The Mosque, the Manger, and Modernity: Reading Pearce with Beaulieu
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
The question behind the question
Joseph Pearce is right that the Qur’an is not a founding text of the West, but his critics stumbled toward a more useful question: what, exactly, has Islam been to the West, and what is it now? Pearce’s essay, “Islam and Western Civilization,” first ran at The Imaginative Conservative in January 2023 and was reissued on October 19, 2026. It answered readers who had asked why his list of the “seven pillars” of Western civilization left out the Qur’an.
Among the commenters was Peter D. Beaulieu, author of Beyond Secularism and Jihad? A Triangular Inquiry into the Mosque, the Manger, and Modernity (University Press of America, 2012). His comment and his book supply what Pearce’s essay lacks. Pearce draws a line between two parties. Beaulieu argues that three parties sit at the table, and that the third, Western secularism, changes the shape of the whole conversation.
This essay reads Pearce with Beaulieu. It takes Pearce’s thesis seriously, adds Beaulieu’s two corrections, follows his “triangle” to its practical conclusion, and closes with notes on several historical claims in the essay and its comments that need correcting.
Pearce’s argument: the West as Christendom
Pearce’s case rests on a definition. He says a civilization is a coherent body of shared values, and shared values grow from coherent theological and philosophical principles. Western civilization is the meeting of Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, and its fullness is Christendom: Greek philosophy and Jewish covenant fulfilled in the person of Christ and carried through history by His Church. His seven pillars follow from that definition: Homer’s two epics, Virgil, the Bible, Augustine, Aquinas, and Dante.
From the definition, the conclusion follows quickly. If Christ is who He claims to be, then Muhammad’s claim to correct and supersede Him is false. A text that denies the Incarnation cannot be the foundation of a civilization built on it. It can only rival it.
Pearce then turns to history. Islam conquered the Christian Middle East and North Africa, took Constantinople in 1453, and pressed into Western Europe in the eighth century. He invokes Lepanto (October 7, 1571) and Chesterton’s poem about it, and he asks what would have been lost had the Christian fleet failed: perhaps Rome, perhaps Cervantes, perhaps the novel itself.
The logic of the first half is sound on its own terms. Two faiths that make contradictory claims about the same Person cannot both be true, and a civilization defined by one cannot be founded on the other. The second half is weaker. It relies on a series of counterfactuals, and counterfactuals prove less than they seem. They also omit the ways the two civilizations touched beyond the battlefield. That gap is where Beaulieu enters.
Beaulieu’s first correction: the Word made flesh, and the word made book
Beaulieu’s sharpest point is that the usual comparison is the wrong one. Pearce sets the Bible beside the Qur’an, as if two scriptures were competing for the same shelf. Beaulieu says the Qur’an’s true counterpart is not the Bible but Christ. In Islam, the Qur’an is the uncreated speech of God, the eternal word made book. In Christianity, the eternal Word became flesh. The Bible witnesses to that Person, not His equivalent.
This matters for more than theology. In his 2017 interview with Carl Olson of Catholic World Report, Beaulieu applied it to the 2007 Muslim letter “A Common Word,” written in response to Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address. The letter invited Christians, as fellow “People of the Book,” to a common word between the two scriptures. Beaulieu asks whether that framing quietly sets aside the Christian claim that the Word is not a book at all. In his phrase, Christians are not “people of the book” in the same way.
He draws the same asymmetry out of the Qur’an’s handling of the Gospel. Muslim commentators read Jesus’ promise of the Paraclete, the Comforter, in John 14 and 16 as a prophecy of Muhammad. They do this by arguing that the Greek paraklētos originally meant periklytos, “the praised one,” which corresponds to the Arabic Ahmad. Beaulieu cites Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s widely used commentary as the source for this reading. The move is revealing: the Holy Spirit, a Person of the Trinity, is reinterpreted as a human prophet. The Trinity has no place in the system, so the text is bent to fit.
Beaulieu goes one step further. He calls Islam a “natural religion” with borrowed Jewish and Christian elements, and he doubts that Muhammad ever heard orthodox Trinitarian teaching. Seventh-century Arabia knew mostly Nestorian and Monophysite Christianity, and the Qur’an’s polemic attacks a Trinity of God, Jesus, and Mary that no orthodox council taught. If so, Islam is less a Christian heresy, as Hilaire Belloc argued, than a home-grown monotheism that rejected a distorted Christianity. Beaulieu concludes that Christian–Muslim conversation is therefore interreligious, not ecumenical. It is a conversation between two religions, not a quarrel inside one family.
This correction strengthens Pearce’s thesis while changing its tone. The difference between Christianity and Islam is even deeper than two rival books. But the cause of the difference may be partly a failure of Christian witness in seventh-century Arabia, not only a rebellion against a truth fully heard.
Beaulieu’s second correction: Dante and the ladder of Muhammad
Beaulieu’s second point cuts against Pearce’s seventh pillar. Pearce writes as though Dante stands wholly inside Christendom, a monument Islam would have erased. Beaulieu reminds him that the Divine Comedy may owe something to Islamic sources.
The scholarship is real, though Beaulieu’s comment garbles its origin (see Note 3). In 1919, the Spanish priest and Arabist Miguel Asín Palacios argued that Dante drew on Islamic accounts of Muhammad’s Night Journey and Ascension, the Isrā’ and Mi’rāj, and on the mystic Ibn Arabi. The parallels he listed include a night journey with a guide, a hell arranged in descending tiers with punishments fitted to sins, and an ascent through the heavens to the throne of God. Thirty years later, in 1949, scholars published the Liber scalae Machometi, the “Book of Muhammad’s Ladder,” a version of the Ascension story translated into Latin and Old French at the Castilian court in the 1260s. Dante could therefore have read it.
Scholarly opinion has settled between the extremes. Few now accept Asín’s strongest claims of wholesale borrowing; some of his parallels have Christian and classical precedents (the Aeneid‘s underworld, the Visio Pauli). But many grant that Dante plausibly knew the Liber scalae and took some images from it.
If so, the picture is more interesting than Pearce allows, and no less Christian. Dante built his poem on Aquinas and the Bible. He placed Muhammad among the sowers of schism in the eighth circle of hell, and he placed Avicenna and Averroes in Limbo among the virtuous pagans. He could take images from Islamic legend and still judge Islam’s founder by Christian truth. That is what a confident civilization does with materials from outside: it baptizes what it can use and rejects what it must. Pearce’s own Aquinas did the same with Aristotle, much of whom reached Latin Europe through Arabic commentators.
The third side of the triangle: secularism
Beaulieu’s book is built on a geometric idea. Pearce sees a line with Christendom at one end and Islam at the other. Beaulieu sees a triangle, and he names its corners in his subtitle: the Mosque, the Manger, and Modernity. The Mosque is Islam as a unified way of life under Shari’a, the body of Islamic law. The Manger is Christianity, centered on the Incarnation. Modernity is the secular West that grew out of Christendom and then turned away from it.
The middle of the book compares the first two corners directly. For the Mosque, Beaulieu draws on Farooq Hassan’s The Concept of the State and Law in Islam, which presents the Islamic state as unitary: religion, law, and government are one. For the Manger, he draws on Heinrich Rommen’s The State in Catholic Thought, which traces the Western distinction between Church and state back to its Christian and natural-law roots. Islam, Beaulieu says, did not fuse the two; it never conceived of separating them in the first place.
The triangle explains why the conflict feels lopsided today. A Muslim who looks at the West sees materialism, individualism, and sexual license, and he often assumes that this is what Christianity produced. The Christian must therefore distinguish himself from secular modernity before he can speak to Islam at all. Meanwhile secularism, which reduces religion to private taste, cannot understand either the passion of Islam or the faith of the Christian. Beaulieu’s compressed formula is that secularism removes God from the public square, while Islam “takes the public forum out of man.” One empties public life of God; the other leaves no private space in man where conscience stands apart from the community’s law.
Beaulieu also sees a surprising kinship between the two outer corners. Early Islam suppressed the rationalist Mu’tazilite theologians in the ninth century; the French Revolution turned Notre-Dame into a Temple of Reason. One shut out reason to protect the will of God; the other shut out God to protect the will of man. Both, he suggests, end up with a God who does not enter history: an absent lawgiver in one case, an absent landlord in the other. Only the Manger claims that God entered history in person.
This is where Pearce’s essay is most incomplete. His drama of siege and defense assumes that the West inside the walls is still Christendom. Beaulieu’s question mark in his own title points to the harder truth. The walls Pearce celebrates are now held largely by people who no longer believe what built them. A civilization that has forgotten its foundation cannot defend it, whatever the strength of its walls.
Natural law as a grammar for meeting
If the three parties cannot agree on revelation, Beaulieu asks what they can share. His answer is natural law: the moral order written into human nature and knowable by reason, apart from any particular scripture. Paul appeals to it when he says that Gentiles without the law show “the work of the law written in their hearts”(Romans 2:15). The West helped to articulate it, from Aristotle and the Stoics through Aquinas, and then largely abandoned it. Beaulieu proposes it as the shared “grammar” for conversation between Western citizens and Muslims.
He is honest that, in his words to Olson, this is a thin reed. Islam has its own concept that resembles natural law: fitrah, the original disposition toward God with which, according to a well-known hadith, every child is born. But Islamic scholarship generally treats this original nature as Islam itself, making natural law a subset of the Qur’an rather than an independent court of appeal. The Qur’an tells believers to “enjoin what is just and forbid what is evil” (9:71), which sounds like the first principle of natural law. Beaulieu asks whether that principle protects all people or only the community of believers. If the moral law is owed only to fellow Muslims, it is not yet universal.
