: bible

  • The Double-Minded Man on His Exercise Bike

    The Double-Minded Man on His Exercise Bike

    Thoughtful theists often find themselves backpedaling from the most odious doctrines of their faith until what remains is no longer recognizably orthodox. Some manage this theological detour while keeping their faith intact. Others slide further down the slope until their religion becomes something more universal, even Unitarian—a faith stripped of dogma and distilled to moral simplicity: love thy neighbor, serve the poor, practice charity, and call it good.

    Within Christianity, the spectrum is wide. On one end stand the infernalists of the Augustinian school, firm in their vision of eternal punishment. On the other are the universalists who, following Origen, imagine purgatory as a place of cleansing rather than damnation, with the possibility of post-mortem salvation. Some, like Martin Gardner and H. G. Wells, found orthodoxy itself to be a spiritual illness in William James’s sense—a sickness of the soul that required liberation. Others, like Dale Allison, hold to faith but jettison the Augustinian vision of perdition. And then there is philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, who takes orthodoxy at its word and concludes that if God authored it, He cannot be moral.

    As one nears death, it would be comforting to have these matters settled—to face eternity with the theological equivalent of a neatly tied bow. But such closure eludes those of us who remain agnostic, chastising ourselves as James’s “double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.”

    I do, however, possess a few fragments of certainty. I reject Rousseau’s sentimental fantasy that human nature is innately good and can serve as our moral compass. I’ve seen enough of humanity to know we are corrupt, self-deceiving creatures who must wrestle with our yetzer hara—our bad inclination, as Jewish tradition calls it. Yet I’m not entirely convinced, as Paul was, that we are hopelessly depraved. Perhaps Paul and I are lost causes, but that doesn’t make the condition universal. The Jewish notion of meeting God halfway—using the strength He gave us—differs sharply from Paul’s portrayal of helpless man collapsing before the mercy seat. One path is desperate; the other is disciplined.

    Whether I write these reflections out of genuine spiritual torment or simple procrastination before an hour on the exercise bike is unclear. Either way, I’ll mount the Schwinn Airdyne, pedal furiously, and try not to think too much about eternal damnation.

  • Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    When I was ten, I made the catastrophic decision to watch an ABC Movie of the Week called The Screaming Woman, based on a Ray Bradbury short story. The premise was simple: a woman buried alive, screaming for help. But to a ten-year-old with an overactive imagination, it was psychological napalm. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind was the muffled plea of a mud-caked corpse clawing her way out from under my bed.

    One night, trembling in a sweat-damp cocoon of sheets, I turned to my imaginary Zen tormentor, Master Po, and asked, “Why am I so stupid, Master? Why did I watch a movie designed to murder my sleep?”

    “Ah, Grasshopper,” he said, with the unhurried calm of someone who’s never paid a utility bill, “the woman buried in a shallow grave is not your enemy. She is your teacher. She shows you the short bridge between life and death. You imagine the bridge as long, but in truth it is a nub, barely the length of a thought. Horror films remind you that you are always one bad turn from the dirt nap.”

    “That’s profound, Master, but I still can’t sleep.”

    “You mustn’t flee from the woman under your bed,” he said. “You must reach into the grave and pull her out. In saving her, you save yourself.”

    “I’m not going near a grave,” I said. “I have claustrophobia.”

    “Life and death,” he replied, “are the same thing seen from opposite sides of the same coin.”

    “I prefer the life side, thank you.”

    “You cling to your vantage point because you think it’s fixed,” he said, with the patience of a man lecturing a doorknob. “But it will shift. When you accept change, death will no longer frighten you—and once that fear is gone, nothing can stop you.”

    “Nothing? Like I could hit a baseball five hundred feet like Reggie Jackson?”

    Master Po sighed. “No, Grasshopper. You will stop wanting to be Reggie Jackson. And that will be your home run.”

