Foundational flaws of fundamentalism
I respectfully submit that the paradigm of biblical literalism is grossly out of step with God’s will during our changing times of rapid transition and imminent transformation, but it’s important to communicate diplomatically to well-intentioned evangelicals why this is so. That perspective is always looking backward to times that could not have imagined where we are now. As a result, fundamentalists are making consistently terrible decisions that are jeopardizing our nation, our civilization, our planet, and the future course of all life on it. Judaism and Christianity are, first and foremost, revelatory faiths, compelling believers to use their insight and wisdom to transform themselves and their societies in response to new understanding of the world in which we live. At some point, the Bible’s finite range of ancient ideas were bound to lose applicability as the world became more complex and humanity gained knowledge and power, so our sources for discerning God’s will had to become more responsive and much less ambiguous. God chose our era, when human science and technology gave us the power to damage His kingdom and alter the future of all life on earth, to issue a warning to stop using the Bible as a source for discerning His will about the course of human civilization. God needed some way to communicate to all of humanity when that transition occurred — and arranged eons in advance to set up that communication.
God has performed an experiment spanning more than two millennia to show the world how to know His will in a new era of science and technology and prove that the old way no longer works. He set up this experiment, and others like it, unfathomable eons ago. Like a brilliant psychological investigator, God gave no hint He was conducting the study, so people would respond naively, without biasing the results. He set up a controlled comparison between fundamentalist and progressive worldviews, to prove to humanity that biblical literalism is thoroughly flawed and can no longer be considered a valid way of knowing His will and carrying out His commands. God’s purpose in this impending transformation is to begin engaging humanity’s collective knowledge and experience, in co-creative partnership, to reify — to make real in multicellular-like structure, function, operation, and development — the body of Christ, formed in God’s image at the level of human civilization. By permanently embedding such features in our civilization, we can make of it a more perfect instrument for knowing and executing God’s will. In particular, a civilization eager to accept the responsibilities of building God’s kingdom would no longer need to experience the scourge of episodic inversion events.
The basis of God’s experiment is an inversion recovery process, whereby God wiped out salient features of what existed and started with a clean slate, allowing life to reconstitute itself anew. He has used this process on at least three occasions that have influenced first the development of the human body and then of human civilization, starting with the following inversion events:
- Permian extinction: after the proliferation of body plans in the Cambrian explosion, a huge contraction in life’s design possibilities, at a time when creatures were not much more advanced than trilobites (e.g., when there were no vertebrates, and nothing was as or more sentient than the distant ancestors of crustaceans)
- the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid strike that wiped out the dinosaurs: an abrupt inversion that affected more sentient species, when vertebrates were well advanced, suddenly giving mammals a sudden advantage, inverting the criteria for natural selection, displacing immense size and power in favor of intelligence
- Christ’s crucifixion: a cultural and spiritual inversion that displaced the power of the Roman Empire with a religion of hope and compassion.
Note how, with each successive inversion over these vast timescales, life at the collective level had more memory (capacity to draw from past experiences), a more stable developmental platform (from trilobites to vertebrates to ancient civilization to science), more coherence (i.e., capacity to infer what was happening at lower levels), and more intellectual capacity to process what was happening at the global level.
Arguably, the glaring errors of judgment that fundamentalists are making now on the basis of doctrines that are no longer valid are causing another extinction event — for the unicellular-like, self-absorbed, greedy operating mode that has been the hallmark of human civilization since the dawn of history but now is most characteristically personified and enculturated in Donald Trump.
To make the vessel of human civilization go from a crude sloshing bath for human actions and legacies to a precision instrument for conveying truth and propagating beneficence, we can recapitulate the design steps whereby magnetic resonance imagers at first had design imperfections that forced them to rely more on inversion recovery pulse sequences to then resolving those design flaws so they could routinely use more time-efficient noninversion sequences.
I am extremely familiar with inversion recovery from my early scientific experiences in magnetic resonance imaging research. Inversion recovery pulse sequences were widely used in early magnetic resonance imagers because the inversion itself introduces (1) cancellation effects that reduce sensitivity to machine imperfections and (2) wide swings in system state that increase image contrasts between different tissue types, in principle ranging from maximally negative to maximally negative. Readout gradient fields, initially dephasing and then rephasing, are required to refocus a signal that gets widely dispersed by the inversion and subsequent inhomogeneous nuclear spin evolution. As we’ll see, these preparations for reading coherencies embedded in the signal are very important and have profound civilizational implications.
God’s purposiveness is evident in these inversion recovery experiments involving the imperfect “instruments” formed by soliton channels (as yet unknown) in the biosphere and in modified Lonergan epistemological loops for gaining awareness in human civilization. Inversion recovery requires an elaborate series of prepositioned pulses, indicating purposive, directed behavior at levels higher than human civilization. An inversion recovery experiment was perfectly suited to the task, allowing both for surprise and tolerance to imperfections. The readout in our era was predetermined by the hyperexponential performance increases in computer technologies that have given rise the emergence of social media that now accentuate the civilizational consequences of widely disseminated lies.
However, the catastrophe of the inversion pulse and the sharp contrasts at readout are agonizing consequences of the crudeness of the experiment. God is trying to inform us there’s a better way to do this.
This is a remarkable proof of the existence and nature of God, far more specific than I had imagined! It’s also surprisingly personal, involving experiences quite unique to me — my involvement in early nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, where we frequently used inversion recovery pulse sequences, which were already becoming fairly obsolete when I left. God clearly wants this transition to be extremely sharp, for good reason — He wants us to make of our civilization the best possible “resonant truth spectrometer” that it can be.