Still, natural law has two advantages that revelation does not. First, it requires neither side to concede its faith before talking. Second, it meets the ordinary Muslim where he actually lives. Beaulieu observes that ordinary Muslims recognize the moral law in their own hearts, even if they credit it to Muhammad. That recognition is common ground. The same is true of secular Westerners, who still feel the pull of justice, honesty, and care for the weak even after they have discarded the God who grounds them.
Natural law therefore serves the triangle in both directions. It calls secular modernity back to a moral order it did not invent. And it offers Muslims a standard by which every act, including an act done in God’s name, can be judged as just or unjust. Pope Benedict’s Regensburg address made exactly this double appeal in 2006. He asked Muslims to consider that violence in God’s name contradicts a God who acts with reason. He also asked the West to recover a reason open to faith, rather than one that excludes it.
The Christian adds something further: the conviction that grace fulfills natural law, not replaces it. As the Second Vatican Council put it, Christ reveals man to himself. Natural law shows what a person is made for. The Incarnation shows Who he is made for.
What the comment section shows
The two dozen comments under Pearce’s essay act out the very problem Beaulieu describes. They fall into three kinds.
The first kind argues about transmission. One reader, Michael, notes that Islamic scholars passed Aristotle to Latin Europe and that Aquinas engaged Avicenna and Averroes. Another, Richard, goes much further and credits Islam with making the Renaissance possible. A third, Manny, replies that the Qur’an itself influenced no Western writer. Each is partly right, and they are talking past one another. Michael and Richard are describing Islamic civilization, which preserved and commented on Greek learning, often through Christian translators such as the Nestorian Hunayn ibn Ishaq, whom another reader mentions. Manny is describing the Qur’an as a text, which was Pearce’s actual subject. The question “Did Islam influence the West?” has a yes answer. The question “Is the Qur’an a foundation of the West?” has a no answer. Both answers can stand.
The second kind is represented by a reader who signs himself Thomas R and thinks Pearce is both too hostile to and too impressed by Islam’s power. He points out that Islam was never a single unified force and that Christians remained influential under Muslim rule for centuries. This is the historian’s caution, and it deserves a hearing.
The third kind moves from argument to anger. One recent commenter calls the Qur’an the work of a demonically possessed man and claims the “Dark Ages” were dark because Islam was rising. Another warns that Western civilization will be erased within a century. These comments make strong claims, and some may rest on real concerns. But the strength of a claim must be proportionate to its evidence, and several of these outrun theirs (see Notes 6 and 7).
The pattern is Beaulieu’s triangle in miniature. One side flattens Islam into a benign cultural contributor. The other flattens it into a demonic enemy. Neither side’s picture leaves room for the Muslim graduate student Beaulieu describes meeting after a talk at the University of Washington. That student was surprised to find American religion more alive than in some Muslim circles he knew. He is not a statistic in a clash of civilizations. He is a neighbor, and the Gospel is addressed to him.
Conclusion: beyond the siege
Pearce is right on his central claim. The Qur’an is not a pillar of the West, and a Christian cannot honestly call it one, because it denies the very Person on whom Christendom was built. Charity does not require pretending otherwise.
But Beaulieu shows that the siege image, true as history, is not enough to guide the present. It sets two parties on either side of a wall. In fact, there are three parties, and the most consequential change of the last two centuries happened inside the wall: the West’s own loss of the faith and the natural law that made it. A secular West has no answer to Islam’s claim to be a complete way of life, because it has no complete account of life to offer. It can tolerate, regulate, or fear. It cannot persuade.
The Christian can. On Beaulieu’s account, his task is threefold. First, to be what the Church is, rather than a religious wing of secular culture. Second, to recover natural law as a public language, so that justice can be argued with a Muslim neighbor and a secular one in terms both can recognize. Third, to bear witness to the one thing neither corner possesses: not a better book, but a Person. Newman’s motto, cor ad cor loquitur, heart speaks to heart, names the method. Civilizations clash; persons meet.
Chesterton’s Lepanto ends with Don John riding home from the Crusade. Beaulieu’s book ends, fittingly, with a question mark. The battle Pearce describes was won. The question now is whether the West will remember what it was defending, and whether Christians will offer it to their Muslim and secular neighbors as a gift rather than hold it only as a fortress.
Notes and corrections
On the book itself. The full text of Beyond Secularism and Jihad? is not freely available (it is a 478-page academic title, priced near $120 in hardcover). This essay draws on the publisher’s description, the library catalog’s chapter list, Beaulieu’s comment on Pearce’s essay, and his own extended account of the book in two Catholic World Report pieces (the 2017 interview and an earlier letter to the editor). The chapters run: “New York to Rome and Istanbul,” “Islam and the Map,” “The Mosque: Shari’a and the World,” “The Manger: The Human Person in the World,” “Modernity: Monologues and Conversations,” and “Present to the Presence.” Anything attributed to the book here should be checked against a copy before publication.
Pearce on Tours and Hagia Sophia. The battle of 732 was fought between Poitiers and Tours, in west-central France, not northern France. Hagia Sophia became a mosque in 1453, a museum in 1934, and a mosque again in 2020.
Beaulieu on Dante. Alfred Guillaume did publish the first English translation of Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Muhammad, The Life of Muhammad, in 1955. But the thesis linking Dante to Ibn Arabi and the Ascension literature is Miguel Asín Palacios’s (1919), not Guillaume’s, and the “Madrid” in Beaulieu’s comment probably reflects Asín, a Madrid professor. Dante composed the Comedy over roughly 1308–1321, finishing near his death in 1321. The Latin Liber scalae Machometi was published in 1949 by Enrico Cerulli and, separately, José Muñoz Sendino.
The Paraclete reading. The Qur’anic verse usually cited is 61:6, where Jesus announces a coming messenger named Ahmad; 7:157, which Beaulieu cites, speaks of the unlettered prophet foretold in the Torah and Gospel. The proposed Greek original periklytos has no support in any surviving manuscript of John, all of which read paraklētos.
“A Common Word.” Beaulieu’s 2017 interview places it in late 2006. The 2006 response to Regensburg was an open letter from 38 Muslim scholars; “A Common Word Between Us and You,” signed by 138, followed in October 2007.
Claims in the comments. The period 450–1200 began roughly two centuries before Islam existed, and the idea of a “Dark Age” began with Petrarch’s lament for lost classical learning in the West; it cannot be blamed on Islam’s rise. The often-repeated comparison of Spanish and Arab book production comes from the 2002 UN Arab Human Development Report, which concerned translations into Arabic across the Arab states, not total books across all Muslim nations. The John Quincy Adams passage a commenter quotes is authentic (from his 1830 essays on Russia and Turkey), as is Huntington’s “bloody borders” line (1996).
Scale. For proportion against the commenters’ forecasts: Pew Research estimated Muslims at about 4.9% of Europe’s population in 2016, with projections for 2050 ranging from roughly 7% to 14% depending on migration (approximate, from memory; verify before publication).
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND · Renaissance Ministries
Introduction
Rob Pue, publisher of Wisconsin Christian News, recently wrote a column warning that New Age spirituality is a deception with a single root, however many names it wears. He writes from the front line of pastoral work: his ministry receives prayer requests from mothers worried about occult influence on their grandchildren, from a young woman pulled between Wicca and the Bible, from a husband whose wife grows more hostile to Christ the more seriously he follows Him. Pue reports that such requests are rising sharply.
He is right about the core of the matter, and I offer this essay in support of his warning. But a warning persuades best when every part of it can bear weight, so I want to do three things here: lay out the reasons behind the warning more fully, correct two points where the column says more than the text of Scripture says, and add one observation about the way the New Age borrows the language of science.
The war behind the visible
Scripture does not treat the unseen world as a figure of speech. Paul writes that our struggle is not against flesh and blood but against spiritual powers of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). Peter tells us to stay sober and watchful, because the adversary prowls like a lion seeking someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). If these statements are true, then much of what we see in the culture is the visible edge of a contest we cannot see directly, and the right response is neither panic nor dismissal but discernment.
Pue’s prayer letters illustrate the point better than an argument could. None of the people who wrote to him describe a debate about ideas. They describe anguish, hostility, a sense of being pulled, homes divided. Those are the marks of a battle over persons, not merely over propositions.
The wheel and its spokes
The most attractive teaching of the New Age is that all paths lead to God, like the spokes of a wheel converging on one hub. Each culture has its tradition, each person finds the path that “works” for him, and all sincere, loving seekers arrive at the same center. This sounds humble. It is not, and we should show why by reason before we show it by Scripture.
First, the paths do not say the same thing. One teaches that a man lives many lives through reincarnation; another teaches that “it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment”(Hebrews 9:27). One teaches that God is an impersonal force or a universal consciousness of which we are each a part; another teaches that God is a Person who made us, distinct from us, and who speaks. One teaches that our problem is ignorance, cured by enlightenment; another teaches that our problem is sin, cured only by forgiveness. These are not different descriptions of one road. They contradict each other about what is real, and contradictory claims cannot all be true.
Second, the wheel picture contains a hidden claim. To know that every spoke reaches the hub, a man would have to stand above the whole wheel and see it in its entirety. The pluralist tells the Christian that no one can claim to know the one way to God, and then claims to know that all ways lead there. That is an exclusive claim, and a far larger one than the Christian makes, because it rests on no revelation at all.
Third, exclusivity is not arrogance when it is true. A physician who says that only one antidote will counteract a particular poison is not being narrow-minded; he is being accurate and kind. When Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”(John 14:6), He was either telling the truth, or He was not. If He was, then the most loving thing anyone can do is say so plainly.
Pue rightly notes the irony here. Many in the New Age prize ancient wisdom, and the older and more hidden a text is, the more it is trusted. Yet the Bible is the best-attested document of the ancient world. The New Testament alone survives in more than five thousand Greek manuscripts, some within a few generations of the originals, far more and far earlier than any other work of antiquity. It is not hidden. It has simply been preserved, and the fact that anyone may read it is no argument against its truth.
