Cinemorphosis

Tag: christianity

  • 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.

  • Beyond Believers and Unbelievers

    Beyond Believers and Unbelievers

    In Reflections on the Existence of God, Richard E. Simmons insists on a binary vision of reality: you either believe in God through the Judeo-Christian tradition, or you reject God altogether, joining the ranks of atheists in the mold of Freud or the New Atheists. A committed Christian, Simmons even agrees with atheist Sam Harris that “atheism and Christianity compete on the same playing field.” In this framing, the contest is nothing less than a duel for human souls, with consequences both temporal and eternal. As Simmons puts it: “The question of God’s existence, in my opinion, is the most significant issue in all of life.”

    Drawing on Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God, which stages a philosophical match between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, Simmons argues that if Lewis is wrong, then Freud must be right: the universe is empty, silent, and loveless. In that case, we are forced to embrace this “harsh reality,” stripping away “false hopes and unrealistic expectations.”

    But Simmons’ stark either/or feels more like caricature than clarity. Not all who reject Christianity are Freud’s disciples. Many non-Christian seekers believe in benevolent spiritual forces larger than themselves. Phil Stutz in The Tools and Steven Pressfield in The War of Art both describe transcendent realities—love, creativity, solace—that hardly resemble Freud’s existential bleakness.

    Even within Christianity, belief is hardly monolithic. The theology of a Calvinist and that of a Universalist are galaxies apart. To affirm substitutionary atonement is to worship a very different God than the believer who rejects it. The label “believer” is too blunt to capture these divergences. Hyam Maccoby, the Jewish scholar who wrote The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, is a believer in God, yet he spends his book dismantling Paul, another believer. Sometimes believers are harsher with each other than with atheists.

    Framing the world as a cosmic battlefield of believers versus unbelievers oversimplifies both camps. Reality is more complex, and spiritual life cannot be reduced to an either/or ultimatum.

  • The Missing Demon in Elizabeth Anderson’s Morality: A College Essay Prompt

    The Missing Demon in Elizabeth Anderson’s Morality: A College Essay Prompt

    In her essay “If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted?,” Elizabeth Anderson challenges the belief that morality is grounded in religion. She argues instead that morality emerges from evolution and learned cooperation. As she explains:

    “It follows that we cannot appeal to God to underwrite the authority of morality. How, then, can I answer the moralistic challenge to atheism, that without God moral rules lack any authority? I say: the authority of moral rules lies not with God, but with each of us. We each have moral authority with respect to one another. This authority is, of course, not absolute. No one has the authority to order anyone else to blind obedience. Rather, each of us has the authority to make claims on others, to call upon people to heed our interests and concerns. Whenever we lodge a complaint, or otherwise lay a claim on others’ attention and conduct, we presuppose our own authority to give others reasons for action that are not dependent on appealing to the desires and preferences they already have. But whatever grounds we have for assuming our own authority to make claims is equally well possessed by anyone who we expect to heed our own claims. For, in addressing others as people to whom our claims are justified, we acknowledge them as judges of claims, and hence as moral authorities. Moral rules spring from our practices of reciprocal claim making, in which we work out together the kinds of considerations that count as reasons that all of us must heed, and thereby devise rules for living together peacefully and cooperatively, on a basis of mutual accountability.”

    Anderson asserts that morality can and does exist without religion, assuming that people are rational enough to sustain moral authority within society. Yet there appears to be a missing element in her account: the demonic. Even without religious belief, it is difficult to deny the presence of a destructive force within human nature. Steven Pressfield, in The War of Art, names this force “the Resistance”—an inner demon that tempts us to waste our lives. Phil Stutz expands on this idea, calling it Part X in his therapy practice, a concept further explored in the Netflix documentary Stutz.