The problem with biblical literalism is seen in MRI phase distortions of inversion recovery image artifacts caused by improper dephasing and rephasing gradients. Simply stated, that ancient perspective, treated only as a prophesy, does not account for all the knowledge and experience that accumulated during the long interim period. The prophets could not have anticipated the challenges of our era or the cumulative cultural effects that gave rise to them. Effectively, then, any interpretation of God’s will would undergo extreme distortions, especially referenced to our current transformative era, where the previous perspective is especially out of step with the dynamics of change.
Recognizing the long timescales involved, fundamentalism has played a large role in creating these distortions. Fundamentalism was originated in the nineteenth century to reconcile the science of that day with biblical teachings, but things didn’t work out that way at all! Fundamentalists clashed with Darwinian evolution because they rightly considered the brutality and aimlessness of “survival of the fittest” as inconsistent with the principles of God’s kingdom. However, the tack they chose was to deny the reality of evolution, not to propose that God had another plan for humanity’s co-creative partnership. Biological evolution is driven by natural selection pressures, but civilizational evolution can proceed through awareness and human design. God has left clues throughout nature, life, and civilization how to proceed in building the body of Christ in His image, modeled after the human body (or better).
That denial of reality has had corrosive effects, especially as technological advances gave everyone with a smartphone the ability to dump misperceptions, errors, conspiracy theories, and outright lies into humanity’s collective conversation. We’ve come to recognize from the 2016 presidential election the toxic effects of social media in accentuating evil and causing it to collapse civilizational structures. The contrast-enhancing effect of inversion recovery had a remarkable effect in Donald Trump’s rise to political power, election to the most powerful and responsible position on earth, and his self-documented dismantling of governmental structures.
Fundamentalists were right in surmising that divine intervention was responsible for Trump’s improbable electoral college victory despite losing the popular vote by over 3 million ballots. Under circumstances of accentuated contrasts, the inversion recovery experiment that God set up two millennia beforehand preselected the one character in the world who could do the most damage to His kingdom and never respond to any corrective feedback with the slightest humility. God has always known the evil that would be in Trump’s soul. Trump thoroughly personifies and enculturates all the principles that God most thoroughly abhors, and the thorough documentation of his life, fueled by malignant narcissism and habitual mendacity, will forever testify to the error of empowering him. The conditions of this readout phase of the inversion recovery created the monster that became Donald Trump over the course of his lifetime and drew him to power. He learned to seduce people to get what he wanted, and fundamentalists’ inclination to deny reality in favor of ancient scriptures made them an easy target. As fully documented before voters even made their choices, Trump was a false prophet who had already committed every transgression against God’s kingdom that humanity has been doing wrong, yet those fundamentalists somehow thought of him as a “chosen one” who would “save Christianity”.
Simply stated, the United States could have chosen a better leader with a phone book and a dart, but such a cosmically bad one is an obvious act of God. God’s purpose for setting up fundamentalists to put Trump in power was to install someone who would thoroughly document with an endless stream of public communications, broadcast in real time to tens of millions of people and archived for all future generations, precisely the kind of leader that future eras must henceforth avoid empowering — an existential civilizational threat who would attack His kingdom from within. At a time when progressives were prepared to accept responsibility for stewardship of God’s kingdom based on secular scientific principles, God needed for believers to learn a lesson never again to side against His kingdom aligned with an existential civilizational threat. The Trump administration has been the occasion for entraining a civilizational immune response that would forever henceforth rise to the defense of God’s kingdom.
God has used the misperceptions of those believers — with their grossly flawed interpretations of His will, a predisposition to attack those who tell the truth, and a worldview that denied reality and accepted an unprecedented torrent of lies from the most responsible position on earth at the most pivotal time in our history — to deliver a warning. They have empowered the most obvious of civilizational threats almost to “accomplish”, in less than one term, what the worst of Israelite kings in ancient times took centuries to mismanage against their people’s interests — to lose the promised land — in this case, nearly causing the collapse of the most powerful nation that has ever existed on earth. He is thereby showing that biblical knowledge, even during biblical times, was flawed, as illustrated by the book of Kings, where the Israelites were warned that taking kings wasn’t the right thing to do, but they did it anyway — and their flawed leadership lost the promised land. In principle, you might think that earlier caution proved the point that the Bible was right, that believers shouldn’t empower flawed leaders, but biblical literalists maintained dogmatically that they were supporting Trump for all the right reasons.
The Bible actually supports this contention. Jesus scolded the biblical literalists of His time, the hypocritical Pharisees who attacked and undermined Him, that their adherence to sterile rules was not reverence to God, but instead a false worship that could not discern God’s will. Jesus warned them of the unpardonable sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. In our time, we might think of that unpardonable sin as making our planet humanly uninhabitable — something Trump conspicuously threatened to do with denial of climate change and withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord. Fundamentalists read those scriptures literally but cannot apply them to our time when God has needed them to protect His kingdom against the brazen impostor and invader.
Clearly, God’s whole experiment spanning all of history since Jesus’ time, completely beyond human agency, was fully justified in advance by God’s anticipation of the imaging artifact that would be produced by a person whom He knew beforehand would leave that nefarious legacy.