The oldest offer
The New Age is not new. It first made its central offer in the Garden.
The serpent began with doubt: “Did God actually say…?”(Genesis 3:1). He then denied the consequence: “You will not surely die.” And he closed with the promise: “You will be like God, knowing good and evil”(Genesis 3:4–5). Every element is still in use. Doubt about whether God has really spoken. Denial that rebellion carries any cost. And the promise of godhood, which in New Age teaching takes the form of the higher self, the divine spark within, or the soul that evolves through many lives until it becomes divine. Knowing good and evil, in the serpent’s sense, means deciding for oneself what is good and what is evil. That is precisely what a path chosen because it “works for me” amounts to.
Here I want to correct one point in the column. Pue writes that Satan approached Eve when her husband was not around. Genesis 3:6 says otherwise: she “gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” Adam was standing there. The failure in Eden wasn’t that the man was absent; it was that he was present but silent. That is a sharper warning to men than the one Pue gave, and it fits his own point that a husband is meant to protect his home. The danger is not only that a man is away. It is that he is there and says nothing.
The column also argues that Satan especially hates women and targets them, citing the enmity of Genesis 3:15 and the false teachers of 2 Timothy 3:6–7 who “creep into households and capture weak women… always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.” There is something real in this. Genesis 3:15 sets enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between his offspring and hers, and that offspring is Christ, “born of woman” (Galatians 4:4). The adversary has every reason to hate the line through which he was defeated. Paul also describes false teachers who work through the home and prey on those weighed down by guilt.
But Scripture does not say that women are the devil’s chief target, and we should not say more than it says. Paul describes a condition, not a sex: the person who is burdened, restless, always studying and never arriving. That condition is common enough among men, and nowhere more common than among educated men who collect ideas the way others collect coins, admiring each one and committing to none. The same chapter goes on to describe men who oppose the truth as “corrupted in mind”(2 Timothy 3:8). The warning applies to anyone unguarded, and the guard Scripture prescribes is the same for everyone: knowledge of the truth, held and obeyed.
Counterfeit love
Pue identifies the second great lie as “all you need is love”: if a path is loving, it is good and will lead to God. He traces its lineage well. The Wiccan Rede says, “An it harm none, do what ye will.” Aleister Crowley stands behind it; in 1904, in Cairo, he claimed to receive by dictation from a spirit the text he called The Book of the Law, whose central command is “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.” The spirit in that text describes itself as the serpent that gives knowledge. Pue is right to notice the echo of Eden.
The Rede softens Crowley by adding a condition: harm no one. But the two share the same center. In both, the self is the measure. My will defines what I may do, and my judgment defines what counts as harm.
Scripture defines love differently. Love is not a feeling that sanctifies whatever it accompanies. It is willing and doing the real good of another, as the One who made him defines that good. “Love does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth”(1 Corinthians 13:6). Jesus tied love to obedience: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments”(John 14:15). Love without truth is sentiment, and sentiment can walk a man pleasantly to ruin. Paul says truth without love is a noisy gong (1 Corinthians 13:1). We need both, and we don’t get to choose one.
This is why the slogan “love is love” fails as an argument, including in Pue’s debate over marriage. The question is never whether a desire is sincere or intense. The question is whether it serves the person’s good, as his Designer intended. A love that cannot say no to anything is not love; it is indifference with a warm face.
The borrowed vocabulary of science
One feature of the modern New Age deserves more attention than it usually gets: it dresses itself in the language of physics. We hear of energy fields, vibrations, quantum consciousness, the universe as one mind, and thoughts that create reality. The words sound scientific, and that is their purpose. They lend an air of discovery to very old claims.
Physics does not teach that the self is God, or that a man can will reality into being by thinking hard enough. Where questions of consciousness do arise at the foundations of physics, they point in the opposite direction: toward an order so precise and so intelligible that it implies a Mind behind it, a Mind that is not ours and that we did not make. “In the beginning was the Word”(John 1:1). The universe is intelligible because an intelligence spoke it. The New Age takes that truth and turns it inside out, making the creature’s mind the source and God the echo. A Christian need not fear science. He should simply refuse to let it be borrowed for a purpose it does not serve.
An angel of light
Paul warns that Satan disguises himself as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). Deception that looked evil would deceive no one. What deceives is what looks good: peace, openness, love, wisdom, self-discovery. That is why John does not tell us to judge spirits by how they feel but to test them by what they confess: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not is not (1 John 4:1–3). The test is not warmth. It is Christ.
For those, like the husband who wrote to Pue, who live with someone they love on another path, Scripture gives a pattern rather than a formula. Peter tells believing wives that an unbelieving husband may be won “without a word” by his wife’s conduct (1 Peter 3:1–2), and the principle holds in the other direction as well. Argument rarely wins a heart hardened against faith. A life that plainly bears the fruit of that faith often does. Pray steadily. Keep reading your Bible openly, without either hiding it or brandishing it. Be ready to give a reason for the hope in you, “with gentleness and respect”(1 Peter 3:15). And remember that God opens eyes.
Conclusion
Pue closes with a question: what if what you believe about God turned out to be wrong, when would you want to find out?
The New Age promises a God who asks nothing, a path chosen by preference, and a destination no one can miss. Christianity offers something harder and better: a God who is real whether we prefer Him or not, a truth that does not bend to our wishes, and a love that went to the cross rather than leave us where we were. The first offer is very old. It was made in a garden, and it has never kept its promise. The second was made on a hill outside Jerusalem, and it has never broken one.
The Wages of AI Abundance: Who Gets What When Machines Do the Work?
Christos Fellowship — Sunday, 19 October 2026.Participants: Thomas, Armond, Charlie, Leonard, Isak (Michael had left)
Notes marked “Note” were added after the meeting. They supply references or correct points the discussion missed or got wrong. Section 13 records a follow-up exchange between Thomas and Armond after the meeting on this topic.
1. Is the Danger Real, and Is the Solution Big Government?
Thomas asked for thoughts on the week’s reading from Transforming America. Charlie said he and Thomas had already talked about the AI chapter and found it remarkable, but he had two questions. Is the danger real, or a Y2K-level panic? And if it is real, what do we do? He said Thomas’s proposed solution seemed like a big-government welfare solution.
Thomas agreed that it is exactly that, and said this concerns him, since he is no advocate of big government. He laid out the problem. Under capitalism, people survive by doing things others need done. If AI and robots do everything, nobody needs anything done, and there is no mechanism for getting what the machines make to people who no longer work. The alternative to big government would be a kind of big communism, where everyone takes whatever he wants from what is produced. So the real question is distribution: how do you decide who gets what?
Having run several scenarios, he said it comes down to two poles. In the first, the government taxes those still producing and gives the money to those laid off. The producers then conclude that the work isn’t worth it if the government takes it all to give to people who do nothing. In the second, the government prints money and sends it to everyone to spend. People then sit back and live on the checks.
Armond said, “Sounds like California.” Charlie said, “I resemble that remark,” and Isak said he wished the money actually came in.
2. Why Should a Labor-Saving Device Cause Havoc?
Charlie asked Thomas to go back to the beginning and examine whether this is a problem at all: why should a labor-saving device cause such havoc? Isak clarified that Charlie meant AI in robotic form.
Armond said the problem is that nobody knows where it ends, who has the authority to draw the line, or where it would be drawn. He looks to history: other industries were inevitable and changed life while people held conversations like this one. Video calls were once on The Jetsons; before television, people listened to ball games on the radio. People once feared automobiles would ruin the ranchers who depended on horses. Yet today a professional rancher or cattleman is probably one of the wealthiest people in his circle. (Armond paused to note he had just seen a red-tailed hawk.) His view is that this change is inevitable, and certain careers and tasks will disappear. The question is what it frees our time and attention for.
Thomas asked: if you didn’t have to work, what would you do?
Charlie said he would still work. Armond said he would do exactly what he does now: build houses, fly planes, and teach. Charlie added that he would probably invent booby traps to kill robots, and Armond said that is already a developing industry.
3. Isak: Purposelessness and the Money in Death Machines
Isak said robot defense is a serious matter. AI leaders, Elon Musk among them, are promising that people won’t have to work and that the government will send a high income, “not a low income, a high income.” Isak said this tells us nothing, since high and low are relative. It also does not say whether such an income would give anyone a reason to keep living. When people retire with nothing they must work for, their bodies can decay. The mind and body stop working together, and the drive to live and to procreate fades. His fear, shared by many, is a sanitized culture of abundance and nothing.
His second concern, which he credited to others, was this. AI is promised to bring healthcare, wealth, and advancement, but the money is currently being made in drones, security, and surveillance. Wars are increasingly automated, becoming contests of surveillance and mind control, with AIs flooding the internet with messages from foreign governments and radicals. It grows harder to see the truth, and even apparent truth may be an AI-generated video. People generally have the goodwill to build healing machines, he said, but the money is in death machines and surveillance machines.
Note: Musk has repeatedly predicted a “universal high income” as AI and robots take over labor. Examples include his remarks at VivaTech in Paris in May 2024 and later statements. He has not specified a mechanism for funding or distributing it. That gap is the one Thomas’s chapter tries to fill.
4. Who Serves Whom?
Charlie asked what would keep robots from making humans their servants, since it takes much human energy to make one robot and humans are relatively cheap. Why wouldn’t they “unionize”? He invoked 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, and Terminator; Leonard added Philip K. Dick. Armond asked who is to say we aren’t already there, already slaves to consumerism. Charlie said he is a slave to his screen and that this could be the Matrix; it feels surreal.
