I received a question from a friend today asking for further clarification on some ideas that I've shared. And I'm going to try to navigate a response to that. It's extraordinarily difficult to hem in the many places that I could go with that and reduce it down to something that's as concise as, as I
can make it as concise as I believe it could be made with all of these kinds of questions. The 11 thing that jumps out to my attention is the fact that just how easy it would be to lay these ideas out from scratch to someone that didn't already have a lifetime of presuppositions deeply ingrained into
how they perceive themselves, the world, their experiences and so on. And so almost all of the the challenges are from the fact that every idea you touch on will immediately pull out a lifetime worth of things that are incorrect or incomplete. And from the outset just to be fully transparent about this
, I I recognize that that's a bold statement to make, but that's actually pretty germane to the conversation. The the question involves trusting God and how to know whether your communication channel, the, whether what you perceive to be communication from or with God is actually that. And so it's easy
to say trust in God. But the question is, how do you know that your concept of, of God is correct? Or that what you perceive to be communication from him is actually from him? Or that you're even interpreting, interpreting it correctly. Very important and very valid questions. So I've often thought that
every religion with which I'm at least a little familiar in the world would be better off throwing out almost everything they have and admitting that they basically have nothing, then they are doing what they're doing, which is almost always assuming they know everything. What, what do you mean, Rob
? That's a crazy thing to say. Well, what do they actually have figured out any of them? It doesn't matter which one we're talking about if you were to buy a house and, uh, without looking at it and you go into it for the first time and you realize the walls are rotted out there, let's say a smoker lived
there and it stinks. There are obvious electric wiring problems. The place is infested with rodents and on and on and on. You need to build a list of what you're going to tear out the things that obviously aren't what they are meant to be. And then you start from there and you move forward one place
I lived there were some folks it was an older neighborhood. There were some folks down the street, a young couple who just bought a house and they gutted the entire thing. It the outside still looked like the original house. But when you walked in, everything was ripped down to the the framing, even
the floor, there was nothing, there was no insulation, there was no wiring, they re redid the entire house, they left the framing and the exterior. So the world religions are like that. And I'm not excluding Christianity from that description. Uh You name a flavor of Christianity. If we could go in the
house and I'll show you all the rodents, I'll show you the stains. I'll show you the, the wiring that's all jacked up and it's not enough to try to tweak those things. But of course, the first step is to see that and, and admit that there are problems and most religious people don't even get there. Most
religious people find or stay with religion because they believe it offers them a solution to the uncertainty problem. So it should come as no surprise that true religion is just about the least palatable thing for a religious person to consider because true religion does not solve the uncertainty problem
by making it go away. It's the best solution to the uncertainty problem because it generates the greatest mitigation of it, but it does not solve it. It never goes away. Truth is infinite and there is no way to get to the point where you're done. There's no way to say, I'm 100% certain that what I currently
believe is the end of all of those ideas and nothing future will ever change that. So anyone who's taken a close look at the natural world, so a good scientist, for example, or a good philosopher or a good artist, any of these people find that the inescapable experience in their field is that you're
never done, you're never done. And then religion walks in and says you can be done. And some of these religions are so goofy that they'll say something like well with one religious, right? Or even a prayer, you can be done. So it's no surprise that those who are most inclined to search for truth are
the least likely to be found in an organized religion and that those who are found in organized religion are the least likely to be interested in truth. There's a reason that in the end times in which we live, the vast majority of people who will receive the things that are newly available in our time
are going to be the atheists and agnostics, not the Christians. And so I have to say here, but I'm saying the label Christian, I, I make a distinct, I, I have to use that word because that's what they use. And it doesn't matter how much it bothers me that they've subverted it, but that is what it is
. They are not followers of Jesus. They're people who claim they believe in Jesus. And there's a world of difference between the two. So that's just that those are the cards we've been dealt with. We have to use the nomenclature that applies. So it's true as this person brought up in their email that
, that you could point your finger to so many organized religions, devout members of them who have done atrocious things. And they've all justified those with the same justification, which was I'm trusting in God. This is what God wants for me. And so the, the writer says they were trusting in religion