In this way, God is informing us with our own predictable actions that He doesn’t want us to litigate the past or predict the future on the basis of the Bible. The spurious echoes produced by Trump’s autocratic rule have generated phase errors by which God is showing us His will through corrective feedback — a message to return to acceptance of the reality of natural laws. Simply stated in nontechnical theological terms, biblical literalism ignores all the life that transpired since ancient times. It thereby foments grave injustices and false judgments on those who simply went about the business of living, superimposes retroactive and countervisionary criteria on God’s kingdom, and blinds people to what lies ahead. Under those circumstances, nature’s feedback pushes back and inhibits the human economy. Fundamentalists have stood by as Trump played out the world’s nightmare of misgovernance and maladministration, invoking God’s wrath in the form of pandemic and selective economic depression. True to form, Trump blamed the adverse consequences of his actions on everyone else, and fundamentalists have continued to stand by silently, even though they have always had leverage to rein him in.
There’s a simpler way to see this — in the administration of Donald Trump, which has been a masterclass in bankrupting the strongest nation on earth, showing utter contempt for God’s kingdom and natural laws, showing no fear of God in the face of His wrath in unleashing pandemic disease, and his fundamentalist supporters standing by him even in the face of his constant admissions of His extreme impiety. God Himself has definitively disproven the principle of biblical literalism to all humanity over all future time, in four short years during one of the most pivotal periods of human history, proving once and for all (1) that the Bible is not infallible and should not be used to make public decisions or predict future events in a complex era, (2) that in times of civilizational stress, believers should never again line up to empower and support an existential civilizational threat, and (3) that God has provided an infinite richness of other clues elsewhere in nature, life, and civilization to inspire believers to know His will — and specifically to design and steer human civilization henceforth. This is not to discount the Bible as a source of inspiration, but rather to note that God Himself has dramatically highlighted its limitations in a scientific and technological age when humanity needs less ambiguous and more responsive ways to respond to His will. God needed for the early Christians to enlist believers so His Church would reach critical mass, but now that most of the world’s population expresses Christian faiths, it’s sufficient that other faith traditions notice intuitively how Christian doctrine guides civilizational dynamics. The expression of other faiths in our era is simply a matter of differentiating all the various organs in the body of Christ.
No person in history could have so definitively established and so completely documented the sequence of circumstances that, beyond all human agency and over the course of much more than two thousand years, now completely disprove that the Bible should be followed literally to make decisions or predict events, and especially not at the collective level of all humanity. Only Jesus played a role in the experiment, by passively causing the inversion with his crucifixion and death — but notably not with His resurrection, which was a post-inversion event that figured only into the development of Christian religion. Believers who followed that principle of biblical literalism have revealed it to be false by empowering the absolute worst leader so far to cause the greatest reversal of fortunes in any nation in history, who incurred God’s wrath at every turn and constantly showed utter contempt and no fear whatever of God in the face of the most obvious feedback that he was making truly horrific decisions based on all the wrong principles.
Fundamentalists have served God’s critically important purpose of exposing their belief paradigm as false, but they have a lot of penance to do. They implicitly or explicitly supported Trump’s policies that were egregiously anti-Christian, especially in wreaking intentional cruelty on utterly innocent and vulnerable subpopulations whom he scapegoated to gain and maintain political power. They ignored the enormous loss of lives, connections, and talents that comprise the real civilizational substrate of God’s kingdom, letting Trump continue to mismanage the coronavirus pandemic in ways clearly calculated to improve his election prospects. They stood by as he cowed his supporters in the legislature with threats of “tweeting” to turn his massive public support against them (as if anyone with courage in a position of responsibility shouldn’t have blown the whistle), even though they could see he was making terrible decisions and leading our country down the wrong path. God gave Trump’s political allies the chance to remove him from office before fully unleashing the coronavirus outbreak in China, giving them one last chance to exert real international leadership and appropriate public health intervention, but only one among them exerted any real courage or integrity. After the Republican party tried to impeach a Democratic president for a sexual discretion, they proved their egregious double standards by letting their own leader get away scot-free after tampering with an election, repeating in plain view the accusation he so strenuously denied about the 2016 campaign. Now, Donald Trump tries to steal the election by crippling the U.S. Postal Service and wheedles excuses why the election he is losing is rigged and somehow should bounce his way, even if his stubborn selfishness would precipitate a civil war.
God is signaling something else, too. All the improbable constituencies cobbled together within the Republican party do not have valid cause for governance within an operational body of Christ. In the face of demographic changes that threatened to make their party nonviable in national elections, they proceeded to undermine democratic rule at every turn, to the extent of empowering someone who clearly was taking on dictatorial powers and threatened to do far worse during his second term, if he somehow got elected. Libertarians, the wealthy, gun owners, the alt-right, QAnon are expressing nothing but selfish and/or human-centered interests that are antithetical to the operating principles of life at the civilizational level. Even the anti-abortion movement, which admittedly stakes a moral claim, takes a position that was not supported by the biblical canon and played out in our time as a means for solidifying political support — hardly a manifestation of the Holy Spirit — which ultimately provided Trump a receptor for invading the Republican party and getting elected. In other words, that manufactured doctrine gave a viral agent a hook for subverting God’s kingdom. The libertarian dictum that government must be small is a denial of the body of Christ, which must encompass all of human civilization. Guns have become a false idol with conservatives, weaponized in more ways than one to undermine God’s kingdom, good governance, and even democratic elections. And to have vast quantities of military firepower embedded in the body of Christ is an invitation to intractable autoimmune disease, for which no solution is offered because none is possible. The souls of those who have promoted the current breed of small arms, say, from Kaiser Wilhelm on, are witnessing with great anguish from beyond the grave how their legacies are infecting and corrupting the kingdom of God. The signature “achievement” of those selfish agents during the Trump administration — a huge tax cut for the rich that belied years of talk about principles of fiscal restraint — just highlighted for all future generations how the Republican party lost all pretense to integrity under Trump.