5. Isak’s Day Off the Internet
Isak described a recent day when he refused to use the internet at all, with no streaming and nothing else, so he could exist in his own mind, fed by God, not by others. He allowed himself books and vinyl records. Driving that day, he began noticing everyone else’s screen use: every car beside him held someone looking at a device or letting a Tesla drive. He said people’s brains are being sucked into a void. He acknowledged he was enjoying the void at that moment because the fellowship was in it. But usually it is twelve thousand perspectives on the news with a blurb about what actually happened. It is a battlefield for information, votes, and influence, exposed to foreign governments and to foreign ownership of social media.
He said he felt wonderful that day. He read William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy in three hours and cried for the first time in months, and felt more human than he had in a long time. Without wanting to sound like a heretic of modern technological culture, and knowing there is good intention behind AI, he said he cannot help feeling we are missing a great deal of life and are at risk of losing our humanity.
Leonard called it a form of fasting, and said fasting is a good thing. Charlie said Isak’s point had made the discussion profound.
6. The Matrix, and Who Regulates AI
Isak said he might be cynical or have watched The Terminator too often, but there is truth in The Matrix. One sees it in church and in paying taxes. The Matrix is essentially an infrastructure system; we have one, and the more it develops, the more it resembles the film’s “desert of the real.” The place where it becomes real or fake is in our heads.
He then asked a series of questions. Is there a fight to be had within the AI world? Thomas has proposed using AI for good and teaching it Christian morality. If that morality is the best and truest, is that battlefield even open? Are the people building AI also the ones regulating it, and can they be trusted completely? If not, we must regard AI with real apprehension, as thought police training everyone to ask the same questions and receive the same answers (“this person started the war, think this way”), with no need for books because the books have been absorbed. Does that benefit humans, machines, or God?
He noted that the military were the first buyers of the Wright brothers’ airplane, and that humanity invented fire for warmth and quickly learned to make flaming arrows. Is evil inherent in this technology, or only in what people do with it? Is it already too late? Should we become Luddites, or accept it in some way? He said he did not have the answers. “I am a man of questions.”
7. Leonard: Denver’s Post, AI as a Copyist, and a False Authority
Leonard read a short blog post Denver published on 18 September titled “Don’t Use AI.” In it Denver says he does not use artificial intelligence to compose anything: posts, talks, letters, emails, or legal filings. He has seen a sharp rise in AI-written messages sent to him, and those may go unanswered, because he is not inclined to converse with an algorithm. Charlie asked whether it was Denver’s and said he could tell.
Leonard then described his own use. He designed the temple concept himself and used Grok Imagine only for the tedious rendering, which it produced on the first try. He compared this to music. A composer might write most of a symphony in MIDI or notation software (Leonard uses an online program called Flat) and then let AI do the copying. He worked as a copyist with his brother for three or four years. The copyist takes the full score and writes out each instrument’s part (first violins, second violins, violas, cellos) so it can be handed to the players. It was done by hand with a fountain pen, using thin and thick strokes, almost an art, and it paid poorly for the labor. Using AI for that kind of work does not trouble him, since the composer remains the source of the inspiration. He sees AI possibly freeing people’s minds to create more great things.
But, as Isak said, evil people will have the same tool. He wondered how to keep it from the wicked, or how to ensure the righteous can handle what the wicked do with it. He added that we already have a superintelligence available through prayer and meditation, since God is the ultimate superintelligence and is not man-made. In that sense, he said, AI may be Satan’s way of diverting humanity into a false religion, or a false sense of authority and intelligence. AI is only what its programmers make it. Most of the job listings Indeed sends him in his field of design and engineering are now for training AI to do engineering and design.
8. Thomas: Humans Training Machines to Replace Humans
Thomas said Leonard had just stated his point exactly: we are using humans to put humans out of work. This has been happening for at least thirty years through training workers overseas to do American white-collar jobs more cheaply; AI is the same thing “on steroids.” Taken to its logical extreme, and echoing Armond’s question of where it stops, he said there is no stopping point.
He also addressed Leonard’s remark about Satan. He recognized it was not quite what Leonard meant, but said the idea that a particular technology is satanic is simplistic. What matters is what we do with it; it can be used for good or evil, and the challenge is to use it for good.
Leonard agreed. He meant that evil people can use it as well as righteous people can. It is a tool, like a hammer: you can build houses or kill people with it.
Note: The two positions are closer than they appear. Leonard’s concern is the AI functioning as a rival authority, the place people go for wisdom instead of God. That is a concern about use, not about the silicon. It is the same distinction drawn in the symbols discussion about the bronze serpent, a God-given instrument that became an idol when Israel began burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4).
Note: On outsourcing, white-collar offshoring since the 1990s has gone chiefly to India and the Philippines (software, call centers, back-office work), while manufacturing went chiefly to mainland China. Hong Kong served more as a financial and trading intermediary than as a destination for outsourced labor.
9. Armond: Overconsumption and Its Counter-Industries
Armond said the deeper issue is our propensity to overconsume. He compared it to a water flosser that keeps pumping after the water runs out. He described a competition between a packaging robot and one of the top human packers on the same line. They kept pace, and the human may even have won within the time frame. But when the human was spent, the robot kept going at the same rate for another twenty-three hours. If production can run without human input for long periods, raw materials will be depleted. That in turn opens opportunities for recycling, and, as Isak’s internet fast suggested, for detox and self-care industries.
Charlie said Armond seemed to be describing a health-and-recovery spa run by robots. Armond said he could imagine getaways inside Faraday cages, much as some concerts already lock phones in pouches, marketed as escapes from AI. Isak imagined a wellness spa with a library and electricity only for lights. Armond added incandescent bulbs and cash only. Charlie proposed an entire AI-free state, “Freelandia.”
10. Isak: Prime Real Estate and Who Lives Where
Isak said people pay so much to live on the California coast because it is coveted, prime real estate that movie stars can afford and others cannot, so most live inland. Even with AI distributing an income, the old questions of value and allocation remain. The leaders of AI may give everyone an income and then live at the beach themselves because they are in charge, while everyone else lives in the bottom of Los Angeles or Bakersfield.
11. Living Alongside the Machines
Charlie predicted that in thirty years even the poorest American family will have three or four broken-down robots in the garage, waiting for someone to pull the hard drives so they can be disposed of. He does not see AI as different from other technologies we have adapted to. He took a four-hour walk a couple of weeks ago and could still feel it, a sign of how much cars have cost him the ordinary human ability to walk all day. (Isak: then we invented horses. Leonard: “Hey, that animal over there, I need that, get on top of it.” Charlie: someday someone will reinvent walking shoes. Isak: We already have driving shoes.)
Isak said every invention brings a dozen accessories. Some consumption is good: eating to fuel the body, cutting trees or using clay or metal to build a house. Overconsumption is different. When he wants to buy new clothing, he said, it is usually because he is dissatisfied with something in his life and is redirecting that into buying clothes, drinking a beer, or other consumption that does not help him. Buying a good book is good consumption; a 32-ounce soda is not. Everything is at our fingertips, and we must decide whether it is worth the piles of trash. He asked whether there is a way, or a country, that lives with minimal consumption and still feeds its people. The drive for ever-cheaper goods produces cheaper food, more pesticides, more sickness, and a market for healing and pills: an ecosystem. If we stopped needing to consume so much, would that be death to humanity or only to an economy? It seems we are told we have only one choice: to keep producing and consuming to keep each other alive, but he doubted anyone thought it through that way; it is more a byproduct.
Charlie told of failing his driving test at the DMV. The young examiner went through a long checklist of his errors and then admitted that he doesn’t do any of those things either, because he drives a Tesla. Charlie said he doesn’t have a Tesla and has to think all the time.
12. Armond: Every Technology Breeds an Industry to Undo It
Armond said every new technology seems to bring an equal industry to help us return to our primitive, natural state, and returning is usually more expensive. Before cars and tractors, treadmills and weights would have been hard to sell. A farmer who had worked all day would not have paid to lift lead balls for fun. Isak said the farmer had a symbiotic relationship between his work and his body; automation then multiplied crops so that people work even less for their food.
Armond said that is where we need to direct our minds now, not later: if AI leads us somewhere, what pathways bring us back toward our natural state? He said the food system shows the pattern, with the FDA allowing poison to be sold while medicines keep people comfortable as they are poisoned.
Charlie asked what the medicine for AI robots would be. Armond asked which AI industry he meant. Isak said there are many, like asking what “the book” means in English. Clusters of American companies buy one another and form super-companies; others do the same in China or Russia, and work is outsourced. It resembles the weapons trade, where one must trace the money to find who is behind the weapons in a given war. What AI is allowed to do will be set by infrastructure and law: we legislated it into cars as road safety, and into the military as a new cold war over who drops the drone bomb first, which is already happening, though not under national flags. Charlie lamented that he will never afford a Mercedes robot and will be stuck with a Kia.
13. Thomas: How Do We Fund the Transition?
Thomas said AI will come whether we want it or not, and we will have to sanctify it, as we must everything else. The question in his chapter is how to fund the transition from here to there. He asked again: of the two poles, printing money or taxing producers, are either acceptable? Should it be a mix, or some third option? We live under capitalism with a socialist streak; can we reach the new world by a path people will accept? He said it is partly a sales job: what will people accept? Speaking as people ourselves, he asked whether we would rather tax companies and individuals to support those put out of work, or have the government print money while everyone follows Isak’s approach of dialing back consumption. On that path, less is produced, people consume less, and that discipline helps those who were laid off simply survive.
He does not expect the timing to synchronize neatly, with each round of layoffs followed by retraining and new production. More likely, AI and robots will be implemented gradually, and people will be put out of work gradually, producing a lower class of semi-unemployed people living on something like unemployment. He said he does not see the end state, where AI and robots make everything, as the big problem. The problem is the transition.