    For your essay (approximately 1,700 words), respond to the claim that Anderson’s essay, by omitting the demonic dimension of human behavior, does not provide a complete or persuasive account of morality. Argue instead that Phil Stutz’s therapeutic framework—especially as presented in Stutz—functions as a kind of substitute for religion. His system offers a narrative of human struggle: being trapped in immediate gratification (a life of the flesh), striving for Higher Powers (a life of the spirit), and acknowledging sin or innate depravity (Part X).

    To support your argument, draw on the work of Phil Stutz, his co-writer Barry Michels, and Steven Pressfield. Be sure to include a counterargument with rebuttal and a Works Cited page with at least four sources in MLA format.

  • 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.

  • Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    Carrère’s Kingdom: Faith, Madness, and the Will to Survive

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère recounts the strange, fevered period of his life when he became a practicing Catholic—a conversion that lasted three years and hovered somewhere between epiphany and breakdown. During that time, he rose each morning to take meticulous notes on the Gospel of John, scribbling like a man possessed. He now looks back at that period in the early 1990s with bewilderment, even embarrassment. What surprises him most isn’t that he converted—it’s that, years later, while immersed in researching the origins of Christianity, he failed at first to connect that research to his own religious episode. When he finally does, the realization is so jarring he feels compelled to dig out the old notebooks. And yet the thought of reading them fills him with dread.

    The last time he looked at them, in 2005, he was deep in depression and under the care of a psychiatrist. At the height of his religious zeal, Carrère had been suicidal. He was prescribed antidepressants—ones whose warning labels included the possibility of “erroneous beliefs,” a caveat that made him laugh darkly at his own conversion. He’s careful not to reduce religious yearning to a single cause, but it’s hard to miss the pattern: a man desperate to avoid self-destruction turning toward a story of rebirth, redemption, and divine rescue. Perhaps, instead of ending his life, he baptized it into another.

    As he flips through the old pages, he’s confronted by a younger self who no longer believed in free will or personal resolve as meaningful paths to goodness. He saw human beings as hopelessly frail and himself as incapable of rescuing his own life. At the time, he clung to God and marriage with equal desperation, hoping both would serve as anchors to prevent him from drifting into the abyss. But the notebooks also reveal a darker truth: his marriage to Helene was deeply unhappy. They loved each other, but they drank too much, blamed each other for their suffering, and fed each other’s neuroses. His writing—once the purpose of his life—had stalled completely. He hadn’t written anything in three years. He was a man sinking.

    Carrère eventually crawled out of that pit, but not through faith. What saved him wasn’t a god, but a set of daily disciplines: yoga, martial arts.

    A spiritual system that promised absolutes had failed him. A life that combined a focus on mind and body resulting in relaxation and clarity of thoughts, helped empty his anxieties and depression. With a strong mind and body, he was able to be productive as a writer. He eventually made lots of money from his craft, and he became the least likely to become religious: He became the rich man for who is about as ripe for salvation as the camel walking through the eye of a needle. 

  • The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    The Real Reason You Take Yoga Classes

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère draws a sly, subversive line between Les Revenants—a moody French zombie drama—and the early days of Christianity, when Paul’s disciples waited breathlessly for the world to end and the dead to rise. They were the original doomsday cult: spiritual outcasts and apocalyptic misfits, not unlike the “true believers” Eric Hoffer famously described in The True Believer. What bound them together wasn’t political ideology or economic despair—it was a single cosmic rupture: the Resurrection. One dead man, allegedly not dead anymore, changed the course of Western civilization. It’s not hard to see the resemblance to Les Revenants—a town full of dead people quietly returning, not as ghouls, but as eerily normal people who nonetheless shatter reality.

    Carrère, never content with simple metaphors, brings this comparison to a dinner conversation with his urbane, rationalist friends. One of them, Patrick, accidentally blurts out something true and uncomfortably sharp: millions of otherwise intelligent, educated, and mentally stable people believe in something as outlandish as Christian theology—and no one bats an eye. If someone today claimed Zeus turned into a swan to seduce their cousin, or said they kissed a frog that turned into a prince, we’d laugh or lock them up. But tell a roomful of professionals that a crucified Jewish preacher, born of a virgin, rose from the dead and will someday return to judge the living and the dead—and you’ll be offered wine and a seat at the gala. As Patrick notes, “It’s kind of strange, isn’t it?”