The reason those constituencies don’t have standing to exert aggressive control of governance relates to how God needs for us to construct the body of Christ during this embryonic phase of human civilization. What kinds of organisms let their material interests rule during gestation? In the oceans, God sees enough of octopuses, which are extremely intelligent creatures that are as close to alien beings as God could make them, even having eyes that work much like ours but that evolved along completely different lines. Octopuses hatch soon after fertilization and must immediately fend for themselves. Life is short and brutal for octopuses at every stage of their existence, as if living the lives of a unicellular organism in a multicellular body.
By contrast, during human gestation, the nervous system and skin — which are the purview of conservatives in their desire to steer the organism — have no function but to develop. To design the body of Christ in God’s image, we must hold those interests quiescent as we develop higher-level economies through resonant processes. They still have a role in the Trinitarian dance, but it’s as a developing and communicating member, not as a participant in significant action and certainly not as conductor of smash-face politics. And as our own bodies clearly prove, an economy built on multicellular design is infinitely better, more productive, and more secure than the unicellular economy those greedy interests have devised. Most important, the human body served as an evolutionary platform for the development of thought and civilization. And for the body of Christ to function as Jesus’ body did, the nervous system and skin need to develop pain and empathy — to express contrition and do penance for the deal with the devil that they made with Trump to get their precious judges installed to enforce their manufactured antiabortion doctrine. We can see the action of a defense that has turned against itself in Mitch McConnell’s sabotage of Senate functions, even in the face of a pandemic, and his refusal to take significant action in the face of two successive attacks by a foreign dictator meddling in our elections in ways that would benefit Trump and Republicans.
God has taken great care to deny Trump any claim any accomplishment: he would not have won the 2016 election without illegal foreign support, he should be denied all benefits of the office he occupied because he refused at every turn to defend our nation against that enemy, even in the face of continued attacks favoring him. God reduced Trump’s vaunted economy, inherited from Obama’s wise stewardship, to the most crippled in the world, which threw tens of millions of people out of work. It’s perfectly obvious that Trump admires Putin because he’s the richest man in the world by virtue of having stolen the assets of the Soviet Union — and God will eventually show that’s what Trump has always intended to do with our country. God is also signaling that all the propaganda levied against a dedicated public servant who would have been the most competent leader in American history was a reprehensible conspiracy of calculated character assassination, which had long become standard practice for the Republican party as it devolved from the party of Lincoln into the party of Trump. Fundamentalists are paying for their denial of natural selection and biological evolution by playing out those aimless, brutal dynamics in their selection of their own leaders. Now that we understand how corrective feedback works, all the animus that conservatives have heaped on everybody they’ve blamed for God’s wrath can now be seen and understood as God’s disapproval for their denial of His reality. Their disparagement of “political correctness”, “the mainstream (or lamestream) media”, “fake news” is just a reflection of their acknowledgement of the fragility of their own worldview, which cannot even stand up to fact-checking. In accusing “liberals” of being “snowflakes”, they exude pathological sensitivity to challenges against their false and faulty perspectives. God is signaling that he needs scientific integrity and journalistic standards to guide His kingdom as knowledge and experience guide humanity to the transformative process of life at the civilizational level. He has let Donald Trump condemn himself to future generations through endless deceptions via social media, now revealed as blasphemy against God’s reality.
Although the “right to life” movement has an ethical point that deserves further attention as humanity advances, even the theoretical notion that every embryo should be born, no matter what, is a violation of one of the most important rules of life: apoptosis, or programmed cell death, which God has built into every cell of every organism as a safety valve in case life becomes unsustainable. Life must make way for future generations by dying, so the mechanisms of cell death are embedded in every aspect of its design. No cell or organism has an unconditional right to life. And no faction or government can intrude so invasively as to prevent elective abortion, as reprehensible as it might be practiced at individual or collective levels. The purview of the antiabortion movement is persuasion, not legislation or regulation. It should be presented as a theological discourse, not a political agenda. The whole process of life involves attending to the most salient aspects first and leaving overtly theoretical concerns in the background. Neither slaves nor fetuses had rights in ancient times — and no biblical authors expressed an antiabortion stance, even though the abortifacient silphium was widely used until the Romans harvested it out of existence. God conjured another mini-inversion recovery pulse sequence for human civilization, beyond any capacity for human agency, whereby a commonly used abortifacient would disappear and instill in His church a revulsion against abortion, that fundamentalists in our era would weaponize a manufactured doctrine that would place a false right to life above the health and security of His kingdom.
In fact, the whole notion of a “right to life” is what cancer cells try to express as they take over the body. Fundamentalists have let multifaceted cancers into our nation and the world — a proliferation of gun violence, oppression of minorities, denial of voting rights, and, of course, Trump himself. God had a hand in their choice of the term “right to life”, because the very notion of keeping all life alive through any phase is a denial of the foundational principle of life, which is its mortality. And since life proceeds one step at a time, it obviously makes sense that the still-oppressed descendants of former slaves would be granted rights before barely formed fetuses. To structure a life sequence that gets that order wrong would invite severe birth defects in the forming embryonic civilization. And fundamentalists’ obsession with the end times amounts to a death wish for all human civilization, wherein their distance from God’s will has empowered leaders and enacted policies that would, in effect, perform an elective abortion on our whole civilization — the ultimate irony expressing God’s disapproval for their denial of the realities of mortality and free will to impose their manufactured doctrine!
