Cinemorphosis

Tag: bible

  • Cherry-Picking Does Not Make a Persuasive Book

    Cherry-Picking Does Not Make a Persuasive Book

    Kathryn Paige Harden left the evangelical church of her childhood and is now a behavioral geneticist at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also the author of the insightful, compelling Original Sin: On the Genetics of Vice, the Problem of Blame, and the Future of Forgiveness. After enjoying her long conversation with Andrew Sullivan, I picked up her book on Audible.

    In it, Harden distinguishes between two kinds of sin. Sin with a small “s” refers to individual acts that violate one’s moral code. Sin with a capital “S,” however, describes our enduring tendency to make a mess of things over time—what might be called the arc of human fallibility. To clarify this idea, she quotes Francis Spufford from his book Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, where he famously defines sin as the “Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up,” or HPtFTU.

    I was surprised that Harden, an ex-evangelical, would draw on a self-described Christian apologist, so I decided to read Spufford’s book myself. It quickly became clear that he is an exceptional writer with sharp insights into the Christian faith. He captures what he sees as the core message of Jesus: that one must give of oneself freely and without limit, loving and serving others with a pure heart. Intention, in his view, is everything.

    Still, something triggered my skepticism. Spufford repeatedly claims that Judaism and Islam, unlike Christianity, emphasize rule-following over inner intention. He uses the term orthopraxy—right action—as opposed to orthodoxy, or right belief. But this struck me as a reductive and biased claim, especially given the abundance of Jewish and Islamic teachings that stress sincerity, purity of heart, and the dangers of hypocrisy. The more he pressed this point, the harder it became to see him as merely insightful; he began to seem like a brilliant writer with a credibility problem.

    That problem deepened as I read on. Spufford appears willing to sidestep or reinterpret scripture when it conflicts with his more liberal views, particularly on issues like gay marriage and eternal damnation. There is a certain irony here. He praises Christianity for its emphasis on inner transformation and intention, yet he cherry-picks the Bible and reshapes Jesus to align with his own sensibilities. That project—recasting a religious tradition in one’s own image—strikes me as a task that calls for more self-scrutiny, especially before critiquing other religions for lacking moral depth.

    I say this as an agnostic. I’m not troubled by Spufford’s liberal commitments. In fact, I wish the Augustinian notion of eternal damnation were not true. But Spufford seems to want both the moral authority of traditional Christianity and the freedom to revise it at will. He presents the demanding ethical vision of Jesus—love without limits—while setting aside inconvenient passages that might complicate that vision.

    Harden, for her part, had the clarity and courage to leave the faith of her upbringing. Spufford also left his childhood religion, but his return to it—on his own carefully edited terms—would benefit from a bit more humility.

  • The Theology of Winter: Genius, Power, and the Will to Prevail

    The Theology of Winter: Genius, Power, and the Will to Prevail

    I can admire the intellect of Augustine of Hippo and John Calvin without signing on to their theology. Their vision—infants consigned to damnation, humanity stamped at birth with moral rot—feels less like illumination and more like a spiritual winter that never thaws. It is rigorous, yes. It is also airless.

    Set against that severity, Pelagius reads like a man arguing for oxygen. He offered a more generous account of human possibility, one that trusted effort and moral agency. History did not reward him for it. Augustine prevailed, sanctified and institutionalized, while Pelagius was exiled to the margins, labeled a heretic for his trouble. The verdict tells you as much about power as it does about truth.

    I don’t doubt the sincerity of Augustine or Calvin. But sincerity is not the same as innocence. The unconscious has its own ambitions, and theirs often read like combat. These were not only theologians; they were fighters—relentless, articulate, and unwilling to yield an inch of doctrinal territory. They argued to persuade, but also to dominate. They didn’t just defend a vision of faith; they enforced it.

    You can see the lineage in Paul the Apostle himself. At his best—Philippians, luminous and humane—he sounds like a poet of grace. At his worst, he is a man sharpening his pen against rivals, guarding authority with the ferocity of someone who feels it slipping. The contrast is jarring, but revealing.