14. Armond: Ghettos, and the Haves and Have-Nots
Armond said he expects what we now call ghettos. Non-working populations on subsidized housing will be corralled into certain neighborhoods. This is not new, he said; capacity is simply being increased, as it already has been. He believes we will eventually recognize that the old divisions of religion, team, city, and race are false classism, offered to us precisely to separate us. In reality there are only two groups, the haves and the have-nots. He sees society moving toward subsidy for anyone not directly providing the means of production or serving as a vendor to or of the AIs. Those who keep practicing a skill AI has largely taken over will become artisans, probably very highly paid ones.
15. Uploading the Self, and Brains Grown from Neurons
Charlie asked whether it will be possible to download a person’s essence (voice, thought patterns, history) into a robot and achieve a kind of immortality, at least for those who recognize the personality. Someone, he said, will try.
Armond said companies are already building biological computers from living human neurons, naming Cortical Labs, which he had read about that morning. He had also read that a man-made computer matching the human mind’s computing and storage would occupy about half an acre. He called it Frankenstein all over again.
Isak asked how people would interact with a new species wheeled out in a few years: “Fred,” the stem-cell bio-brain. What rights would it have, or lack, and what purposes? We are drawing closer to the line where robots are just like people, and might decide to use people as their horses. Armond suggested we might create our own destruction.
Note: Cortical Labs, based in Melbourne, grows human neurons from stem cells on electrode arrays. Its 2022 “DishBrain” experiment, published in Neuron, showed a neuron culture learning to play Pong. In 2025 it announced the CL1, a commercial biological computer. The “half an acre” figure could not be traced to a source and should be treated as illustrative. Estimates of the brain’s computing capacity vary by orders of magnitude.
16. Armond: Parasites and the Serpent
Armond described a book he had read about “Wetiko.” It holds that ancient religions and cultures all reported a parasitic presence as a prominent part of human experience. He said one parasite, toxoplasma, is so prevalent that doctors no longer test for it, and that it alters behavior much as rabies does. On this philosophy, everyone from the politicians down is infested, and the parasites have steered leaders toward policies favorable to the parasites’ survival, in food, drink, clothing, and how water is or isn’t treated. Charlie said there is a lot of truth in that.
Armond also reflected on the serpent in Genesis. Rather than a snake, he suggested picturing a parasitic worm in the body. Parasites can give a person thoughts and voices, so such a thing could tell a person to eat a food harmful to his health and survival. He asked what the underlying goal of AI is and what it would do for the parasites in control of so many things, adding that such a parasite could easily be considered satanic.
Note: “Wetiko” (wétiko, a Cree term; wendigo in other Algonquian languages) names a cannibalistic spirit of insatiable greed. The likely source is Paul Levy’s Dispelling Wetiko (2013) or Wetiko: Healing the Mind-Virus That Plagues Our World (2021). Levy treats wetiko chiefly as a psychic or spiritual infection, a “mind-virus,” using biological parasitism as an analogy, not as a literal claim.
Note: On toxoplasma, it is not true that doctors no longer test for it. Testing is standard in pregnancy and for people with weakened immune systems, because the infection can harm a fetus and can cause severe disease in immunocompromised patients. Infection is common: the CDC estimates roughly 11% of Americans aged six and older carry it, and estimates run higher worldwide. Toxoplasma gondii does alter rodent behavior, making infected rats less afraid of cat odor. Associations with human behavior and psychiatric conditions have been reported but remain debated, not established.
Note: On the serpent, Scripture identifies the serpent of Eden as “that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan” (Revelation 12:9; cf. 2 Corinthians 11:3). The parasite image works as a metaphor for how temptation speaks from within (James 1:14–15). Read literally, it would shift the source of sin from the will to biology, which the text does not support.
Leonard recalled a recent TV comedy-mystery on the same theme, Brain Dead. Tony Shalhoub, who played Monk, plays a right-wing legislator infected by an alien parasite that eats about a third of the brain and makes its host more radical in whatever he already believes. Infected liberals and conservatives push each other to extremes until the parasites, male and female, are revealed to have infested Washington. He said it was well made and funny, credited Ridley Scott, and noted it ran one season but wrapped up its story. Mind control, by chip, brainwashing, or parasite, has long been a theme in programming, he said. Now Elon Musk’s Neuralink is helping people speak or see again. He added that he and Thomas are working on the NeuroGym.
Note:Brain Dead aired on CBS in 2016. It was created by Robert and Michelle King, with Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the lead. Shalhoub played Senator Red Wheatus, a senator, not a congressman. Ridley Scott was not the director. His production company, Scott Free, was involved as producer, as it had been on the Kings’ The Good Wife.
17. What Is This Group?
Charlie asked what to call this weekly think tank. Armond said he calls it Fellowship; Leonard offered “the Blue Sky Fellowship.” Isak said he always absorbs new information and viewpoints. He said it helps to weigh these questions at the start of each week, for the same reason weekly church can be a good institution: it is a time to look at the important things in life and go through the week with new ideas about the right way to live.
Leonard said his wife needed to go, and the group closed in prayer. Thomas thanked God for bringing them together, for the week’s insights and the launching platform for reflection, and for the fellowship and opportunity to share and be real people. He asked God to guide and bless them in the coming week, in Jesus’ name.
18. Follow-Up: Thomas and Armond After the Meeting
After the others left, Thomas told Armond that he had spent the week not on physics but on national policy for the presidential effort. Unlike last time, he intends to promote it publicly, aiming to have it ready by 4 July 2027. He has written perhaps twenty to forty or more policy essays and finds the work almost addictive. The AI chapter’s problem, how to support people AI puts out of work, is not a fringe concern; nearly everyone sees it, and no one has proposed a convincing answer. He asked whether Armond had read it. Armond said he had read Chapters 7 and 8, including the addendum to Chapter 8 on the bridge from wages to AI robotics.
Thomas said that, in drafting, ChatGPT proposed giving everyone $18,000 a year, and he hates it because no one can live on that. Armond said that is what is happening now, and it is unrealistic to expect the whole norm to change. He said the real opportunity is to raise what we consider an acceptable standard of living in those situations, which would be monumental. Otherwise, too much rests on whoever decides what meets the standard.
Thomas described what he expects: a person living an ordinary life comes home one day and tells his wife that the life they spent years building is over and they must move into the projects, not because anything else changed but because an AI took his job. This could be epidemic. Armond said it is already happening. He mentioned a recent report of five thousand layoffs at a steel mill. He said U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, around which his whole city was built, once employed about 30,000 people and now employs about 5,000 while producing more steel than at its employment peak. “How do we keep everything from looking like Gary, Indiana?” Thomas said that is exactly his point.
Thomas then gave his own answer: all three remedies will be needed together.
Tax the windfall. Tax those whose profits have soared through automation more on that windfall. Letting them keep all of it to stay motivated to innovate is “a little bit much.”
Increase the debt, that is, create money to support those displaced.
Ask everyone to lower consumption during retraining. No one should expect to keep a gold-spoon standard of living untouched. Society cannot treat the displacement as someone else’s problem. “We are all in this together, and we are going through a change, and it’s going to be wonderful on the other side, but we are not on the other side.”
Because giving people money raises prices if consumption stays the same, he proposed what he called Sensors: a system that measures the actual stock of goods and services and announces which are scarce. People would be asked to hold back on scarce items unless they had a real need, so prices of plentiful goods, such as toothpicks, wouldn’t rise merely because more money was circulating. He framed it as a wartime footing. This is a crisis; rationing and sacrifice are necessary; a weekly list from the Sensors would say what to avoid overconsuming; people would buy only what they needed, refuse to hoard, and trust their neighbors to do the same; and stores would impose limits, as they did with toilet paper during the pandemic.
Armond said his family had stocked up beforehand and never understood the toilet paper panic. He suspected it was artificially manufactured, because lumber was in short supply and the lumber companies own the paper industry. Thomas attributed it more to “the sky is falling, let’s do something.” Armond recalled buying three fishing rods, still in their plastic, thinking he would have to live off fish from the local pond.
Note: On the funding question, one consideration bears directly on the print-or-tax choice. Inflation results from money growing faster than the goods and services it buys (the quantity equation, MV = PY). If AI and robots substantially increase output, the money supply can grow in proportion to that added output without raising the general price level. Some of the “printing” pole may therefore be less inflationary in an AI economy than it would be today. It becomes inflationary only to the extent that money is created faster than production rises. This does not settle the moral question of whether it is righteous to give money without work, but it changes the economic arithmetic.
Note: On the Sensors proposal, in a free market prices already function as a scarcity signal. A rising price tells buyers to economize and tells producers to make more. The proposal therefore substitutes voluntary restraint, guided by published information, for part of what prices do. The nearest precedent is the World War II Office of Price Administration, which combined price controls with ration books. It held down measured inflation but also produced widespread black markets. The voluntary, non-coercive form Thomas describes, which publishes the information and appeals to neighborly restraint with store-level limits only where needed, avoids the controls that caused those problems. It also depends far more on public trust and a shared sense of crisis.
Note: Gary Works is the largest integrated steel mill in North America, not in the world. Its employment did fall from roughly 30,000 at its mid-century peak to a few thousand today, which supports Armond’s point that automation and productivity gains, not lower output, account for much of the job loss. The report of 5,000 recent layoffs was not verified for this write-up.
Note: On toilet paper, the 2020 shortage arose mainly from a sudden shift in demand from commercial to household products, which are made on separate production lines and packaged differently, combined with panic buying. The lumber price spike came separately, in late 2020 and 2021. Toilet paper is made from pulp, and pulp supply was not the main constraint.
Notes marked “Note” were added after the meeting. They supply references or correct points the discussion missed or got wrong.
