The Parasitic Mind and the Wood Cricket Church

A Fellowship Discussion Essay on Gad Saad’s Tel Aviv Lecture

Renaissance Ministries | March 14, 2026

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”
— 2 Timothy 1:7

Introduction: A Voice from the Ruins

Dr. Gad Saad is a professor of evolutionary psychology, currently at the University of Mississippi, formerly at Concordia University in Montreal — until it became too dangerous for him to teach there. He is the author of The Parasitic Mind and the forthcoming Suicidal Empathy. He is a Lebanese Jew who fled Beirut during the civil war at age eleven.

He is also one of the clearest voices diagnosing what has gone wrong with the West.

In a recent lecture in Tel Aviv, Saad laid out a framework for understanding how civilizations destroy themselves — not through external conquest, but through internal parasitism. His analysis, though secular, carries profound implications for the church. For if the West has been parasitized, the church has been parasitized even more completely.

This essay examines Saad’s key insights and applies them to the Christian situation. The diagnosis is grim. The remedy is Christ.

Part I: The Parasitic Mind

What Is a Parasitic Idea?

Saad defines a parasitic idea as one that hijacks the mind, decoupling it from reality and causing the host to act against their own interests — even to the point of self-destruction.

Just as a neural parasite can take over an insect’s brain and compel it to act in ways that benefit the parasite (and destroy the host), so ideological parasites can take over human minds and compel self-destructive behavior.

Examples of Parasitic Ideas

Saad gives examples from his academic career:

The postmodernist graduate student who could not agree that only women bear children or that the sun rises in the east. When reality itself becomes negotiable, anything can be believed — or denied.

The doctoral student at Hebrew University who, unable to find evidence of IDF rape of Palestinian women, concluded that the absence of rape proved the depth of Israeli racism — Palestinian women weren’t even worthy of being raped.

The professor who cannot define “woman” — now a Supreme Court Justice — because acknowledging biological reality would be politically incorrect.

These are not stupid people. They are parasitized people. The parasite has hijacked their cognitive system, making them unable to see what is plainly before their eyes.

The Postmodern Root

Saad traces this to postmodernism and its offshoots:

Tabula rasa: We are born as blank slates; all differences are socially constructed
Social constructivism: Reality itself is constructed by language and power
Deconstructionism: Language creates reality; there is no reality outside language
Cultural relativism: All cultures and beliefs are equally valid; none can be judged

These ideas began in humanities departments but have now infected every discipline — engineering, medicine, law, even physics. The virus broke out of the lab.

The Result: Inability to See Reality

Once parasitized, people cannot:

Acknowledge that men cannot bear children
Acknowledge that Islam produces more terrorism than all other religions combined
Acknowledge that some cultures are objectively better than others
Acknowledge that Western civilization has produced unprecedented human flourishing

The cognitive system has been hijacked. Reality no longer penetrates.

Part II: Suicidal Empathy

The Golden Mean of Empathy

Saad invokes Aristotle’s principle: Too little of something is bad. Too much is also bad. The goal is the golden mean.

Applied to empathy:

Level	Description	Result
Too little	Psychopathy — inability to feel for others	Predatory behavior
Optimal	Adaptive empathy — appropriate compassion, properly directed	Healthy relationships and society
Too much	Suicidal empathy — compassion so dysregulated it becomes self-destructive	Civilizational collapse

What Suicidal Empathy Looks Like

Saad gives devastating examples:

The Norwegian man who was sodomized by a Somali immigrant — and then publicly grieved when his rapist was deported, because the rapist wouldn’t be able to “flourish” in Somalia.

The American woman who was raped by a Haitian man while advocating for black men — and concluded that her rapist was the real victim of white supremacy, and she was grateful for the “learning experience.”

The German city that, facing epidemic sexual assaults at public pools by men named Muhammad, produced a poster depicting… a red-headed German woman assaulting a black child.

The Western elites who explain 48,000+ Islamic terror attacks since 9/11 as caused by climate change, lack of exposure to art, beard bullying, and colonialism — anything but Islam.

These are not isolated lunatics. These are professors, politicians, judges, and journalists. They shape policy. They teach our children. They have been parasitized.

The Mechanism: Civilizational Seppuku

Saad argues that the West is committing civilizational suicide through misplaced guilt:

“We are evil white colonizers who are transphobic, Islamophobic. We took over indigenous land. Self-flagellate. The only way I could now expatiate my existential guilt is to commit civilizational seppuku.”