More likely, however, the delays incurred by their lack of insight would induce birth defects into the embryonic body of Christ. The New Testament says we must always be personally prepared for the end times but never anticipate them with our actions. The epistles scold believers for shirking duties as they awaited Christ’s second coming. How much worse is it to encourage public action based on the premise that we should end human civilization and hasten Christ’s return? Our planet has existed for 4.35 billion years and its lifespan is likely measured in many more billions to come. Human civilization is only 5000 years old. Unless God only intended us to have a blip of influence or else judged that He would have to rule us Himself in post-millennial supervision, the numbers show that God had bigger plans for human civilization. This picture is entirely consistent with my claim that our civilization is in an embryonic stage just negotiating the unicellular-to-multicellular transition.
I suppose I should say a few words about what fundamentalists fear from a secular standpoint from progressives and minorities — that “leftists” will take over, redistributing wealth and privileges with which they’ve been blessed and to which they’re entitled. They think social justice is a cynical ploy to take away their rights and give them to others. And they worship their guns like golden idols, despite the obvious fact that they erratically deprive God’s kingdom of its lifeblood of a reliable stream of lives, connections, and talents. And they envision government in the context of “constitutional originalism” that attaches special reverence to the founding era of our nation.
Marxism arose in the context of civilizational designs that have demonstrably made it toxic to human civilization. But when social justice is recast in light of a resurgence of Christianity amplified through knowledge and experience, it’s no longer about redistribution — it’s about making the body of Christ undergo a transformation from the last of its unicellular-like phase to the rest of its multicellular existence. In human embryos, that transition occurs at 16- to 18-days gestation and is followed shortly thereafter by development of the circulatory system. The endoderm (analogous to progressives, fated to become the gut, and ultimately committed to nourish those who are alive at any time), ectoderm (analogous to conservatives, fated to become the nervous system and skin, and ultimately committed to steer the organism after birth), and mesoderm (entering the picture a bit later, fated to become the musculoskeletal system and visceral organs) undergo a kind of resonance at a higher level of existence, which serves the multicellular organism throughout the rest of life. And we also see that design defects must be “annealed” (think healed) not just 300 years back, but 2000 years back, to the start of the previous cycle, in early Christianity. Thus, fundamentalists’ secular stance also reveals the same kind of phase distortion that plagues inversion recovery, by refusing to see the elements that would make the body of Christ function outside the flawed originating historical contexts in which they prejudge them. This is another example how biblical literalism fails to acknowledge all the living that has transpired since ancient times, in this case, prejudging the world in terms of “right” and “left” when we need to think responsibly about how to construct the body of Christ.
Under fundamentalists’ fear-based perceptions, they put themselves at the head of God’s kingdom, with special privileges as “the chosen ones”, even as their actions may threaten to derail and disrupt what may be time-sensitive development of the body of Christ. It’s worthwhile to note, as I mention elsewhere, that the ectoderm plays no functional role during embryogenesis within the human uterus except to interact with the other cell types via chemical signaling, in sharp contrast to other organisms, where a free-living larva needs to put its nervous system to immediate use to survive in the wild.
I distinguish between evangelicals, devout Christians who endeavor to save souls, and fundamentalists, whose Christianity is flawed because they deny the realities of life, nature, and civilization. And in defending their untenable worldviews and positions in the face of stubborn fact-checking, they create overtly false realities and disparage reputable journalistic standards that hold their errors and disinformation to accounting. The chip on its shoulder that fundamentalism developed against the very reality of biological evolution — making up all kinds of alternative realities that “survival of the fittest” doesn’t apply, not just that it shouldn’t rule civilizational evolution — represents a denial of reality that generates God’s dephasing pulse in His inversion recovery pulse sequence, which put fundamentalists on a course to precipitate this crisis of governance.
The Republican party attempted to coopt religion for political purposes over a period of three to five decades, contradicting insights and unraveling mildly transformational gains made by the opposing party through wise and realistic secular policies. The coalition it has formed appears to be reaching back to commit our nation’s worst civilizational sins: ignorance and stupidity, corruption and exploitation, duplicity and treachery, existential threat. It was bad enough when George W. Bush, through inattention and mismanagement, lowered our guard against the 9/11 attacks (and proceeded to start two retaliatory wars, instead of conducting a police action against the perpetrators and asking the most salient and obvious question: why did they hate us so much to do that?). Later, his mismanagement of the economy unleashed the 1988 financial crash. But Trump has committed far worse civilizational sins. God is signaling that business leaders have no special qualifications for government service and their vested interests are typically antithetical to what will be required for building the body of Christ in human civilization. Republican leaders laughed without the slightest remorse that Trump was beholden to a foreign dictator and enemy, as if that was funny. He was and he is. After five bankruptcies and still showing utter contempt to lenders, Trump borrowed 2 billion dollars over 30 years so he could “invest” in the inherently unprofitable business of golf resorts and continue to lose money hand over fist, as he had done all his life. Somebody with unlimited money underwrote those loans, and they obviously had to come with strings attached. The fact that Trump denies Russian involvement so strenuously yet refuses to defend our country against its continued attacks and even tries to alter the evidence of Russian meddling are the obvious machinations of a guilty individual who has no remorse or shame.