    Augustine, Calvin, Paul—each too large to be reduced to a single impulse, each capable of brilliance and depth. But running through their work, like a low electrical current, is something harder: the instinct of the embattled mind, the need to be right, to prevail, to settle accounts. It is the scent of the theological pugilist—the man who doesn’t just seek truth, but victory.

  • The Day the G-Shock Frogman Hired Security

    The Day the G-Shock Frogman Hired Security

    Owning a single G-Shock—the mighty Frogman GWF-1000, no less—has taught me several humbling lessons about the realities of atomic timekeeping and solar-powered heroism.

    Lesson one: one Multiband-6 watch, even a legendary one, is not enough.

    I learned this during the night of Daylight Saving Time, when my Frogman—strapped proudly to my wrist—failed to synchronize with the atomic signal from Colorado. The problem, as I later realized, was strategic error. The watch should have been resting nobly on the windowsill, antenna pointed toward the Rocky Mountains, quietly listening for the midnight radio whisper from the WWVB tower. Instead, it was trapped on my wrist like a submarine trying to receive satellite signals from inside a cave.

    Lesson two: the Frogman occasionally deserves a night off.

    The solar battery is hardy, but I have a habit of activating the backlight like a man signaling aircraft during a blackout. Letting the watch rest on the windowsill overnight gives it two gifts: sunlight recharge during the day and atomic calibration during the night.

    Lesson three: there are places where wearing the Frogman is unnecessarily risky. Airports. Crowded cities. Questionable neighborhoods. Situations where theft, damage, or simple bad luck might separate a man from his amphibious masterpiece.

    These revelations led to an unavoidable conclusion: the Frogman needed protection.

    Enter the G-Shock GW-7900, acquired for the almost suspiciously reasonable price of $110. A watch this loyal and hardworking cannot remain nameless, so I have given it a title worthy of its mission: The Protector.

    Now the system is simple. Frogman and Protector—a tag team.

    The Protector belongs to a broader category I call Bodyguard Watches: rugged backup watches deployed when the owner wishes to preserve the dignity, resale value, or physical safety of a more expensive timepiece. The bodyguard absorbs scratches, suspicion, and general abuse while the principal remains comfortably out of harm’s way.

    I briefly considered naming the GW-7900 “The Bodyguard,” but that sounded less like a watch and more like a brand of anti-perspirant.

    So the name stands.

    The Frogman commands.
    The Protector takes the hits.

  • The Frogman Fidelity Oath

    The Frogman Fidelity Oath

    Dear God, hear the humble prayer of a watch addict who is trying—heroically, if imperfectly—to stay faithful to his G-Shock Frogman. Grant me the strength to appreciate the magnificent amphibious creature already on my wrist and to resist coveting other G-Shocks, especially the cheaper ones that whisper seductive promises of practicality and convenience. Protect me from the restless itch that sends me wandering through YouTube at midnight, where cheerful reviewers with macro lenses and enthusiastic voices assure me that the next watch will transform my life, my character, and possibly my posture.

    Please quiet the anxious machinery in my brain that insists on researching watches I do not need. Help me understand that the Frogman already fulfills every rational requirement a man could have for a digital timepiece: it is solar, atomic, indestructible, and built like a submarine designed by an engineer with trust issues. Remind me that my obsessive excursions into the G-Shock ecosystem are not noble acts of research but rather neurotic pilgrimages through a desert of comparison charts and unboxing videos.

    And please, dear God, intervene quickly, because the temptation is growing stronger by the hour. I can feel myself drifting toward the purchase of a GW-7900—not because I need it, but because my mind has begun whispering the most dangerous phrase in the collector’s vocabulary: “backup watch.” I tell myself the 7900 would merely protect my Frogman from harsh conditions, as though the Frogman were a delicate orchid rather than an armored amphibian designed to survive the Mariana Trench.

    If this prayer sounds familiar, you already understand the Frogman Fidelity Oath: the solemn pledge made by the watch enthusiast who believes he has finally found the perfect G-Shock and now begs for the strength not to betray it. The oath is heartfelt, sincere, and deeply moving—and it usually lasts right up until the moment the addict watches two enthusiastic YouTube reviews and convinces himself that buying a second watch is not an act of infidelity but an act of responsible stewardship.