The Japanese samurai, when shamed, would commit seppuku (ritual self-disembowelment) to restore honor. The West, convinced of its irredeemable guilt, is doing the same — but to an entire civilization.

The mechanism is suicidal empathy: feeling so much for the “victims” of Western civilization that we welcome our own destruction as just punishment.

Part III: The Wood Cricket

The Parable of the Wood Cricket

This is Saad’s most powerful image.

The wood cricket naturally detests water. It wants nothing to do with water. But when parasitized by a hairworm (a type of brain worm), the cricket is compelled to happily jump into water — where it drowns. The parasite needs water to complete its reproductive cycle.

The cricket doesn’t know it’s been hijacked. It feels free. It wants to jump into the water. But the wanting has been manufactured by the parasite.

Wood Cricket Jews

Saad applies this to Jews who advocate for their own destruction:

Anna Epstein at Boston University, tearing down posters of kidnapped Israeli children two weeks after October 7
Gabor Maté, the “Holocaust survivor” who compares the IDF to Nazis
Tal Nitzan, who concluded that the absence of IDF rape proves the depth of Israeli racism

These Jews have been parasitized. They happily march toward the water that will drown them.

Wood Cricket Christians

Saad doesn’t discuss Christians, but the application is obvious.

How many Christians have been parasitized to the point of self-destruction?

Christians who cannot say Islam is false
Christians who celebrate “diversity” that includes those who would persecute them
Christians who apologize for the “violence” of evangelism while welcoming actual violence
Christians who are more concerned about “Islamophobia” than about Christians being slaughtered in Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan
Christians whose churches fly rainbow flags while Muslim countries execute homosexuals
Christians who preach “tolerance” while their civilization collapses around them

The Western church has become a wood cricket church.

We have been parasitized. We no longer see reality. We feel compassion for those who hate us and guilt for those who founded us. We are jumping happily into the water.

Part IV: The Nomological Network

How to Defend a Position

In the midst of his diagnosis, Saad offers a powerful tool: the nomological network of cumulative evidence.

“Build a network of many distinct lines of evidence, all of which point to the veracity of the position.”

Instead of relying on one argument (which can be dismissed), build multiple independent lines of evidence that all converge on the same conclusion.

Applied to Islam

If we want to demonstrate that Islam is not a religion of peace, we build the network:

Line of Evidence	Source	Finding
Historical	1,400 years of Islamic history	Conquest, dhimmi system, persecution
Scriptural	Quran, Hadith, Sira	Commands to fight, subjugate, kill unbelievers
Statistical	Terror databases	48,000+ Islamic attacks since 9/11; no other religion comparable
Demographic	Global patterns	Three-stage progression wherever Muslims gain majority
Testimonial	Ex-Muslims, survivors	Consistent accounts of violence, oppression, fear
Contemporary	News reports	Grooming gangs, honor killings, apostasy persecution
Comparative	Other religions	Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity produce nothing comparable

Each line of evidence is independent. Together, they are overwhelming. Good luck debating someone who has built this network.

Applied to Christianity

The same method can be used to defend Christian truth:

Historical evidence for the resurrection
Manuscript evidence for the New Testament
Archaeological confirmation of biblical accounts
Prophetic fulfillment
Transformed lives across cultures and centuries
The uniqueness of Christ’s claims and character
The failure of all alternative explanations

Build the network. Then stand on it.

Part V: Saad’s Eight Principles for Saving the West

Saad concludes with eight principles:

Pursue knowledge unencumbered by ideological activism — No forbidden questions
Freedom of speech as deontological principle — Absolute, not contingent on feelings
Meritocracy — Hierarchies based on competence, not identity
Proudly defend Western values — Stop apologizing
All cultures and religions are NOT equal — Some are objectively better
Zero tolerance for seditious belief systems — Freedom of religion doesn’t mean suicide
Adaptive empathy, not suicidal empathy — Properly calibrated compassion
All beliefs open to scrutiny — No sacred cows

A Christian Assessment

These principles are largely sound. But they lack foundation.

Why should we pursue truth? Why is freedom valuable? Why are some cultures better? Why should we resist sedition?

Saad, as a secular evolutionary psychologist, can only appeal to survival. But survival is not enough. The parasitized person thinks they’re surviving. The wood cricket feels good jumping into the water.

We need a deeper foundation: God.