During the course of his time in office, Trump commandeered a Republican party that had already been led badly astray by its pervasive disdain for reality, cowed all the feckless politicians who came to accept or even endorse his obviously antibiblical principles, and turned his position of power into a wrecking ball that has befriended dictators everywhere and almost dismantled governmental institutions and practices to install dictatorship in the nation that he was entrusted to lead. When given the chance to remove their false prophet from office before he did irreversible damage, Trump’s supporters instead rallied around him, expecting the rebuke of impeachment to chasten him. Only one of their ranks opposed him, who conspicuously subscribed to a different biblical version, as yet another divine clue that the original Bible is not an appropriate source for guiding decisions on a national or civilizational scale in God’s name.
But being impeached only emboldened the false prophet. He coddled his fellow dictator, Xi Xiaoping, as their coordinated complacency and evasion of accountability unleashed a pandemic that, had the tables been turned or their principles been consistent, fundamentalists would have rightly recognized as the wrath of God (or, in more appropriate nonbiblical terms, corrective feedback). Trump admitted that the Chinese should have contained the virus before it went pandemic, but Obama and even Bush before him had robust pandemic prevention strategies in place and CDC boots on the ground in China, which, true to form, Trump dismantled. By trying to dismantle Obama’s legacy, Trump has at least shown what we should do with his.
Now God’s kingdom is crippled with a mutable viral agent that may episodically reemerge in deadly form to constrain human activities and hobble humanity’s economic potential, possibly forever. Trump “invested” billions in multiple vaccines that have advanced medical science, but that was primarily from the standpoint of his all-purpose universal bankruptcy strategy. There is a simple and obvious way to purge coronavirus from the entire world’s human population: worldwide synchronous lockdowns for just enough incubation periods to rob the virus of any chance of transmission. That simple strategy is predicated on providing everybody in the world enough material security to hunker down for a month or two, altogether. Such a distribution system would recognize what Trump conspicuously denied — our world’s interdependency — and form the scaffold for a circulatory system for our embryonic civilization as it enters its multicellular phase of awareness, responsibility, and intentional co-creation of God’s kingdom. Instead of a Green New Deal, progressives could work on making that circulatory system green.
As I said, Trump has given a masterclass in going bankrupt — a step-by-step screed on Twitter broadcast to the world year after year, documenting for all to see how he has never earned a cent of his exaggerated wealth and has squandered every asset he has ever inherited. He inherited a robust economy from Barack Obama and proceeded to remove every regulatory restraint that kept it on track. Now, when wise leaders like Cory Booker are advocated baby bonds, Trump proposes ending the payroll tax — a page right out of the playbook of the bankruptcy king that would quickly deplete Social Security and Medicaid and make those wise programs unavailable to future generations. God retaliated against His utter contempt, denial of reality, gross incompetence, and galling arrogance by unleashing two of His worst scourges — a pandemic and an economic collapse. God thereby deprived Trump and his followers of any claim of success. I hope all those unemployed former Trump supporters realize what they put our country through and oust him from office.
God put theology on a path to glean such an insight because it was critical for the future of His kingdom that humanity never make such mistakes ever again. He had to set up a perfect experiment, completely documented by the people participating in it, that would show once and forever, that fundamentalists were using the wrong tools for making decisions in His name. Those fundamentalists are the Pharisees of our day, prying and obsessing over what happens behind closed doors while leaving all of God’s kingdom exposed to an obvious civilizational threat. We’re going to understand a lot better how viruses and other pathogens work, because God made Trump for the sole purpose of infecting our nation and world with his virulent, deliberately cruel agenda. We can see what he did to us a lot clearer than we can peer into virus-infected cells, and the same mathematical principles apply.
I see myself as a progressive evangelical, explaining to people how we must act collectively, and not so much individually, to ensure the health of the body of Christ and the future of God’s kingdom. What fundamentalists have done, blasphemously claiming in God’s name, is to let a series of viruses into His kingdom, each one worse than the one before, until this one is posing an existential threat to the future of life on earth.
I would also say to my fellow progressives that we must not pursue a leftist agenda — that would only lead to further oscillation and resentment. There is another path that life prescribes, to form resonant life forces and structures at a higher level, patterned after our own bodies. The miserable record of past leftist regimes issues a warning that we must not dissipate what exists, but instead follow a transformational path. I think that minorities, playing the role of the mesoderm that will form civilization’s musculoskeletal system, should take the lead in constructing humanity’s embryonic circulatory system and working with progressives to follow its optimal developmental path. That undertaking would form a separate economy at the civilizational level that need not siphon excessive resources from the one that currently exists at our familiar level. Embryonic life doesn’t allow much leeway for either mistakes or delays, so we’d better approach this task carefully and wisely. Fortunately, God has left lots of clues throughout His kingdom about how to proceed and what pitfalls to avoid.
We can see from biology and technology how these events came to pass in our era. Moore’s law of hyperexponential growth of computer capabilities gave rise to technologies that gave clueless people the capacity to broadcast their poorly conceived ideas to tens of millions of people instantaneously via social media, especially Twitter. That proliferation of toxic ideas resembled a sudden inflammatory process, which attracted the least insightful people to spawn countless conspiracy theories. And that’s how Trump, the champion conspiracy theorist, rode to the top of that inflammation. Over the course of Trump’s lifetime, God also crafted the evil in his soul to make him the ultimate dictator and bankruptcy king, an existential threat to His kingdom, with ambitions that would bankrupt it, too. For God’s purpose, Donald Trump was the perfect villain for showing future generations how an existential civilizational threat would seduce believers, exploit their self-righteousness, and get them to support his own evil agenda. Trump has performed future generations a great service by documenting every vacuous twitch in his nefarious plot as his supporters stood by and applauded him.