  • The Watch That Doesn’t Need Your Approval

    The Watch That Doesn’t Need Your Approval

    Spend enough time in the comment section of a G-Shock review and you’ll see the same confession repeated with surprising consistency: I own Rolex. I own Omega. I own watches worth thousands. But my G-Shock gives me more satisfaction.

    Most people leave it there, baffled by their own admission.

    The explanation, however, is not mysterious. It has a name: Utility Purity.

    Utility Purity is what happens when a watch does exactly what a watch is supposed to do—accurate time, legible display, solar power, atomic synchronization, shock resistance, dependable alarms and timers—and refuses to turn the experience into anything more complicated than that. The effect feels like truth. No symbolism. No heritage narrative. No prestige hierarchy. Just performance. Luxury watches can be beautiful, but they also carry social meaning. A G-Shock feels like choosing function over theater—and for many people, that choice feels like integrity, especially after years of wearing objects that double as personal statements.

    Utility Purity also delivers something rarer than accuracy: cognitive ease.

    A G-Shock is psychologically light. No winding schedule. No time drift to monitor. No anxiety about door frames, desk edges, or metal bracelets scratching polished surfaces. No constant background calculation about risk and wear. The brain relaxes because the object doesn’t require caretaking. Luxury ownership often includes a quiet layer of vigilance. G-Shock satisfaction comes from the opposite experience—the relief of a tool that refuses to become a relationship.

    There’s another benefit: freedom from social noise.

    Luxury watches speak even when you don’t. They invite attention, assumptions, silent status calculations, and the occasional internal question: What does this say about me? A G-Shock shuts that conversation down. It’s socially neutral. Invisible. The pleasure becomes private. Much of the satisfaction comes from negative space—the absence of being evaluated.

    Then there is the emotional power of reliability.

    Atomic synchronization. Solar autonomy. Shock and water resistance. The message is simple: This will not fail you. Humans attach quickly to dependable systems. The watch becomes a small island of certainty—always correct, always ready, always indifferent to your moods. Mechanical charm offers personality. Utility Purity offers security. For many people, certainty is the deeper comfort.

    Finally, Utility Purity produces a cleaner dopamine cycle.

    Luxury acquisitions often follow a dramatic curve: anticipation, unboxing euphoria, validation, then the quiet descent into worry, justification, and the next rung of the ladder. G-Shocks operate differently. Lower cost. Lower risk. Fewer regrets. You wear them hard, not carefully. The emotional pattern shifts from I need to justify this to I can just use this.

    And that difference matters.

    Because in the end, Utility Purity isn’t about affordability.

    It’s about the rare satisfaction of owning something that asks nothing from you—no protection, no explanation, no performance.

    It just works.

    And after a lifetime of managing objects that carry meaning, status, and expectation, that kind of silence can feel like freedom.

  • Maudlin Grail Syndrome

    Maudlin Grail Syndrome

    As I consider Cicero’s call for self-restraint in Tusculan Disputations, my thoughts return to a story that’s haunted me for over twenty years—Anton Chekhov’s “Gooseberries.” It is, in essence, the tragic fable of a Maudlin Man, told with surgical clarity and Chekhovian cruelty.

    His name is Nicholai Ivanich, and he’s not merely pathetic—he’s morally revolting. He marries an aging, unattractive woman for her wealth and waits with predator patience for her to die. Once she obliges, he buys himself a country farmhouse ringed with gooseberry bushes, retreats from the world, and crowns himself a minor deity among the local peasants by handing out cheap liquor like some portly, provincial Dionysus.

    Chekhov doesn’t give us Nicholai’s voice. He gives us Ivan, the disgusted brother, who sees this man for what he is: a swollen, self-satisfied corpse in waiting. Ivan calls Nicholai’s farmhouse dream a “definite disorder”—not a goal, but a fixation, a fever dream dressed up as a life plan. For Ivan, his brother’s pastoral retreat is less Arcadia and more open-casket viewing. “He looked old, stout, flabby,” Ivan observes. “His cheeks, nose, and lips were pendulous. I half expected him to grunt like a pig.”