Truth matters because God is truth
Freedom matters because God made us free
Western values are worth defending because they reflect (imperfectly) Christian truth
Seditious ideologies must be resisted because they oppose God’s order
Empathy must be calibrated because God’s love is both fierce and tender

Without God, Saad’s principles are just preferences — and preferences can be parasitized.

With God, they are grounded in reality itself.

Part VI: The Christian Response

Diagnosis Without Remedy

Saad can diagnose. He cannot cure.

He can show us the parasite. He cannot remove it.

He can explain why we’re jumping into the water. He cannot give us the will to stop.

Only Christ can do that.

The Gospel as De-Parasitization

What Saad calls “parasitic ideas,” Scripture calls “strongholds”:

“For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:3-5)

The Gospel is the ultimate de-parasitization:

It restores our cognitive system by revealing truth
It restores our emotional system by properly ordering love
It breaks the power of guilt through forgiveness
It replaces fear with holy boldness
It gives us a sound mind in place of confusion

The parasitized mind cannot save itself. But Christ can save the parasitized mind.

The Fire That Burns Away Parasites

This connects to our earlier discussion of Christian zeal.

The fire we need is not just intellectual clarity. It is the fire of the Holy Spirit that:

Burns away false ideas
Burns away misplaced compassion
Burns away cowardice
Burns away the desire to please men rather than God

A church on fire cannot be parasitized. The parasite cannot survive the flames.

Suicidal Empathy vs. Christ’s Love

Christ’s love is not suicidal empathy.

Christ loved His enemies — but He also called them “brood of vipers” and “whitewashed tombs.”

Christ died for sinners — but He also drove out the moneychangers with a whip.

Christ welcomed the repentant, but He also said: “I never knew you; depart from me.”

Christ’s love is fierce, truthful, costly, and effective. It does not celebrate those who hate God. It does not welcome its own destruction. It does not confuse compassion with complicity.

Suicidal empathy is not Christ’s love. It is a counterfeit — a parasitic distortion of the real thing.

The Wood Cricket Church Must Die

The wood cricket church — the church that has been parasitized into self-destruction — must die.

Not the people in it. But the parasites controlling it.

We need:

Cognitive reformation: Recovering the ability to see reality and speak truth
Emotional reformation: Recalibrating empathy to match God’s own love — fierce and tender, just and merciful
Spiritual reformation: The fire of the Holy Spirit burning away every parasite

This is revival. This is what we pray for. This is what must happen if the church — and the West — are to survive.

Questions for Fellowship Discussion

On parasitic ideas: What parasitic ideas have infiltrated the church? How do we recognize them? How do we remove them?
On suicidal empathy: Where do you see suicidal empathy in contemporary Christianity? How do we distinguish it from genuine Christ-like love?
On the wood cricket: Have you been a “wood cricket” in any area — supporting those who would harm you or the church? How did you recognize it? How did you escape?
On the nomological network: How could we apply this tool to defend Christian truth claims? What lines of evidence would you include?
On Saad’s eight principles: Which do you agree with? Which needs Christian modification? How would you ground them theologically?
On Islam: Does the church in America adequately understand the threat of Islam? What should we be doing differently?
On cultural protection: What is the church’s responsibility to protect Western/Christian civilization? Is this a legitimate concern or a distraction from the Gospel?
On the fire: How do we recover the fire that burns away parasites? What would revival look like in our context?

A Closing Reflection: The Sound Mind

Paul wrote to Timothy:

“For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” (2 Timothy 1:7)

Notice the triad:

Power — not weakness, not submission, not suicidal surrender
Love — genuine love, not parasitized empathy
A sound mind — not a parasitized mind, not a mind decoupled from reality

This is what we need. This is what only God can give.

The parasitic mind cannot heal itself. But God can heal it.

The suicidally empathetic heart cannot recalibrate itself. But God can recalibrate it.

The wood cricket cannot stop jumping into the water. But God can remove the parasite and restore the cricket to its right mind.

This is our hope. Not in ourselves — we are too far gone for that. But in the God who makes all things new.

May He grant us power, love, and a sound mind.

May He burn away every parasite.

May He set His church on fire.

“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.”
— Psalm 51:10

Source Material: Dr. Gad Saad, lecture in Tel Aviv (2026); The Parasitic Mind (2020); Suicidal Empathy (forthcoming)

Related Christos Content: “The Fire at the Center” (Theological Grammar, Part V); Fellowship Discussion on Brigitte Gabriel; Fellowship Discussion on Islam and Cultural Protection

Suicidal Sympathy for the Devil