, they were trusting in the idea of God that they currently held. And here's where I push back, they weren't, actually, they weren't. And now that I've poked quite a bit at organized religion, I, I'll turn the tables and poke quite a bit at scientism. So, as a career scientist, I have seen my share of
people who are brilliant in some sense, admirably brilliant and yet shockingly deficient in some other sense. And in my investigation of this, I've come to conclude that honesty is a real problem with human beings. And it really doesn't matter if someone is spiritual or secular or some mixture of both
odds are, if they're human, then somewhere in their life. In fact, in multiple places, there will be areas where they would not continue down a certain path of discovery. And the reason was the same reason people wouldn't ask Jesus questions in the New Testament. You see this again and again, they were
afraid to ask him a question. They terminated the interaction. Why? Because they had a feeling that they knew what he might say and that they weren't going to like that very much. And so this is characterized in early in the gospels in John chapter three where Jesus is talking about how we're all already
condemned because the light has come among us, it's already available, but we would not turn toward it because we were afraid of what it might show us about ourselves. And we preferred to remain in ignorance in darkness because we didn't want what was in the light. It's a paraphrase of the, the second
half of John chapter three. And that is a human quality and it's not limited to people who are overtly religious. Like I said, if you're a scientist, you will find throughout your interactions with people that there is a distinct lack of courage to look into the questions whose answers might deviate
from what people want to hear and what people want to see and how people want to be so much of the truth in science will get you into big trouble professionally. You'll, you'll struggle to. So if you're on the academic side, you're constantly walking through a minefield where the wrong step will prevent
you. If you learn the wrong things and you speak up about it. It will prevent you from being published from getting grants from getting tenured or from being able to remain in your academic post even if you are tenured. Now, the good news is, I suppose that that minefield is very clearly marked. It's
extremely clear where the line is and you have colleagues and mentors and gatekeepers, uh editors of journals or peer reviewers or grant panel review personnel, whatever, constantly helping you helping to remind you of where those markers are and warning you not to step over them. But every single person
has to decide what they care about more and they will be put into situations, plural, multiple situations where they get to show what they care about more if they're still in the system and successful odds are they've made their choice and that's accelerating in our day. It's like that everywhere folks
. Now, now if you're in a position professionally where what you're doing isn't so much in the realm of discovery in knowledge, creation, propagation, creativity, any of that stuff, then maybe it's not super obvious yet, you're kind of insulated from this somewhat. But but in these, these grounding points
of science and religion, all of this, all of this carries higher contrast. And so it's the same problem in both spaces. It's this, it's this question of trust in your communication channel being from God. That might be a weird thing to hear when you we're talking about science but just replace God with
truth. What's your channel of truth and the properties again that, that I'm trying to draw attention to is that you're never done. There can't be a dogma, there can't be taboo topics in the, in the search for truth. It always has to be open. Everything has to be open to questioning, always bounded by
reason, but always open to questioning. And religion should also be, we talk about evidence based medicine. And that is a charged phrase that comes mostly from criticism from scientific people where they've correctly identified that much of medicine is not evidence based. It's certainly not kept up to
date. You know, you, you memorize things in medical school 25 years ago. You're still operating on the same information when it's been superseded by newer research that shows different things or newer ideas. But science itself has grown away from, it's not really grown, has decayed away from being evidence
based. It's become more, more of a political ideology then than a system of open ended inquiry. And for most people, religion never had anything to do with evidence. The way they defined faith is the opposite of evidence, which happens to be contrary to everything said about it in the scriptures. But
I guess that's a different conversation. If you want want to know more about that, you can read the book I wrote called Through Faith. So the problem is not actually whether people say they were trusting in God or not when they do bad things. The problem is what was their basis for their confidence in
what they believed and what contrary evidence were they ignoring? Now, can someone be genuine and sincere and think sincerely that they're following God and do things that are less than perfect or even what could be correctly judged is outright evil? Absolutely. What evidence do you have? Well, just
to make it brief, here's one we read in the scriptures that Paul persecuted Christians when he was a pharisee and that he didn't know any better. He was being zealous in the religion that he truly believed. But what happened to Paul God visited him? He came to him appeared to him and he gave him correcting