1. Opening: The Week’s News
Michael said he had spent the week in touch with former students, some of whose own students he now also knows. One is now in his fifties, a professor at Princeton who heads a department of religion. His life’s work has been building community among Catholic priests, Protestant ministers, imams, rabbis, and Buddhist monks. After 9/11, when anti-Muslim feeling ran high, he gathered Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders to issue joint statements urging that no hostility be based on religion. In his early twenties he received a large grant from a Norwegian peace organization. He chose not to keep the money and went instead to Sri Lanka, where Muslims, Christians, Hindus, and Sikhs were killing one another. He visited the religious centers of each community, asked for their stories about peace, had them translated into the island’s languages, and had the churches, mosques, and temples teach them to the children. His reasoning was that the parents had already made up their minds, but the children had not yet been fully taught that the other side were the bad guys.
Michael’s second correspondent works for the UN in Haiti. Michael said the United States is sending roughly 100,000 people back to an island that is about 80% run by gangs, where no one wants to be president because presidents get shot. Many of the returnees have not lived there in ten years.
Armond said he had good weather and had been taken on, whether as volunteer or hire he was not sure, as a construction consultant to the local vocational school. Charlie said his week was just work.
Leonard said that the previous Sunday he attended the Unity and Humanity Conference, whose theme was sacred symbols. A man who had studied ancient symbols for many years gave a presentation, followed by four or five other talks, with Denver giving the last. Leonard said the conference opened his mind to the symbols God makes as well as those men make. During the week he worked with John and sent him parts so John could continue, and the flex circuits were requoted. He also reported that BYU, ranked eighth, beat Notre Dame, ranked second.
2. Does a Sacred Symbol Do Anything?
Thomas asked whether a sacred symbol has any actual spiritual significance or merely brings concepts to mind.
Leonard said the first conference speaker reported that drawing these symbols himself affected his thought processes and inner spirit and opened him to further inspiration.
3. The New Seal on the Scriptures
Leonard described how his group received a new symbol. At a gathering at a cabin in Oak City, near Delta, attended by people from the area’s Covenant Christian community, Denver and his wife Stephanie came and shared a meal. Denver brought folios of the new scriptures (the large printed sheets that are folded, trimmed, and stitched into the binding), since the bound copies had not yet been delivered. In passing he mentioned that a symbol would appear on all their scriptures and websites, and showed it without explanation.
Leonard emailed to ask for an image, and Denver sent a phone photo of it, which the group found amusingly old-fashioned. Later, during a talk Denver gave over Zoom, Leonard used the Q&A to ask him to briefly explain the symbol. Denver read the question and answered, “Yes, I can,” and moved on. Leonard said one must be careful how one phrases a question to an attorney. When Charlie asked why Denver was being so secretive, Leonard said he believes Denver wants people to inquire of the Lord and work it out for themselves.
Leonard described the symbol: it combines many ancient elements, including the circle and the square and the cross, with the phases of the moon around it, and it is eight-pointed, signifying a new beginning. Several people have written and shared their interpretations. A friend in his fellowship made iron-on transfers of it; Leonard had hats made, had small versions laser-cut (his wife Debbie chose to wear one), and made a large one for his entryway. He said people hang pentagrams and stars at their doors and he did not want that, so he made this for his own.
Michael searched the web for the symbol’s origins during the discussion and shared an image of a ring with a similar eight-sided design and a cross resembling a plus sign.
Leonard concluded that he does think symbols and images cause people to think, ponder, and center themselves. He pointed to nature: the Fibonacci spiral appears everywhere, and the sun and moon serve across religions as signs of deity.
4. Is There Such a Thing as a Sacred Symbol?
Leonard said he thinks symbols are more sacred to men than to God, though God may have symbols too. He would like to know whether God likes some symbols and dislikes others. He noted that Satanists clearly propagate their own symbols, and that symbols identify who one is and what one believes, as when a person wears a cross.
Charlie said his background is in the visual arts, and he has studied Deuteronomy 4 and its prohibition on making images, even of things God created. His questions were these: When does an image become idolatrous, and when does it remain a pictogram, like our letters? Does a symbol become sacred through usage? What separates a sacred symbol from a logo, and a sacred symbol from folk magic? He said he sees no biblical source for using a sacred symbol, and wondered whether the fish magnets on Christians’ cars are simply something people create to communicate.
He also described a vision he once saw in the night sky, witnessed by another person with him: a circle containing a five-pointed star, drawn in fine, luminescent, perfectly geometric light. He has struggled for years to understand it and wanted to take it as a sign, but does not know of what. Unlike a drawn symbol, he said, no person made it.
He noted that Masonic symbols came into use in early Latter-day Saint history and temple practice, and said he had reached no conclusion on the subject. He added that he was surprised the topic came up, though not offended.
Note: On whether Scripture uses sacred symbols, the Old Testament gives several God-instituted signs: the rainbow as the sign of the covenant with Noah (Genesis 9:12–17), circumcision as the sign of the covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17:11), the blood on the doorposts at Passover (Exodus 12:13), and the tassels on garments “that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD” (Numbers 15:38–40). God also commanded images for the tabernacle, the cherubim over the mercy seat (Exodus 25:18–22). The prohibition in Deuteronomy 4:15–19 is aimed at images made as objects of worship. The bronze serpent illustrates the line Charlie asked about. God commanded it as a means of healing (Numbers 21:8–9). Centuries later Hezekiah destroyed it because Israel had begun burning incense to it (2 Kings 18:4). The same object was a God-given sign in one generation and an idol in another; what changed was how the people used it.
5. Signal to Others or Power in Itself?
Michael said Christians of every denomination wear the cross, and it means different things to each while sharing a common Christian foundation; the same holds for Muslim and especially Hindu symbols, with their many variations. Fundamentally, he said, a symbol is devotion to whatever it means to the person wearing it.
Charlie asked whether a symbol is a signal to others or has power in itself, like a talisman.
Michael said both, much as with clothing: one picks what one likes, but it also communicates to others whether one is formal or casual, and which culture one belongs to. Wearing or not wearing something states “this is part of who I am.” His wife Jenny wears a ring with the yin-yang sign and lives by its philosophy. A cross usually means something to the wearer, but not always; for some celebrities it is a fashion accessory.
6. Isak: The Temptation to Display Righteousness
Isak said he had recently asked himself why he resists wearing a cross. Honestly examined, his answer was that for him it would be a display of his own righteousness rather than an open invitation saying “I am a safe place.” He asked whether there is more power in wearing a symbol and holding oneself accountable to it, or in presenting oneself as one is and letting one’s actions speak. He does not think wearing one is wrong, but he recognized that his own first motive was jewelry and the wish to represent something he thinks he is. He decided not to buy a cross for his chain.
Charlie joked that crosses ward off vampires; Isak said it hadn’t worked for him, since he’d already been bitten.
Isak added that his concern is whether one’s actions line up with the symbol, and he stressed that he was not directing this at Leonard. He called the cross a beautiful thing because of what Christ did, but noted it is also a torture device, and that, as Michael said, its meaning depends on the denomination and the angle.
Later in the discussion Isak clarified further. His worry is not that wearing a symbol obliges him to live up to it, but whether he would be doing it for himself or for God, like the man who opens the windows and prays in public for the glory of being seen. He said people have an urge to be seen as righteous when they are righteous and to hide when they are not, as with wanting others to see that one makes good money and buying the car to show it. The question is how much of that outward expression pulls away from actually following God. He called this “my own personal cross to bear.”
Note: The image of praying at an open window comes from Daniel 6:10, but there it has the opposite sense. Daniel prayed at his open window as he always had, knowing the decree made it a capital offense. His visibility was faithfulness under threat, not display. The warning Isak was reaching for is Matthew 6:1–6, where Jesus condemns those who pray “standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.” The two passages together locate his test precisely: the same public act is righteous or vain depending on whether it is done before God or for an audience.
7. Leonard: Why He Wears the Seal
Leonard said the main reason his group puts the seal on shirts and hats is to let people see it and ask, a subtle way to put something out there. Since almost no one has seen it before, it starts conversations, and several people have asked him what it is. That is the only reason he wears it; it has nothing to do with his identity. He simply wants to share what he has been given with those who are interested, and he has no problem with those who are not.
He also shared an image of a temple concept. He built a 3D model of the seal in his modeling program, took an image of it, and submitted that to Grok Imagine with his own prompts, which produced the rendering.
8. How Communities Picture Jesus
Michael described a book that surveyed how churches depict Jesus. Some show extreme suffering: the crucifixion, blood, the crown of thorns. Others, like the picture in his office, show Jesus simply sitting in a beam of light, a universal moment of inspiration anyone who has been inspired can relate to. The book found that communities under subjugation, political oppression, or tyranny tend to depict a suffering Jesus, while well-off communities depict a more pleasant one. If God is, as Thomas puts it, “the everything,” Michael said, then the human representation of God reflects the life of the artist and of the community that chose to hang the picture.
9. One God Seen from Many Places?
Isak asked whether Michael was saying that all people have the same God but worship from different points of view based on their experience, and whether that holds for individuals as well as cultures.
Michael answered with examples. The Eskimos lived thousands of years before Christians reached them; the Pacific Northwest peoples near Seattle carved totem poles recording memorable events without ever hearing of Jesus. Before the Bible, people still had versions of God. In fertile Mesopotamia, he said, the deity was a great mother pouring food from a horn of plenty. The Egyptian gods were by turns generous and cruel, like the Nile that brought both drought and plenty. The Norse had snow and thunder gods, which desert peoples did not. Each conception, he said, reflects what people had to work with. God, as the everything, functions like a symbol of the essential aspects of whatever makes up one’s life and gives it meaning.
Note: The horn of plenty (cornucopia) is Greek, from the myth of the goat Amalthea who nursed Zeus. It is not Mesopotamian. Mesopotamia’s prominent fertility and abundance deity was Inanna (Ishtar). The broader point, that a people’s experience of its land shapes its picture of the divine, is a common observation in comparative religion. Note, however, that it describes how people picture God. It does not establish that God is only the sum of those pictures. Scripture’s own claim runs the other way: God reveals Himself, and some pictures are true and others false (Romans 1:20–23).