    Carrère is not the first to dwell on this strangeness. Nietzsche, he reminds us, was equally dumbfounded that people who believed in rationality, science, and history could also believe in what is essentially a fairy tale with incense and stained glass. And yet, the tale persists. Presidents still bow to bishops. Cathedrals still echo with sacred music. Maybe it’s not belief that sustains Christianity, but aesthetic inertia—what Carrère calls “pious sentiment.” It’s not that people believe Jesus walked on water. It’s that the stories—and the cultural power they evoke—feel too grand to abandon. You may not believe in Santa Claus, but you still get misty-eyed when the lights go up and the music swells.

    So Carrère offers us a taxonomy of belief: There are the literalists, who treat doctrine as GPS coordinates for their soul. And then there are the sentimentalists—the lukewarm faithful—who love the rituals, the candles, the elevated language, but leave the miracles in quotation marks. For them, religion has become spiritual décor. They still crave spiritual ritual but instead of going to church, they attend yoga classes. The creative power that once summoned cathedrals and crusades now hums gently in the background, just another playlist in the cultural mix. Belief, in this world, doesn’t have to be true—it just has to be beautiful enough to preserve.

  • Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    Resurrecting the Narrative: Why Some Stories Won’t Die

    In The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère’s sly, genre-mutating novel, the narrator—an aging screenwriter with a history in French television and a grudge against his own irrelevance—ponders the cultural staying power of zombie stories. Zombies, after all, are the walking dead: viral, contagious, unsettlingly lifelike in their mindless hunger. While consulting on a TV show saturated with post-apocalyptic gore, Carrère’s narrator growls at younger writers, quits in a fog of midlife disdain, and watches from the sidelines as the series becomes a global phenomenon. Bitter and brooding, he studies the success with the sulky fascination of someone who just broke up with their ex and can’t stop checking their Instagram. “I stopped writing fiction long ago,” he mutters, “but I can recognize a powerful fictional device when I see it.”

    Carrère then executes a narrative judo move, flipping from zombie melodrama to the Apostle Paul in 50 A.D., an itinerant zealot-turned-mutation vector. Paul, in Carrère’s retelling, doesn’t just preach the resurrection of a crucified prophet—he unleashes a viral narrative that spreads through Corinth like spiritual malware. Paul doesn’t need a production team or a streaming platform. He has a loom, a message, and an uncanny ability to hijack human consciousness. As Carrère writes, belief in the resurrection becomes “the portent of something enormous, a mutation of humanity, both radical and invisible.” Early Christians, in this telling, are infected—mutants hidden in plain sight, walking among neighbors with a secret that rewires their sense of reality.

    Carrère’s language—mutation, contagion, infection—is no accident. He draws a direct line from Paul’s religious storytelling to the psychological mechanics behind marketing, ideology, and modern myth-making. Yuval Noah Harari makes a similar argument in Sapiens: civilization is held together not by laws or gods, but by collective fictions powerful enough to convince strangers to cooperate. Religion, like branding, spreads through the bloodstream of the culture until it feels like fact. Carrère takes this one step further: religion doesn’t just organize civilization—it haunts it, like a beautiful, persistent hallucination that refuses to die.