  • Pumpkin Pants and the Stolen Nectar

    Pumpkin Pants and the Stolen Nectar

    Last night I dreamed my dresser had a secret tier for magical pants—trousers that could rewind age, inject vitality, and reboot my identity on command. I slipped into a pair of pumpkin-orange linen specials and, poof, a mastiff materialized: a melancholy titan who brightened under my hand and wilted the moment I stopped petting him, like a living barometer for attention.

    I conjured my brother to act as the dog’s surrogate owner—someone to manage the mastiff’s emotional weather—then set off on a quest for the nectar of the gods. My route was wonderfully bureaucratic: I walked into a museum, stepped into a glass case of Roman centurions, and revived one. Together we climbed Mount Olympus and stole the gods’ food—a heist movie scored by thunder. The soldier, alabaster white and eternally pleased with himself, proved cocky, selfish, and deeply agenda-driven.

    We returned from Olympus, bounty in tow, and stopped by a beach picnic where my friends were sprawled across blankets. That’s when the centurion confessed he’d hidden the nectar, claiming it was reserved for “the people God had planned,” which apparently did not include my friends. We argued—he with smug fatalism, me with wounded entitlement. If anyone had earned a sip of immortality, surely the guy in magic pants who resurrected marble and burgled Olympus had.

    My plan was simple: share the nectar, dazzle my friends, and be canonized as the man with enchanted trousers, a mystical mastiff, and a knack for raising statues from the dead before shopping the divine pantry. It was less generosity than PR. But my uncooperative companion killed the campaign. By hoarding the nectar, he blocked my ascent in the friend-group hierarchy and forced an unflattering verdict: no elevation for me—just a man in orange linen, standing next to a sulking dog and an even sulkier demigod.

  • False Neutrality: Reading Armand Nicholi’s Debate

    False Neutrality: Reading Armand Nicholi’s Debate

    I’m about a third of the way through the Audible of Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate, in which Nicholi argues that the single largest life decision — whether to accept or reject belief in God — carries the heaviest consequences. He paints Lewis as modest, serene, and living in a state of grace (the fruits of the spirit, if you like), while he casts Freud as intoxicated with his own genius, dismissing God as a childish projection.

    I have several objections. First, Nicholi leans on a rhetorical pose I find disingenuous: “I’m not trying to persuade anyone — just look at the facts.” He presents himself as a neutral referee while quietly aligning with Lewis. The result is a parade of straw-man treatments that caricature Freud and flatten the debate into tidy contrasts the evidence doesn’t support.

    Second, Nicholi’s central frame is an either/or fallacy: you either believe in God or you don’t. That binary elides the vast internal variety within religious traditions. One person’s God can be another person’s devil — and not across religions but within the same text. Christianity alone supplies wildly different conceptions: the Calvinist God versus a Universalist God; a God who offers post-mortem purgatorial salvation versus one who does not. Even accounts of the Crucifixion diverge: some Christians see it as substitutionary atonement, others categorically reject that reading. As Jerry Walls notes, the God who plans substitutionary atonement is not the God who doesn’t.

    Nicholi also ignores how different beliefs about God imply different beliefs about human nature. Are we, as Paul suggests in Romans, depraved and helpless? Or, as Hyam Maccoby argues from a Jewish perspective, did God create us with the capacity to meet Him halfway? The kind of God you endorse carries with it a theory of human wiring — and Nicholi refuses to engage that complexity.

    Those omissions aren’t accidental; they’re convenient. Reducing belief to a binary choice lets Nicholi render one side salutary and the other contemptible without wrestling with the theological and anthropological thickets that make the question genuinely hard.

    The tone of the book compounds the problem. A Harvard psychiatrist writing in a creamy, intellectual register, posing as an impartial guide through this existential choice, slides easily into what feels like a polished little tract. The surface civility—measured analysis, calm diction—camouflages rhetorical sleights of hand that, to my mind, undermine the work’s seriousness.

    I want to be fair. I’m trying. But once you notice the frauds and fallacies — the imposture of neutrality, the forced binary, the flattened portrayals — they don’t unsee themselves. So I’m forcing my way through the remaining two-thirds of the book, partly out of duty and partly to see whether Nicholi can salvage his argument when he has to meet the harder questions he’s been avoiding.