Beware: God is watching you differently now that you have been warned, making it clear to future generations that your words and actions are now being recorded in a different light. Henceforth, you cannot hide behind your smug self-assurance. The record button has always been on, but now you know about it. That was God’s purpose for social media all along, only we could only conceive of it from our own narrow perspectives.
I feel guilty that I didn’t see these things earlier and call them to people’s attention, but the course of events has clarified my thinking greatly. The coronavirus isn’t just affecting individuals — it clicked into place at a higher level to infect the human global economy, especially in the United States under Trump’s genius for precipitating bankruptcy. It was nature’s way to put the brakes on our own species for acting like a pathogen in the biosphere, especially as Trump became a super-pathogen throwing gasoline on the fire. That one poor bat that got butchered unceremoniously in the Wu Han market to seed the coronavirus pandemic is being feted silently by the natural world everywhere, finally taking advantage of humanity’s first existential civilizational threat to free God’s creation from humanity’s ruthless and pervasive encroachments. We need to heed that lesson as we envision ourselves becoming a good citizen of the biosphere, since we are the only species with analytical capabilities and a civilization to provide wise stewardship for the future of all life.
And at this moment when humanity gains the insight and accepts the responsibility for co-creative engagement in building God’s kingdom, He needed for us to see everything that we were doing wrong or possibly could do wrong, so we could avoid all those pitfalls in the future. Donald Trump is perfect for the role of showing us that, since he is the personification and enculturation of everything that humanity has been doing wrong, with the bonus feature of broadcasting every nitwit idea he has ever had, immediately and fully documented for all future generations! His whole mindset is that of a virus and, using technologies that God has carefully crafted for our time, he is broadcasting a complete description of the genetic toolbox by which viruses seduce, attack, and destroy.
For fundamentalists not to see that is a manifestation of the inflammation they have fomented by denying nature’s laws and fabricating their own realities. The cynicism they feel toward progressives and the narrowness by which they frame their criticisms of social justice, wise stewardship, compassionate policies, and moral imagination is just a manifestation of their own vague realization that something is not right with God within themselves — their own internal fact-checking that is signaling them they are denying God’s realities. Of course, both minorities and progressives are not yet thinking along these lines, but they are well positioned to enter into a trinitarian resonance for transforming our civilization to higher-level development. By contrast, conservatives have misconstrued and sabotaged God’s kingdom for decades, bitterly fomenting a race-to-the-bottom, smash-face politics that feeds on divisiveness. God needed all future generations to see these realities clearly in one sharp moment, so under His direction, we could make of our civilization a new kind of truth detector that can turn our civilization into the body of Christ by retracing the orbit of Christianity, this time with knowledge and experience. God timed the development of technology to destabilize human civilization at just this moment of our maximum self-destructiveness, letting semiconductor performance grow according to Moore’s law so cell phones, computers, networks, and servers could proliferate social media in a toxic form and give rise to this existential civilizational threat of our era.
God especially needed for us to see the hazards that dictatorship pose to His kingdom. There is perfect remedy for ridding God’s kingdom of dictators — give the victims of their capricious, cruel, and malign rule legal standing to sue them personally in civil courts for incautious and autocratic actions taken under color of authority. Our system of government rightly provides officeholders with immunity from civil liability for official actions, but when autocrats dismantle the governments they have been entrusted to lead to do their own bidding, they abrogate those protections. In health, the body doesn’t let a virus get away with attacking it. When Trump is bankrupted by the innocent immigrant families he unfairly deported, cruelly separated, or unjustly detained and the COVID-19 victims and their families who suffered under his management-by-delusion-and-confusion, future autocrats will realize they will jeopardize their personal fortunes by going into politics and avoid like the plague the slightest consideration of entering public “service”!
Multicellular organisms need to repel acellular and unicellular pathogens, and this is how they do it. Dictators can’t use life’s operating paradigm because it empowers people and initiates vibrant resonances at higher levels that will challenge their authority. Those harmed by Trump’s malignant rule have standing to sue Vladimir Putin for violating our election laws and putting him in power. They can recover damages from any personal assets he holds in democratic nations. When the Russian people see themselves left behind as democratic nations learn how to harness life’s rules to transcend our current unicellular-like economy, they will strive to depose him. We should enlist the Chinese to build synthetic islands in the China Sea to house dictators in exile. Their countries won’t mind one last looting of their treasuries to subsidize the good riddance of their exile.
Trump admired the most vociferous kleptocrat in human history and wanted to siphon America’s wealth for his own dictatorship. He abandoned our natural democratic allies and formed a cabal of dictators. He encouraged them to oppress their own people. He was willing to dismantle our government, corrupt our justice system, cripple our postal service, ignore a deadly virus that was raging like a forest fire only in our country under his watch, lie endlessly, rig and sabotage our election, whine that the election was rigged against him, force voters to risk viral infection because mail-in voting worked to his disadvantage, and even foment civil war if he lost, just to get his way. That’s exactly what viruses do. God crafted Trump into the perfect human virus. And that, along with the fact that his supporters looked the other way and let him get away with dismantling every aspect of our government, is the most perfect proof that their worldview was infected with blasphemous error, even aside from the physics and history of human civilization that I will describe next.