    That image sticks: Nicholai, the human piglet, grinning over his plate of gooseberries, believing he’s achieved bliss when in truth he’s just decaying in comfort.

    And then comes the moment that seals it—Nicholai’s nightly ritual: he’s brought a plate of gooseberries from his estate, and upon seeing them, he literally weeps with joy. “He looked at them in silence, laughed with joy, and could not speak for excitement.” He is consumed by the performance of happiness. It’s not the berries he loves—it’s what they symbolize. In his mind, they are proof that his life is complete.

    But it’s all delusion. Nicholai isn’t fulfilled—he’s embalmed in maudlin sentimentality, drunk on nostalgia for something that never really existed. His joy is cosmetic. He’s not flourishing. He’s fermenting.

    And this, I confess, reminds me of myself—and my fellow watch addicts.

    We, too, have our gooseberries. Ours just happen to tick.

    We post videos of our “grail watches” and glow with reverence as we hold them up to the camera like relics from a sacred shrine. We give breathless soliloquies about our “perfect” collections, our “ultimate” configurations. We praise bezels and dial textures the way Nicholai praises his berries—with trembling hands and watery eyes. And like Nicholai, we’re not convincing anyone but ourselves.

    Because deep down, we know: the drama is maudlin. We have arrived at Maudlin Grail Syndrome–a condition in which the collector performs reverence rather than experiencing peace. Tears may form, voices may soften, thumbnails may glow—but the joy is theatrical, not restorative. The grail embalms rather than liberates. The joy is hollow. The entire pageantry is just a way to distract from the torment our hobby brings us. We spend hours obsessing, comparing, flipping, tweaking, always convinced that this next watch will bring balance and peace, only to find ourselves more anxious than before.

    We are men who weep over gooseberries. And worse—we make YouTube thumbnails about them.

    If we were honest, we’d admit that one decent, mid-priced watch would offer more peace than any “holy grail” ever could. But that would mean giving up the theater. The drama. The illusion that our fixations have meaning. And that, for the Maudlin Man, is the hardest loss of all.

  • No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    No Backup World: Martin Hägglund, C.S. Lewis, and the Moral Urgency of Now

    Philosopher Martin Hägglund, in This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom, advances a stark and unsettling claim: genuine goodness is impossible unless we accept that death is final. There is no afterlife to balance the books, no celestial extension cord supplying meaning from beyond the grave. This life—finite, fragile, irrevocable—is all we have. Faith in eternity, Hägglund argues, is not a comfort but a distraction, a metaphysical detour that siphons urgency away from the hard, unglamorous work of building justice here and now. To make his case, he turns to an unlikely witness: C.S. Lewis. In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his wife Joy Davidman, Lewis—Christian apologist, defender of heaven—finds his theology torn open by loss. Scripture offers no shelter. Promises of eternal reunion ring thin. Lewis admits to “bitter resentment,” to madness, to a grief so absolute that it flattens piety on contact. What he wants is not God, not eternity, not consolation—but Joy. Her absence exposes a truth Lewis cannot escape: the intensity of love is inseparable from its fragility. Love hurts because it can be lost. Its power comes from time running out. Hägglund presses the implication Lewis cannot fully accept: even if eternity existed, love could not survive there. With no stakes, no risk, no irreversibility, existence would congeal into something inert—an endless, consequence-free duration. Heaven, in this view, is not fulfillment but sedation. To imagine God as a valet who merely returns our loved ones to us is, for both Lewis and Hägglund, a form of idolatry. But where Lewis is torn—desperate to hold faith and grief in the same trembling hands—Hägglund feels no such strain. For him, religion does not deepen love; it dilutes it. It shifts responsibility elsewhere. It turns this world into a waiting room and this life into a rehearsal. Secular living, by contrast, is an act of commitment without backup plans. There is no “later” to fix what we neglect now. That is precisely why what we do here matters so much.