  • Religion Is No Kevlar Vest Against the Fear of Death

    Religion Is No Kevlar Vest Against the Fear of Death

    My mother’s people were Ashkenazi Jews from Poland; my father’s, Roman Catholics from Scotland and Ireland. Yet both treated religion like a dusty attic trunk filled with moth-eaten lace. When a TV preacher with the face of a sour prune croaked on about sin, my parents would smirk, as if watching a vaudeville relic wheeze out his final act.

    I wasn’t so quick to sneer. At Castro Valley High, a white-haired Mrs. Hanson, seventy if a day, handed us the Book of Job, and I was caught like a fish. God, suffering, celestial wagers—it was grotesque, terrifying, delicious. I’d drive my Ford Maverick to the gym, sunrays slicing through storm clouds, and briefly imagine a divine presence scanning my biceps. I didn’t know biblical doctrine from dog food, but I felt sure there was an afterlife waiting—an enchanting lounge where the velvet ropes always parted. For a short stretch of adolescence, I even stopped fearing death.

    Then came my Christian classmates, thrusting paperback apocalypse manuals into my hands. Rapture. Beasts. Eternal torment. Overnight my buoyant heaven curdled into a horror show where my Jewish relatives burned forever. Some Christians reassured me that such cruelty wasn’t “real Christianity.” But the deeper I read, the more Paul’s letters stood like theological battering rams against Jews who wouldn’t bend the knee. Supersessionism, they called it—a polite term for spiritual eviction.

    The Church Fathers weren’t gentler. Augustine’s take on eternal damnation? Justice, pure and simple. Billions in flames, and he shrugs: they had their chance. Forgive me if I don’t find that a winning sales pitch.

    Which is why I keep returning to Dale Allison’s Night Comes. Barely 200 pages, but packed with the force of a midnight storm. A Christian, Allison treats hell not as a theological curiosity but as a moral obscenity that collapses under its own weight. He doesn’t stitch loopholes into doctrine—he pokes holes until the absurdity gushes out.

    His stories haunt me. His teenage daughter found annihilation worse than hell; she feared nothingness more than flames. His son, in an email of raw honesty, mourned the idea that “the museum of his mind will be closed.” Not death, but the erasure of memory—the bulldozing of everything tender and beloved—that was the real terror.

    As a teen I believed our cherished moments had permanent residence in some cosmic vault. Allison doesn’t smash that hope, but he makes it more fragile, more complicated. He notes—accurately, grimly—that saints and mystics, when Death shows up in the doorway, often beg and claw like the rest of us. Religious devotion, it seems, is no Kevlar vest.

    And so, in old age, I sit with a religious ambivalence as stubborn as arthritis: no doctrine, no creed, no “blessed assurance” makes the thought of extinction less ghastly. Maybe the fear of death is not a flaw to be cured but a mirror—one that forces us to stop pretending we’re eternal and finally face the finite with our eyes wide open.

  • Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    Old Age and Father Time’s Frenemies

    I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were vacationing in Maui. There, on the beach, I spotted a short, compact man in his mid-seventies parading around in dark-blue Speedos with a woman at least fifty years his junior — a striking Mediterranean beauty in her twenties. The guy was trim, well-manscaped, scampering confidently on the sand like a millionaire who spends half his life in boardrooms and the other half trying to outrun the Grim Reaper. He dove into the waves with the vigor of someone convinced that as long as he keeps moving, Father Time can’t catch him.

    You could smell the wealth on him. He was probably a CEO with a portfolio big enough to buy the illusion of eternal youth. He worked hard and played harder, to borrow Hugh Hefner’s mantra. Now, I’m not here to pass moral judgment on a man who chooses a partner young enough to be his granddaughter — that’s his business. What fascinates me is the fantasy: money, discipline, and a little manscaping used as talismans against aging, as if youth were a rare potion you could sip to stay forever young.