Isak reflected that the people in the Zoom room come from different walks, family, old friends, and new friends, yet share a common language and communication even when not everyone understands everything. As he has become aware of other perspectives, it seems reasonable to him that we are made of the same stuff but are each bound to the view from where we stand. He wondered whether there is more to see by getting out of one’s own space, whether it is good for people to experiment with other religions, and where people can meet. His underlying question was whether humanity is bound to fight wars forever over skin color, location, or resources, or whether there is a way to agreement without war.
10. Listening, and Advice from One’s Future Self
Michael said his Princeton friend does exactly what Isak described, without needing to travel. He convenes priests, ministers, imams, rabbis, and monks, and what they write together collects the wisdom of all of them without requiring them to agree on everything. Michael said that for every religion and political belief he tries to extract the wisdom and add it to a cumulative vision that is always under revision. One grows by listening avidly and weighing what works; nobody is the same person he was ten years ago.
He cited a saying he attributed to Mark Twain: the ten-year-old self tells the two-year-old self, “Thanks for teaching me never to touch the stove; you saved me many burned hands. But I’m revising it: never touch a hot stove.” The old wisdom remains but is refined. Michael extended this forward. There is another voice, harder to hear, the self ten years from now, or more manageably one year from now. At a crossroads, one can ask what that future self will thank one for having chosen. He closed with a saying he attributed to Confucius: two ears, one mouth.
Note: Neither attribution is secure. Twain’s actual line is about a cat, not a child. In Following the Equator (1897), he wrote that a cat that sits on a hot stove-lid will never sit on a hot stove-lid again, “and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.” His point there is the opposite of Michael’s: over-learning from one experience. The child-and-stove version appears to be a later paraphrase. The “two ears and one mouth” saying is attributed in antiquity to Zeno of Citium, founder of Stoicism, by Diogenes Laërtius (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers 7.23), and in modern collections often to Epictetus. It is not found in the Analects of Confucius.
Isak said he found this valuable. He observed that the future self is something we construct in our heads from what we now feel is right and wrong, projected to its ultimate expression. That makes the exercise a kind of time-travel experiment in morality. It lets one test whether a decision holds up and ask where one’s sense of good and bad comes from. He said he usually begins with prayer directed outward, asking God for wisdom, which then turns inward: what wisdom is out there, what is here, and how to merge or direct them. It is a combination of the outward coming in and the inward going out.
11. “We Turned into Rome”
Thomas read a text he had just received from a friend: we have turned into Rome, like the movie Gladiator, where the rich organize wars to make money, sell their goods to the war, and gain property.
12. Thomas: Symbols in His Searching Years
Thomas said the topic reminded him of his years of spiritual searching as a New Ager and occultist. In that world, symbols were regarded as having magical power, not as mere signs. They were objects of meditation whose power was to change the person internally and carry him into a state, the state sought being some form of enlightenment, an esoteric knowledge of who God really is.
He summarized the reasons for symbols raised so far. Leonard’s seal is a symbol whose intended meaning is not yet known, yet his group has put it on their identification. Isak focused on a symbol as communication to others and the obligation it might create to live up to it.
Later Thomas returned to the question of idolatry Charlie had raised. A symbol can become an idol, he said, if one says, “I’m going to worship this thing; it will save me.” But he recalled a book he had recommended to Charlie, a survey of world religions, whose section on Hinduism presented its many gods differently from the usual view that Hindus worship elephants or monkeys. In that author’s account, a worshiper looking at Ganesh sees aspects of the universe that are like an elephant, goes into that aspect of creation, and sees God behind it. On that reading each god or symbol is a doorway: a way of focusing on one aspect of creation and seeing in it the One behind all creation. Thomas said this way of understanding symbols, and all the external things done in religion, resonates with him. We are looking for the God behind the thing in front of us.
Note: The book is Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions (1991; first published in 1958 as The Religions of Man). Smith’s reading of Hindu images as windows onto the one Brahman reflects the Vedantic interpretation. Popular Hindu practice varies widely, and many devotees relate to a particular deity as a distinct personal being. The “doorway” view also has a scriptural boundary. Romans 1:20 affirms that God’s invisible qualities are “clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.” Romans 1:23–25 condemns exactly the step of exchanging “the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to… fourfooted beasts,” worshiping “the creature more than the Creator.” Looking through creation to God is commended. Directing worship to the image is not. This is the same line drawn by the bronze serpent in §4.
13. Charlie: Jung’s Man and His Symbols
Charlie said the subject finally dawned on him when he remembered Carl Jung’s Man and His Symbols. He read a short summary he had asked Perplexity for. The book argues that we understand ourselves more fully when we attend not only to conscious reasoning but to the unconscious as it expresses itself in dreams, myths, religion, and art. Its central concern is individuation: becoming a more complete person by recognizing and integrating parts of oneself that conscious identity overlooks or rejects. Its main claims are that conscious identity is not the whole personality, that symbols express what plain statements cannot, that dreams must be understood in the dreamer’s own context, and that personal experience connects with recurring human patterns.
Charlie said symbols are far more than logos or drawn signs. He has a recurring dream with an airplane and another with various houses, and these are symbols to him of his freedom and his life. He said he had been asleep to how big the subject is until he remembered the book.
Note:Man and His Symbols (1964) was conceived by Jung and contains his essay “Approaching the Unconscious.” He finished it shortly before his death in 1961, and the remaining chapters were written by his collaborators (Marie-Louise von Franz, Joseph Henderson, Aniela Jaffé, and Jolande Jacobi). It was Jung’s one book written for a general audience.
Michael said he loves the book and agreed with everything Charlie said. Most of the time, he said, more is going on inside a person than he is conscious of, whether in choosing a symbol (Leonard’s seal won out over hundreds of others because it appealed to him), choosing clothes, or simply deciding to be in this meeting. The better one knows the underlying causes of what one does, the richer one’s experience of those moments.
14. Animal Natures, and the Hero’s Journey
Michael added that one can think of a person in terms of an animal. Some flit from flower to flower like a butterfly, others stay home in their hovel like a mole, and others are tigers, frightened little creatures, or puppies. Cultures can adopt an animal that represents how they feel without worshiping it as a deity. If Man and His Symbols is the noun version of the subject, he said, the verb version is Joseph Campbell’s account of the hero’s journey, a universal story underlying all endeavors. He said he had to leave before going into it, thanked everyone, and signed off.
Note: Campbell’s book is The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). “The hero’s journey” is its central concept, Campbell’s “monomyth,” not its title.
15. Armond: Everything Is a Symbol
After Michael left, Armond said the conversation had led him to think of symbols less as particular emblems and more as the way he experiences life: everything is a symbol. The way someone says something or doesn’t, the treatment from a waitress, the greeting from a hostess are all signs, and he allows himself to be influenced by them, or at least not to be unaware of them. If one looks closely enough, he said, everything indicates direction on one’s path. Either you are in the right place and made the right decision to come, or being here is a distraction from what you should be doing, and the experience will reflect it. He tries to stay as neutral as possible, which is why Isak’s comments resonated with him. He does not want to impose his will so strongly that he misses the directions the environment is offering.
As for specific emblems, Armond said he sees them more as branding and belonging. Humans are social creatures, and even the soul is one part of a greater whole, so wanting to identify with a group through symbols is natural human nature, partly a means of self-protection.
16. Isak: Flags, Teams, and Reclaimed Symbols
Isak agreed and pointed to flags, countries, political parties, and states as ways people mark allegiance. He likes a couple of sports teams but has trouble wearing their hats, since he is not from Seattle and has no real part in the Seahawks. Similarly he respects the American flag for much of what it represents, and he does not feel un-American or separate from other Americans, yet he finds it hard to say “the flag is my flag” because he cannot stand for every part of what it symbolizes. Christianity’s symbols are similar.
He noted that a symbol carries who has worn it. Some symbols used by indigenous peoples are now unusable because the Nazis adopted them. The cross, by contrast, was the torture instrument of the Roman Empire, an emperor’s weapon, yet Christians retook it and turned its meaning on its head.
He said he found Armond’s point about experience the more symbolic one. Like dreams, each moment of life is not a symbol of a thing but a whole bit of meaning. His questions were what each moment means, and whether one can direct oneself toward moments that are more meaningful and part of God’s will.
17. Armond’s Hawk
Armond said he has a recurring sign. Often at a big decision or eventful moment he happens to see a red-tailed hawk or a bald eagle, often enough that he now takes it as a good omen. Years ago, during an important moment with Alicia at a Popeye’s drive-through, they looked up to see a red-tailed hawk sitting on a yellow concrete pylon six feet away. (Charlie asked whether it was holding a sign; Armond said it might as well have been.) Later in the meeting he reported spotting another red-tailed hawk as he spoke.
His conclusion was this: if we trust and have faith that God made everything in this world, how could we not trust in symbols, look for them, and believe that what we experience happens for a reason we should try to discern?
Isak agreed that if we are surrounded by God, every individual seems to have something, whether a spirit animal or a recurring sign, that resonates when he is trying to connect with God or struggling with something large: Armond’s hawk, his father’s airplanes. He said such signs seem most authentic when one is not looking for them. You don’t go out looking for the hawk; it finds you.
Note: Scripture affirms both halves of the tension here. God does give signs: Gideon’s fleece (Judges 6:36–40), and the star to the Magi (Matthew 2:2). Creation itself declares His glory (Psalm 19:1). But Scripture also warns against omen-reading as a practice: “There shall not be found among you… an observer of times, or an enchanter” (Deuteronomy 18:10). Jesus refused to perform signs on demand (Matthew 12:38–39). Charlie raised the distinction between a sacred symbol and folk magic in §4. It seems to fall where Isak placed it: receiving a sign God gives versus seeking out signs to steer by. Gideon himself asked for confirmation of a command God had already given. He did not consult the fleece in place of God’s word.