    If you are a political-sapien, this conclusion feels not bleak but bracing. History—not heaven—is where salvation must be worked out. There is no eternal kingdom hovering offstage, no divine reset button waiting beyond the clouds. This world is the only stage, and its outcomes depend on the quality of the institutions we build and maintain. Moral authority does not descend from above; it emerges from human reason struggling, imperfectly but persistently, toward fairness. People, in this view, are not saints or sinners by nature so much as products of systems—capable of decency when the scaffolding is sound, capable of cruelty when it is not. Politics therefore becomes the highest moral labor: not a sideshow to spiritual life but the arena in which justice either materializes or fails. AI machines enter this worldview as probationary instruments. They are not saviors and not demons. They earn trust only insofar as they distribute power downward, widen access, and reduce structural inequity. If AI flattens hierarchies and democratizes opportunity, it is a tool worth refining. If it concentrates wealth, authority, and decision-making into fewer hands, it ceases to be innovation and becomes a threat—something to regulate, constrain, or dismantle in defense of the only life that counts.

  • That One Last Reservation Before the World Ends

    That One Last Reservation Before the World Ends

    Last night I dreamed I lived in a buried Eden—an immense underground forest strung with posh restaurants and spa resorts like jewels on a necklace. Rumors crept through the crowd that thunder was coming, that the floodgates of heaven were warming up their rotator cuffs. No one cared. They feasted, drank, and posed for selfies beneath glowing lanterns as if the apocalypse were a pretentious wine critic whose opinion they could safely ignore.

    Their denial infected me. I booked a table at a celebrated outdoor tiki restaurant where fire torches hissed and thatched huts leaned like gossiping debutantes. The maître d’ was Ari Melber, no longer the news anchor who dissected politics but a hospitality messiah who now curated flaming cocktails. He remembered me with a kind, almost pastoral smile. We bantered as if I hadn’t abandoned his television show months ago, when the news began to feel like surgery performed by angry interns armed with steak knives.

    On my way back into the mob, I spotted Werner Herzog: prophet of bleakness, birder of human despair, now loitering like an omniscient owl. His gaze locked on the bright orange watch strapped to my wrist. He coveted it with a seriousness usually reserved for glacier panoramas. I handed it over without hesitation—it was cheap costume jewelry, a gift I had held onto only out of politeness. Now I’d at least have a noble story: “Herzog wanted it.” Who could argue with that?

    Then the heavens decided to audition for God’s wrath. Thunder cracked, lightning flared, and rain attacked with the ferocity of a SWAT raid. The revelers lost their composure and scattered. Higher ground. We needed higher ground. We sprinted into an all-girls parochial school. The hallways smelled like chalk, fear, and cafeteria cheese. Teenage girls sobbed as some faceless authority commanded them to abandon their duffel bags and place them in a nursery filled with empty cribs. They laid their bags into those cribs like mothers relinquishing newborns. The sound of their crying was medieval.

    Water kept hammering the roof. The underground city was a sinking ship without a captain. My pulse was quiet—too quiet. Some part of me had already accepted the ending. That’s when Herzog returned. I glanced at my wrist and discovered a new watch there—brown, joyless, like a UPS truck. I offered it to him the way a man gives tribute to an impatient god. He accepted, now wearing orange and brown on a single limb, comforted by trinkets in the face of annihilation.

    If doom was coming for us all, then let it. I’d shaken hands with Ari Melber. He’d greeted me with the authenticity of a priest who still believes the liturgy. If anyone deserved restaurant success in a drowned world, it was him. A flood could wash away our bodies, but the memory of an affable maître d’ was buoyant enough to float.

  • Sam Harris Has Tea with a Christian Nationalist

    Sam Harris Has Tea with a Christian Nationalist

    Sam Harris has always been a curious kind of mystic—one who believes in meditation, not miracles; consciousness, not creeds. He seeks transcendence without theology, a spiritual depth unburdened by institutional clutter. Religion, he concedes, sometimes gestures toward the same inner world he explores, but it arrives dragging a freight train of dogma, myth, and moral detritus.