information and Paul changed on a dime toward a more correct orientation, a more correct version of what he thought he was doing in the first place. And this story repeats itself throughout scripture. We could give other examples, but this is a pretty clear example, well known one. What will happen as
you do the best, you know, again, whether you believe in God or not as you do the best, you know, you will be led to better things. The problem isn't that you might not be clear about what your channel is of truth. The problem is, you ignore the signals that show you something better and you ignore the
signals that you have less than you thought that something in your perspective of what you have is less good than you thought, less useful than you thought, less enduring than you thought. Or maybe it's none of those things at all contrary to what you thought. And the question is, what do you do about
this? If your guiding belief in life is that religion means to have the answers on everything in a final way from the outset, then that puts you in a very difficult place because you have to choose to turn away completely from your religion because that's what you've been led to believe. It means the
final answer to everything. Or you choose to recognize something that is obvious evidence in life. You know, you touch a wood stove and it's hot and you get burned and you say, well, if I acknowledge that my hand is burning and that maybe that wasn't such a great idea. I have to turn away from my religion
completely. And obviously, that's absurd. And so this is why I say most people would be better off stripping down the house of their belief system down to the studs, down to the things that they really have evidence for and build up from there because most of what you believe is absolutely garbage. Those
that have some idea of what the end times is all about for good or evil. I'm saying they just thought about it, whether it's correct or not, those ideas tend to focus on how, how God is going to give more and better than he has in the past. Very few people. In fact, off the top of my head, I can't think
of any other than myself have described a process where he takes away. And what is he going to take away the dead branches, the dead wood, the ideas that are not rooted in reality, the beliefs that have no foundation. Why? Because they're in the way they will prevent you from accepting better things
, the better things that are coming in our day, the better ideas. And so at a metal level, interestingly enough, at least to me, so much of what I've been writing has that's not published yet. These books that I keep referring to so much of it, it's, it's all about giving more, but so much of it is actually
about illustrating why you are not here. You're actually here. Now, as you're reading it, you're not gonna notice that it's not subliminal, but it's, it's pursued in a way that's designed to not trigger your fight or flight mechanism. It's handled in a different space. But that will be the result is
that through reading these books, you're going to have a multi 1000 page argument that you're here. Not here. The good news is it will intricately illustrate the path to be where you currently think you already are. But for real, at the same time the changes that are coming in the world are going to
be like a very hot fire that burns away all the things that all the things in your life that help you believe that you're here. And so this is a multifaceted front. Now, I'm trying to think if there's anything else that I need to say about this. So one of the best things you can do to avoid the mistake
of having high confidence and something that's not true is to learn to measure your confidence in what you believe. What's the best way of doing that live your beliefs fully. Not just sometimes, not just when it's convenient, but especially when it's hard. And what that will do is it will lead you to
, to better see the edges of your belief. It'll, it'll help you see the faults in what you think is true. And along the way in this process, not only are you going to identify beliefs that you should let go of because they're garbage, you'll also see beliefs that you hold that are more valuable than
, you know, currently you'll identify needs that you have that you don't realize you have, but more important than that. You'll actually refine the process, you'll gain confidence in the process. You will discover how true religion is a solution to the uncertainty problem and that it isn't specific to
religion. It's just in general how you find truth because remember, religion is not this little subset of truth. It's actually what it's the super set of truth. And so one of the hallmarks of true religion is that it's just as useful in every, um every angle of life, not just what you do on Sundays or
when you're reading scripture. And so if it, if it's not, if you, if it doesn't fully expand into what you think of as secular, the secular side of life and I'm not talking about in churchy ways, like pray always. That's not what I mean. I mean, if you're not in the dead of your secular job in this really
hard problem, if you don't know how your religion helps you in that problem, in practical ways, not just how you wish it would if it's not touching that part of your life and making it better, true religion makes everything in life better because that's what God does. He. He, he did not create this world
as some sort of alternative to what matters. He designed it precisely so that it would offer to us exactly what we need to, to improve in all the ways that matter the most. And if you don't understand how every second of your life is a part of that, you don't yet understand very much at all about him