    The whole tableau, though, felt wrong. He and his youthful companion were mismatched puzzle pieces jammed together by brute will. It was as if two jagged halves of a broken mirror had been glued into place; every forced smile and awkward embrace chipped another sliver off, until all that remained was a pile of glittering shards — the perfect image for the futility of trying to cheat time.

    This rich, fit man is Father Time’s frenemy — the one who insists they’re on friendly terms while secretly plotting a hostile takeover. He may have sold himself a “perfect picture,” but the public sees the mismatch as plainly as a traffic cone in a tuxedo. The spectacle exposes his poverty: an inability to relinquish something that no longer belongs to him, a clinging to youth that reveals fear rather than confidence. That fear, in turn, sabotages his aspiration to curate an enviable life; the attempt to perform eternal youth only underlines the loss he refuses to admit.

    I’m reminded, uncomfortably, of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted. Born in Ecuador in 1962 and raised in Toronto, Ferraro turned to bodybuilding, gambling, and organized crime as a teenager, hungry for money, women, clothes, and respect. He got it all — a Rolex Daytona, gold necklaces, designer sunglasses large enough to require their own zip code — until seven months in prison and eventual deportation stripped him of his infrastructure. In his sixties, he’s a sculpted caricature: tank top, ostentatious sport coat draped like a cape, and penetrating melancholy eyes that reveal he knows the score. He says he wants his life back, but knows he’s too old for the young man’s game and can’t look away from it.

    Both the rich man in Maui and Ferraro in exile put me in mind of Lot’s wife. They cannot relinquish the lifestyle that defines them; youth is their identity, and the thought of being disconnected from it registers as a kind of death. Unable to let go, they calcify into pillars of salt — frozen monuments to a self that no longer exists.

  • The Camera, the Angel, and the Mantra

    The Camera, the Angel, and the Mantra

    Last night I dreamed I was drifting up the coast with my twin daughters, sermonizing like a broken record: There is a physical world and there is a spiritual world. I said it so often I sounded like a street preacher who’d lost his pamphlets but kept his conviction.

    We stopped at a retreat, the entrance nothing more than a ladder plunging into a meadow. Down we went, rung by rung, my mantra trailing after us like incense: physical and spiritual, spiritual and physical.

    In the meadow stood an angelic blonde, late teens, all halo and camera gear, fiddling with a tripod as if she were about to capture the resurrection. Beside her was her younger brother, a sweet kid who instantly bonded with my daughters—proof that love doesn’t check the itinerary before showing up.

    I told the angelic sister this was an inconvenient day for romance, since we were traveling north to find the rest of our family. Still, watching affection bloom like an invasive weed, I conceded we might linger a little longer. My daughters, I suggested, could teach her brother the finer points of philosophy, relationships, and all the grand illusions we adults mistake for wisdom. She nodded, grateful, and asked where we were headed. I repeated: north, always north.

    Her camera squatted in the grass, looking familiar—something from an earlier chapter of the dream, mediocre at best. I bit my tongue rather than insult her equipment, repeating inwardly my refrain: The world is both physical and spiritual.

    Meanwhile, my daughters and the boy turned the ladder into a playground, climbing and descending until their thighs grew visibly muscular—an anatomical exclamation point underscoring my point. The body is flesh, the soul is fire, and the dream was happy to remind me of both.

  • How Selfishness Accidentally Invented Kindness

    How Selfishness Accidentally Invented Kindness

    Morality is one of those words that makes people recoil. It has the stale odor of an HR training video, the medicinal burn of cod liver oil, the joyless bulk of broccoli shoveled onto your plate, or the dead-eyed banality of inspirational refrigerator magnets. Nothing about the word screams adventure—it screams paperwork.

    The topic itself feels penitential and airless, full of clichés, and as lively as a Soviet staff meeting in the Kremlin basement. Take Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The title alone could euthanize a graduate seminar.