    That distaste for organized faith didn’t stop Harris from sitting down with one of its most unyielding champions: Doug Wilson, a self-described “Christian nationalist” pastor out of Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is the sort of man who makes the Bible sound less like scripture and more like federal law. He calls himself a scriptural absolutist, affirms the Apostles’ Creed word for word, believes the earth is 6,000 years old, defends the Old Testament’s death penalties for Sabbath violators, and dreams of a Reformed Presbyterian theocracy—America governed by divine fiat and fossilized certainty.

    When Wilson argued that moral relativism was America’s undoing, Harris did not interrupt. The pastor warned that tolerance would rot the nation from within—imagining a slippery slope from pluralism to polygamy, from open borders to moral anarchy. Harris listened quietly, allowing Wilson to build his own cathedral of logic brick by brittle brick.

    Throughout the conversation, Harris stayed composed, probing only occasionally—asking about the justice of eternal damnation, or how exactly divine law handles marriage beyond the traditional mold. His restraint was surgical. He wasn’t there to score points; he was there to let the argument reveal itself.

    At one point, Wilson lamented that secular institutions had failed us. Oddly, Harris seemed to nod—at least internally. They shared a disappointment in modernity’s moral anemia, though their prescriptions could not be more opposed. Harris seeks meaning through reason and mindfulness; Wilson seeks it through submission and authority.

    By the end, no one converted anyone. Harris didn’t embrace theocracy, and Wilson didn’t abandon it. But something subtler occurred: civility. Wilson, almost startled, thanked Harris for his respect and good manners—an acknowledgment that such conversations usually end in shouting.

    So what did Harris accomplish? He held a mirror to theocratic ambition without breaking it. By letting Wilson speak freely, he illuminated the growing movement that longs for a Christianized state—a homegrown version of moral authoritarianism dressed as righteousness. Harris didn’t win an argument; he revealed the landscape of the battlefield.

  • The Fig Jam of Eden and the Gospel According to Dr. Phil

    The Fig Jam of Eden and the Gospel According to Dr. Phil

    Last night I dreamed my in-laws owned a house in Southern California—a suburban Eden fenced off from the infernal sprawl. The garden was lush to the point of parody: fig trees drooping with purple abundance, vines heavy with mysterious nectar fruits that looked genetically engineered for temptation. But paradise had its fine print. Poison ivy twined through the arbor like a legal clause in a lease with the devil. My in-laws, wounded by this horticultural betrayal, decided to sell the house and flee to the coast where they had found an obscure yet appealing city. As they packed, they shared a final sacrament: crackers smeared with their last batch of fig jam. It was obscenely delicious, the kind of sweetness that feels like divine mockery—Eden’s exit tax.

    My story in the dream wasn’t so upbeat. While they escaped to ocean breezes, I was sentenced to return to the California desert, a spiritual exile with a vague rap sheet. My sin was unnamed but apparently grave enough to require rehabilitation by Dr. Phil.

    At the studio, Dr. Phil strutted out like a Texan oracle with a talk-show budget. Each of us received a set of mystical props: a rock, a book, a flute, and a seashell. We were told to sniff them and describe their scent. The trick, he said, was that every smell meant something different to everyone. At the end of the show, he’d reveal the “real” smell and, somehow, this revelation would transform our lives.

    When my turn came, I inhaled the objects furiously—nothing. No salt, no cedar, no note of redemption. Just the hollow scent of my own frustration. Instead of passing them on, I hoarded them. Soon they piled around me like the debris of a failed experiment: rocks, shells, books, flutes—my life rendered as an archaeological dig of bad habits.

    Dr. Phil raised an eyebrow, that signature look of televised concern. “I hear you’re a professor—a smart man,” he said. “But you’re disorganized. You need to get your act together.”

    I looked at the clutter choking the floor and saw the metaphor laid bare. My possessions were my sins: chaos, indecision, intellectual hoarding, spiritual mildew. I woke knowing the dream’s diagnosis—my life had become a dumpster fire disguised as scholarship. It was time to clean house, inner and outer.