In Him We Live: God as Everything, and Why You Are Not God
· @Thomas Lee Abshier, ND
The claim on the table
God is everything, in the sense that nothing exists except from Him, through Him, and within Him. But that does not mean everything is God, and it certainly does not mean you are God. The difference between those statements is the difference between Christianity and the most attractive spiritual alternative of our age.
I recently listened to a video summary of Alan Watts’s 1966 book, The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Watts, the English-born popularizer of Eastern thought, argued that the separate self is an illusion. In his telling, all things — people, animals, plants, rocks, stars — are one being wearing different masks, and each of us is God playing hide-and-seek with Himself.
This idea deserves a serious answer, not a dismissal. Many thoughtful people find it compelling, perhaps because it contains an element of truth. My purpose here is to illuminate its truth and show how the Scriptures offer a fuller form.
What Watts gets right
Watts is right that the modern West has an inflated view of the independent individual. The picture comes largely from the Enlightenment. John Locke described persons as bearers of rights to life, liberty, and property, and his individuals resemble Newton’s atoms: self-contained units that bump into one another but are not inwardly joined.
That picture has real virtues. It protects conscience, property, and due process from the tyranny of kings and crowds. But taken as a complete account of what a person is, it is false. No one makes himself. A man receives his body from his parents, his language from his community, his knowledge from teachers living and dead, and every breath from an atmosphere he did not create.
Watts makes the point well with the example of an ant. To describe the ant you must describe its soil, its food, its colony, its predators, its weather. Eventually you must describe the whole world, because the ant does not exist apart from it. Watts’s summary phrase is worth keeping: distinction is not separation. The head and the feet are different, but they are not separate.
He is also right that our culture places people in a double bind. We tell a child to be himself and to conform, to be free and to obey, and to want to obey. A society that worships autonomy cannot easily explain why anyone should yield to anyone else.
None of this is foreign to Christian teaching. Paul wrote that we are members one of another “So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.”(Romans 12:5). The isolated, self-made individual is not a biblical idea; it is a modern one.
Where the picture breaks
Watts moves from “we are not isolated” to “there is no self,” and from there to “you are God.” Each step is larger than the one before, and the evidence for the first does not carry the second or third.
First, his God is not a Someone. Watts says plainly that he does not mean God in the religious sense, but the single whole of existence, close to what Spinoza meant. A whole of that kind does not love, speak, promise, grieve, or judge. It simply is. Yet the deepest thing in human experience is that we are persons who love and are loved. A source that is less than personal cannot account for persons. The stream does not rise higher than its spring.
Second, the self disappears just when it is needed. If my sense of being a distinct “I” is a hallucination, then so is my responsibility. Scripture treats each person as answerable for himself: “the soul that sinneth, it shall die”(Ezekiel 18:20), and “every one of us shall give account of himself to God”(Romans 14:12). Watts rightly rejects the isolated self, but he throws out the accountable self with it. Christianity keeps both truths. We are joined to one another, and each of us still stands before God by name.
Third, “you are God” confuses the part with the whole. A wave is of the ocean, from the ocean, and in the ocean, but a wave is not the ocean. When a creature says “I am God,” he has not discovered his true identity. He has repeated the oldest temptation in the record: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”(Genesis 3:5).
Fourth, the game has no stakes. Watts concludes that life should be played as a game with nothing to win or lose, and with conflict as part of the fun. That may be a tolerable outlook for a comfortable man at leisure. It is not tolerable to the parent of a murdered child, or to the child sold into slavery. If cruelty is only God hiding from Himself, then it is not ultimately wrong. A philosophy that cannot call evil evil has not risen above morality. It has fallen below it.
In Him we live: the biblical picture
The Bible does not teach that God made the world from some second material already lying around. There is no second principle. “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made”(John 1:3). Paul told the philosophers of Athens that in God ” For in Him we live, and move, and have our being”(Acts 17:28). He told the Colossians that in Christ “all things consist” — that is, hold together (Colossians 1:17). And he described “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all”(Ephesians 4:6).
Together, those verses form a clear picture. Everything comes from God. God holds everything in being, moment by moment. Everything exists within God’s sustaining presence. In that sense, God is everything: there is no place to stand outside Him, and nothing is ultimately not His.
But the same verse that says God is through all and in all also says He is above all. Philosophers use two words for the difference:
Pantheism means “all is God.” The universe and God are the same thing, so God is exhausted by the world and exists no more than it. This is Watts’s position.
Panentheism means “all is in God.” God holds all things within Himself, yet He is more than all things and remains distinct from them. He is the author, not merely the sum of the characters.
I hold the second view, and I believe Scripture does. (Some Christians prefer to avoid the word panentheism because others have used it loosely. The word matters less than the three truths it is meant to guard: God is the source of all, present in all, and greater than all.)
This view gives Watts everything he wanted, and more. We are really joined at the root because we all come from and live within the one God. But the root is not an impersonal flow of energy. It is a Father who knows each of His children by name, numbers the hairs of their heads, and notices the fall of a sparrow (Matthew 10:29–30).
A physical picture
Watts leans on quantum physics to support his view: particles that seem to have no definite state until they interact, and “entangled” particles that behave as one object across great distances. He is right that modern physics has dissolved the old picture of matter as tiny independent billiard balls. But physics alone cannot tell us whether the unity beneath things is a blind flow of energy or a living Mind.
For some forty years I have been developing a physical model I call Conscious Point Physics. It starts with the idea that matter is not the bottom layer of reality. Beneath every particle are what I call Conscious Points: tiny, non-material units of awareness, each of which perceives its surroundings, responds by a fixed rule, and moves. Particles, forces, and space itself are the large-scale patterns that emerge from countless such points acting together. (The technical work is published at www.hyperphysics.com for anyone who wants to test it.)
What are these points? I understand them as loci of God’s sustaining attention — the places from which God, in effect, looks back at His own creation. The rules they obey are not arbitrary. They are God’s declared order, His word holding all things together moment by moment, just as Colossians says.
If this picture is right, it explains why reality feels so deeply connected. Everything is connected because the one God upholds everything with one attention. It also explains why that unity does not erase distinctness. God’s attention is not a fog; it is precise, and it gives each thing its own place, its own rules, and in the case of persons, its own will.
I offer this as a model to test, not as a doctrine to believe. The theological point stands on Scripture without it. But I find it helpful to picture “in him all things consist” (Colossians 1:17) in physical terms, and to see that the picture leads to a personal God rather than away from Him.
Evil, freedom, and why life is not a game
If God is everything, where does evil come from? This is the hardest question for any view that places all things within God, and Watts answers it by denying that evil is finally real. War, cruelty, and conflict are all part of the game.
Scripture gives a different answer. Evil is real, but it is not a second power standing beside God, and it is not an expression of God’s nature. It arose within creation, from creatures God made genuinely free. God is not the author of evil; He is the author of freedom, and freedom includes the possibility of saying no to Him.
That distinction lets us hold two statements that would otherwise contradict each other. At the level of origin, everything comes from God, including the rebel and his capacity to rebel. At the level of alignment, the rebel stands against God’s nature and grieves Him. A father who allows his grown son to walk out the door does not thereby will the son’s ruin. He permits what he does not prefer, because forced love is not love.
This is why life is not a game in Watts’s sense. A game is something you can walk away from with nothing lost. Our choices are not like that. They shape who we become, they wound or heal real people, and they will be weighed. The stakes are high precisely because the persons are real and the God who made them cares what happens to them.
Watts is not wrong that there is a kind of joy available in life — the ease of the man who has learned to ride a bicycle and no longer fights the road. Scripture knows that joy too. But it comes from trusting a Father who holds us, not from discovering that nothing matters.
A member, not a mask
Watts offers the image of a tree: each of us is a leaf, distinct but joined to branch, trunk, and root. Paul offers a better image because it is living. The church is a body in which “the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee”(1 Corinthians 12:21). The members differ in function, depend on one another, and share one life — yet the eye remains an eye and the hand a hand.
This changes how we treat other people. Watts says we should not see our opponents as enemies to be eliminated, because the game would be dull without them. Jesus asks more and gives a better reason: “Love your enemies”(Matthew 5:44), because your enemy is a person made by God, upheld by God, and loved by God. The reason is not that the conflict is unreal. The reason is that He is real.
It also changes how we understand our own lives. Our consciousness is not God’s consciousness, but it is held within His. When we look on creation with gratitude, wonder, and love, we are not God enjoying Himself in disguise. We are His children, giving Him back the delight He gave us and sharing in His joy as He shares in ours.
Finally, it answers the most striking phrase in the Watts summary: that you are God pretending to be human. Christianity makes the reverse claim, and it is far more astonishing. God did not pretend. In Jesus of Nazareth, God actually became human — not a mask, but a man who was hungry, wept at a friend’s grave, and died (John 1:14; John 11:35). He did this not to remind us that we are God, but to bring us, as ourselves, back to Him.
Conclusion
So, is God everything? In one sense, yes. Nothing exists apart from Him, nothing is made of anything but what He gives, and nothing continues for a single moment without His sustaining attention. The modern picture of the self-made, self-contained individual is a fiction, and Watts was right to say so.
But God is not only everything. He is also Someone — above all, distinct from all, and personally present to each. That is why we can be joined without being dissolved, accountable without being alone, and humble without pretending that we are nothing.
Watts invites us to wake up and discover that we are God. The gospel invites us to wake up and discover that God knows us and loves us. Both are true, and I stand in awe of this miracle: God created a world where love can be known, pursued, and found. I stand in awe that He could begin from nothing, or exist forever, be the One who is All, and create a world of palpable separation, where we desperately need, want, and seek to love each other. A world where we can fulfill both His longing and ours for love. We live in a remarkable world. A world where meaning and purpose center on love.