    And yet economist Russ Roberts opened this dusty tome and found himself not nodding off, but utterly hooked. So hooked that he wrote How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. Roberts argues that Smith’s insight—that even our selfishness requires us to make others happy—isn’t boring at all. On the contrary, it’s deliciously counterintuitive: the truly selfish person learns that generosity is the best form of selfishness. The helper outpaces the sloth.

    This paradox gives Smith’s argument fizz. What looks like a grim penal code of moral duty turns out to be startlingly original and surprisingly human. For Roberts, the book became a companion, a talisman. He lugged it everywhere, scribbled notes in the margins, and evangelized to anyone who would listen. The book stopped being just a book and became, as Kafka once demanded, an axe for the frozen ocean of the soul.

    I admit, I almost left Roberts’ book untouched. The title had the whiff of self-help, and I vowed long ago to steer clear of the genre’s swamp of clichés. But Nabokov was right: it’s not the what but the how. A book brimming with insight and originality can transcend its category. Roberts’ take on Smith is philosophy dressed as self-help, but in the best sense: witty, sharp, and unafraid to wrestle with misery, selfishness, and the false idol of money.

    Good philosophers, like good teachers, are also salesmen. Roberts sells Smith not as piety in a powdered wig, but as a guide for how to live with honesty, courage, and—yes—even happiness. Against all odds, I’m sold.

  • The Gospel of the Liver King

    The Gospel of the Liver King

    Brian Johnson, better known as the Liver King, is a steroidal cartoon who tried to sell himself as a prophet of “ancestral living.” In reality, he was just another hustler juicing his body with over a hundred grand a year in growth hormones and anabolic steroids. He strutted around Instagram in animal skins, bellowing like a berserk Viking, gnawing raw liver on camera, and flogging overpriced supplements. His entire empire collapsed the moment it was revealed that his shredded physique was less the fruit of caveman purity and more the handiwork of pharmacy-grade science.

    Instead of bowing out in disgrace, he doubled down. Unable to detach from the narcotic glow of internet celebrity, he documented his own unraveling in real time—YouTube became his padded cell, each video another entry in the world’s strangest public diary. He wanted to be remembered as a leader, a liberator from modern malaise, but he became a parody of himself, a sideshow Rambo gone rancid.

    Raw meat became his metaphor—masculinity, toughness, a primal rejection of processed life. But it was also cosplay, a carnival act built for the algorithm, because nothing feeds clicks like a maniac tearing into a bull testicle with his teeth. And young men, starving for meaning, saw not a fraud but a messiah: the steroidal savior who would flex them into the promised land.

    This was kayfabe 2.0. Vince McMahon taught wrestlers never to break character, and Liver King took that gospel straight to Instagram. Only he forgot the cardinal rule: kayfabe consumes you. Live in the gimmick long enough and the gimmick swallows the man. By the end, Liver King wasn’t selling a mask—he was the mask, devoured whole by his own performance.

    His collapse is bigger than one delusional influencer. It’s a commentary on the culture itself: a society so anesthetized by spectacle that it mistakes bombast for wisdom. Idiocracy predicted a wrestler-president peddling electrolytes; we got a shirtless Texan chewing raw liver and pushing HGH cocktails disguised as authenticity. Mike Judge wasn’t satirizing the future—he was reporting it early.

    And yet, there is something deeply American in the Liver King’s fall: the grift, the spectacle, the refusal to relinquish the stage even when the show is over. His tragedy is that of a man who wanted love, found instead an algorithm’s approval, and now cannot escape the cage of his own creation.

  • The Warm Bath and the Higher Forces

    The Warm Bath and the Higher Forces

    Therapist Phil Stutz, in Lessons for Living: What Only Adversity Can Teach You, identifies the most insidious adversity we face daily: the lure of immediate gratification. This dopamine-charged, compulsive, addictive pull consigns us, he says, to “the lower channel,” the “Warm Bath,” the comfort zone. Its source is the inner saboteur he calls Part X.

