Religion is not just a belief system. It is a shared agreement about reality.
About two thousand years ago, a little less, Jesus Christ was dying on the cross. He said, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.”
Time itself changed.
We still sit here now, doing our duties, living inside that moment whether we acknowledge it or not. Large parts of the world at the time were entirely oblivious to Jesus. And yet, somehow, we collectively agreed to reset our measurement of time around his birth.
Truth Makes Sense Until It Breaks
To the religious, religion is the truth. And the shattering of that truth is generally incomprehensible to them. Because until a worldview is broken by something you loved and trusted, you cannot comprehend how insane it was.
I was born into an insane religious community. But it wasn’t just a community. I was born into a complete system of thought that felt so real, so total, that I devoured it with all my heart as ultimate reality until it was shattered in a devastating way.
A Truth Too Heavy to Be Heard
The other day I was thinking about my mother. I imagined that back when my dad first took over our religious cult, someone had come up to her and said this:
From this moment on, the man you love will slowly become delusional. The one person you trust most will come to punish you over years, and your children will be turned against you.
Imagine they laughed and walked away.
It would have been true, but it would have been far too much reality for my mom to handle or even believe.
Truth isn’t in the feeling at hand. Back then, I’m sure my mom felt a deep devotion. In her reality, she was part of a beautiful work and a sacred mission. I remember that devotion. It’s why I believed it so completely.
Destiny Feels Like Truth
What feels like truth is often the present delusion of your spiritual reality, your current sense of destiny. And what will come true, as far as it possibly can, is the future you feel most deeply and can see a path toward.
The key thing is this: if you get that sense of destiny, the feeling of truth, the comfort of the future, from someone else more than from yourself, they control more of your future than you do.
So what is actually true?
One reason a sense of destiny feels so true is because it will come true, as far as it can. Delusion, paired with some degree of staying within reality, seems to be the key not only to predicting the future, but to making it happen.
Delusion as a Requirement for Reality
It’s not so much about who can control you. It’s about where you can feel the greatest sense of future destiny. And if you happen upon a person or a group that gives you that feeling more than anything else, the idea that you can simply resist it is further out of reach than you think.
Most people don’t leave a belief system because they discover it’s false. They leave because, at some point, it stops offering them a future they can live inside.
And when that future disappears, what replaces it is not clarity.
What replaces it is nothing.
The Void
When a future disappears completely, it doesn’t get replaced by clarity. It gets replaced by a void.
This is not confusion. It’s not sadness. And it’s not doubt.
It’s the moment where no path feels justified, no dream feels honest, and no belief offers a place to stand. The things that once pulled you forward stop working all at once.
Most people never reach this point. They pivot to an alternate belief system before total despair. And most people who do don’t stay there long.
Suicide Territory
The void is not a place humans can live.
That’s not poetic. That’s not metaphor. That’s just reality.
When there is no future that feels real enough to move toward, something in you starts to shut down. Not emotionally, but structurally. You can still eat. You can still breathe. You can still go through the motions. But none of it makes sense anymore. And once existence stops making sense, it starts to feel optional.
This is why I call it suicide territory.
Not because everyone there wants to die. Most don’t. It’s because they no longer understand why they should stay.
Pain is not what drives this. People survive pain all the time. Pain still has direction. Pain still points somewhere, even if that direction is just to make it stop.
The void doesn’t point anywhere.
It removes the reason to move, the reason to choose, the reason to keep pretending that tomorrow is different from today. It’s not despair. It’s worse than that. Despair still cares. The void is what happens when caring itself collapses.
Most humans cannot exist here for long. And they don’t.
They grab onto anything that gives them back a future, even if they know it’s cracked, even if they know it’s partially false, even if it costs them parts of themselves.
Because something untrue that lets you live is more tolerable than something true that leaves you unable to exist.
Why Meaning Always Returns
Humans do not stay in the void.
They don’t leave it because they find better arguments. They leave because existence without orientation cannot be sustained for long.
Meaning returns not because it is true, but because it works. It gives shape to time again. It puts a future back in front of you. It tells you what matters and what doesn’t. And once that happens, people will protect it.
This is where delusion re-enters. Not as error, but as necessity.
Once orientation returns, clarity becomes secondary. People will accept contradictions and ignore what they once saw clearly if the alternative is returning to the void.
My Father as the Extreme Case
My dad is not an example I chose. He’s the one that was forced on me.
People want a simple story about him. They want him to be evil in a way that makes sense. A monster you can point at and say, that’s not me.
But that story isn’t true enough to explain what actually happened.
My dad didn’t cling to belief because it gave him power. He clung to it because leaving it would have destroyed him.
I watched this happen in real time.
Every time cracks appeared, something in him panicked. Not emotionally. Existentially. And every time that happened, he learned the same lesson again: stay inside the belief or you won’t survive.
If my dad had fully let go of what he believed, he would have killed himself. I’m convinced of that.
So belief became non-negotiable.
It is also true that my dad sexually abused underage girls and women, justified it spiritually, and caused real, lasting harm.
And it is also true that he lived inside a delusion so complete that he was willing to sacrifice himself for it.
This does not excuse what he did. It explains how it continued.
Evil Inside Delusion
There is not necessarily evil that exists outside of a delusion or belief system.
You cannot have good or evil without some kind of belief holding it in place. If you say my dad was purely after evil, that explanation doesn’t make sense. In the absence of belief, there would not even be a reason to do evil.
When someone reaches the void, they usually don’t go hurt people. That point is closer to suicide than violence.
People hurt others when they remain partially inside a delusion, especially one where they still feel owed something by the world.
That’s where the damage happens.
Why People Stayed Loyal
As far as I can tell, my dad really believed God was returning, and that his life was meant to be the one that carried people there.
Reality did take him as close to that as it could. It just ended when a bunch of us woke up and said, what the fuck are we doing.
But my dad did not wake up.
Every time he started to come out of it, he couldn’t stand it. That taught him one thing: trust in the God you always have, or you will die.
People were loyal to him not because he manipulated them, but because he embodied a future so powerful he would die for it.
That is why people stayed.
Jesus and the Delusion Worth Dying For
If I make an assumption about Jesus Christ with the understanding I have now, it is this: he was an intelligent man who had a delusion he was willing to die for, and the people around him were willing to die for it too because he inspired them so deeply.
You do not shape the future the way he did unless you are willing to believe something that deeply.
A large part of what Jesus taught was love and loving one another. That might be a delusion worth dying for. That might be a delusion worth having, and even worth making real.
My problem with Christianity is not its principles. It is its claims about God.
Humans are starving for a delusion they cannot break down. One that feels like spiritual truth.
Delusion is not delusion unless you really believe it.
Truth, Honesty, and the Cost of Living
The spiritual world might be a participant in the delusions we choose. Reality may be shaped more by belief than by truth, at least in human structures and organizations.
Our inner guide is only good for the delusion we are in. If our intuition ever truly surpasses our beliefs, we will leave them.
That’s why manipulation is not really a choice once you choose any future at all. The person who speaks the language of your belief system better than you do will always have power over you.
All I can really do is ask questions and refuse to lie.
That may not be ultimate truth. But it’s better than pretending I don’t live inside some kind of shared delusion with the rest of you.
You would also enjoy this article: How Warren Jeffs Controlled All 79 of His Wives
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My podcast this week titled: You Are Not Strong Enough To Leave Religion. That’s Why It Worked.
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