    Consider Madison Avenue’s version of salvation. I recall a 1990s Mercedes-Benz commercial where a man, lost and panicked in a shadowy forest, emerges onto a mountaintop. Above him, the stars align into the Mercedes logo. Transcendence is achieved. No need for Damascus Road—just a lease and decent credit. The brand has become a kind of secular gospel. No one cares that Mercedes flunks reliability scores; the emblem still gleams like a divine seal. In this light, Carrère’s Paul isn’t just a religious visionary—he’s the original brand strategist. His resurrection story had better legs than the competition. It caught on. It mutated. It endured. And Carrère, the self-professed unbeliever, is too entranced—and too honest—to dismiss it. Carrere’s novel The Kingdom is the story of a narrator marveling at how the world got infected by a story so powerful, it continues to raise the dead.

  • Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Exactly three months from today, I’ll turn 64. Which means I now live in that strange hinterland between actuarial footnote and walking myth. If adolescence introduces a 13-year-old to waves of chemical chaos and operatic feelings, one’s sixties bring their own interior weather system—gusts of existential dread, sudden squalls of nostalgia, and long humid stretches of unnameable longing.

    One thing I’ve learned: I detest cowardice in the face of mortality. I’m not after false bravado or some barrel-chested denial of death. What I want is a middle path—courage without spiritual negligence, composure without cosmic amnesia. My Jewish relatives on my mother’s side don’t see the need for salvation—certainly not in the harrowing Christian sense of eternal stakes. Meanwhile, my Catholic father’s family insists you better not die with your pants down. Meaning: be ready. Eternity, like a TSA agent, does not tolerate surprises.

    These opposing legacies leave me bouncing between Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Pascal’s cold-blooded Wager. What if belief is a cosmic bet and I’m holding a busted flush? The writer Jerry L. Walls offers a possible lifeline with his arguments for post-mortem salvation—but only if you squint hard enough and don’t mind a theological gray zone. Still, I’m annoyed—and I mean truly annoyed—that I remain agnostic on the most important question of all. 

    But let’s leave eschatology for now and talk about something far more pressing: my inexplicable, almost primal desire to move to the tropics.

    More specifically, Florida. Yes, that Florida—the state of my birth, the national punchline. But in my dreams, it’s not today’s meth-and-misrule Florida. It’s a mythic, fragrant Eden—a sensual vision of coconut palms, mango air, tropical rain falling like music, and an ocean that feels more like the Mother’s Womb than a giant salty death trap. It’s not a real place. It’s Jung’s beach resort.

    Unfortunately, my wife refuses to move there. Too many reasons to name. So I’ve drafted a respectable Plan B: South Carolina. Still sticky, still green, still filled with those sweet tropical mangoes that perfume your skin. Close enough to my psychic homeland. Good enough for the myth to survive.

    And while we’re speaking of myths—let’s talk about the one in my mirror.

    I want to look like the teenage Adonis I once was. Not in some delusional “Silver Sneakers” sort of way, but with genuine conviction. I hit the garage gym, slam down protein and fish oil, and pop creatine like I’m prepping for Mr. Olympia 2089. Deep down, I know my aging joints and erratic hormones are staging a quiet rebellion. But I lift anyway, as if my Mythical Self must match the Mythical Seascape. Call it folly, call it denial—but when reality stings, myth becomes the better moisturizer.

    Then there are The Big Questions, hovering like philosophical fruit flies:
    Does life have meaning?
    Is ennui a moral failure or simply being awake in a stupid world?
    Is anhedonia just a side effect of broadband internet?
    Are our souls sculpted by divine intention or evolutionary leftovers?
    Why are the most sincere believers often either morally wholesome or the most toxic people alive?
    And why is sincerity—God help us—no guarantee of goodness?

    I should care about these questions. But honestly, I care more about my morning bowl of buckwheat groats slathered with mango slices and a French-press tsunami of dark roast. I care about losing ten pounds before my doctor lectures me about cholesterol. I care about making it to 64 with most of my joints intact and my mind still more interested in Kierkegaard than clickbait.

    And I suppose that’s the final humility: I’ve lived long enough to know I don’t have the answers. Like any person, I wish I could be comforted by certainty and absolutes. The only certainty and absolute I have is to be humble in the face of my skepticism and doubts.