    In Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, the same force appears as “The Resistance,” the invisible enemy that diverts us from lives of creativity and meaning. Sometimes it takes the form of “unwholesome activities”—scouring the internet for smut or indulging in materialistic temptations that pull us away from hard work. Cal Newport warns that when we return from such addictive detours, our brains are still coated in “lower channel” residue—mental detritus that dulls our clarity and compromises our work.

    Confronting Part X—or the Resistance—is not a one-time victory. We never ascend to a nirvana where the demon vanishes; it is always nearby, waiting for an opening.

    Rejecting the endless circuit of traditional talk therapy, Stutz arms his patients with Tools—practical methods to counter the bad habits born of Part X. His patients are often “either trapped in a past that no longer existed or living in fantasy about a future that hadn’t arrived yet—and might never.” The Tools, he says, “open the door to the infinite wisdom of the present.”

    His therapy hinges on three elements:

    1. Homework—daily exercises outside of sessions.
    2. Forward Motion—steps away from the past and repetitive stagnation toward a new life.
    3. Connection to Higher Forces—a necessary change, not an optional one, to avoid the self-destruction that leads to death.

    “We are only a tiny part of an infinite universe,” he writes. “On our own we can do nothing. But, in a silent miracle, the universe puts its energies at the service of human evolution.” Higher Forces help us escape personal hell and learned helplessness. When his patients connect with them, they find hope and the power to change—here, in the present.

    Before going further, I have to pause and unpack this. First, I believe Stutz’s framework offers a real way out of the wide path to self-destruction and onto the narrow path of meaning. Second, I can’t help but think of Christianity, Judaism, and A.A.

    In Christianity, especially Pauline theology, we are compulsive creatures, helpless before our sinful drives. Only surrendering to Higher Powers—in this case, the cosmic Christ—can break our demonic impulses. Paul spells this out in the Epistle to the Romans.

    Judaism, at least as Rabbi Hyam Maccoby describes it in The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, rejects this helplessness. We do have self-agency. When we cry to God for rescue from our self-destruction and abasement, He meets us halfway—we move toward Him, and He moves toward us.

    In A.A., the principle is stripped to its core. Comedian Marc Maron has spoken about his recovery from substance abuse: every day, he got on his knees and told a Higher Power he could not free himself from addiction alone.

    Across these three traditions, I see more similarities than differences. I’m confident that anyone who sincerely applies these principles will improve.

    But here’s the sticking point: belief in a Higher Power without religious baggage is not the same as belief in a specific deity. The Jewish God—open to debate, vague about the afterlife—is quite different from the Christian God who, under Pauline influence, recasts Judaism into a universal religion for gentiles, condemns Jews as cut off from the vine, and adopts Augustine’s stark vision of eternal paradise or eternal damnation.

    Three notions of deity—each with profound implications.

    As an addict and an agnostic, I wonder: am I letting these theological questions distract me from the urgent need to connect with Higher Powers so I can face my own demons? This question burns in me. Will these Higher Powers help me navigate my dense jungle of doubts? Will they help me find clarity?

    Stutz notes that many of his patients backslide. Why? Because they stop using the Tools. Why stop? Complacency. Or disbelief in the stakes.

    Which brings me to the core of my own struggle: faith in a doctrinal God versus a personal God without doctrine. The doctrinal God comes with teachings—eternal perdition, the Virgin Birth, a literal resurrection—that can be difficult to swallow. For a fuller exploration of the problems with doctrine, see Elizabeth Anderson’s essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?”

    The personal God without doctrine might be more palatable, but perhaps lacks the high-stakes edge that some people need to stay committed to their daily battle with Part X, the Resistance, or whatever name we give this destructive force.

    So what’s the path forward? Should I call life a nihilistic joke and live recklessly? Certainly not. Even with my doubts, I must press ahead, use the Tools, and seek communion with Higher Powers. I can only hope such a life will yield answers—and remind myself that giving in to immediate gratification only strengthens the lower channel, leading, inevitably, toward darkness, confusion, and death.