We also need to understand how we fit personally into God’s kingdom, specifically in relation to our actions in life, our legacies after death, and our souls. The theory I’ve developed recognizes four interacting moieties in the universe — charges, masses, photons, and spins — but there is a fifth moiety that courses through our bodies by the billions every second but doesn’t interact: neutrinos. The four interacting moieties establish a basis whereby chemical affinities can set up a pattern of interaction that encompasses and transcends all organizational levels of nature, life, and civilization. But God may have a different purpose for neutrinos. Forged in stars everywhere in the universe, they make me think of a cosmic CT scanner. Whether or not that’s true, our souls after death experience the consequences of our past actions and continually rippling legacies. The souls of destructive liars, torturers, or those who fomented weapons technologies during life revisit related actions that occur after their deaths, when they have no agency to intervene, experiencing both the perpetrator’s initiative and victim’s anguish without any ability to stop anything from happening. Worse still, they can see how the rippling consequences of their actions have infected God’s kingdom. The body of Christ exists as an embryo still in the last phases of its unicellular existence, but the actions of fundamentalists threaten to induce what will become birth defects. That’s why it’s critical to pinpoint exactly what they’re doing, so they can stop and make amends — not only for their own souls, but for the future of God’s kingdom.
As we contemplate all the design flaws that have become embedded in human civilization through its haphazard development, we can envision retracing its orbit from the previous two cycles, first in Judaism and then in Christianity and now, third, in our era. With knowledge, technology, and historical experience, we can anneal all those design flaws, but to do so, we must start at the beginning. Here again, conservatives are at odds with God’s plan, seeing our world in terms of “constitutional originalism”. There obviously were design flaws embedded in American society then, most notably, slavery of colored people and genocide of Native Americans. To anneal all the design flaws, so our civilization starts with the firmest, best foundation, we must go back to the origins of Christianity, when believers envisioned the Church as the body of Christ and God as the Trinity. Their insights were ageless and point now to how we need to apply them. As it turns out, the triadic structure and “dance” of the Trinity play out in embryogenesis and also relate to electronic technologies we have developed, so God has left clues everywhere in nature, life, and civilization — far beyond the imagination of biblical authors — for us to follow.
Let us review the course of events and the evidence before us that now serve as God’s own instructions not to rely on the Bible as a guide to His will in the future, based on how it has led people astray in our era. Biblical authors themselves envisioned profound transformation and revelation, and it must cause their souls great distress that their own words are being distorted, in a very real sense that has never before been identified, to harm God’s kingdom. If you are not already convinced of that by my narrative above, just think how Donald Trump’s endless barrage of absolutely inane and criminally vacuous tweets will read to future generations, who will have the reconstructive wherewithal to evaluate every toilet pontification and brazen lie against a complete timeline of everything that really happened. Trump has unwittingly provided future generations a handbook for recognizing an existential civilizational threat, so God can make sure henceforth, in times of great civilizational stress, that believers will line up on His side and not the civilizational threat’s. It’s perplexing to imagine how fundamentalists imagine that Donald Trump has anything to do with Christianity, outside my contention that God is conveying that fundamentalism itself has become toxic to His kingdom. Fundamentalists have made a deal with the devil, letting their manufactured doctrine become the entry receptor for a virus masquerading as a leader. Their disdain for those who are unlike themselves, coupled with the harm they have inflicted on God’s kingdom, gives us some idea whose side God is on.
Biblical authors could not have conceived that their civilization was destined to become ours, where technology routinely works what they could only have imagined were miracles. They anticipated a revelatory future, but they could not have conceived it going through the computer and Internet age. Biblical authors could not have anticipated conditions thousands of years later in our time, and efforts to twist their words into new rationalizations defy a plain and simple logic that must emanate from their souls. If they had known that antiabortion sentiments derived from their reverence of human gestation would destabilize civilization and threaten planetary health, persuade people to deny reality, fabricate mass communication systems to defend a fragile and untenable artificial worldview from fact-checking, generate manufactured doctrines, and induce believers to follow an obvious grifter off a cliff, they would say to us now,
Look, you have technologies that we would have considered miracles! We had no idea that such things were even possible, much less that they could be designed from human ingenuity!
Don’t misuse our legacies to drive human civilization off a cliff!
Use your heads and look ahead, not behind, when it comes to building our civilization!
We talked about the body of Christ — you can implement it! Do it!
God has been trying to show fundamentalists, though the cynicism in their own hearts, that they are practicing an unsatisfactory form of Christianity and tearing His kingdom apart. Those who have supported Trump as he has dismantled our democracy, tormented and terrified vulnerable populations, tried to install himself as a dictator, violated every standard of Christianity, and threatened the future course of all life on earth should worry about the legacies they will be leaving behind as a result and making amends before it’s too late. The Bible’s authors whose words they are misusing are crying out from beyond the grave to get with God’s plan for human civilization, lest their own holy legacies be responsible for catastrophic collapse that God had never intended. We must make this midcourse correction or the path that God has prescribed for our civilization will be thrown off-course. And we can tell that these are not the end times because nobody is more clueless than those believers.
The conclusions I have reached follow from first principles of how nature, life, and civilization are organized and how they function dynamically. This perspective derives from physical principles, far beyond the purview of our anthropomorphic thinking or conspiracy theories — or of biblical authors. This view of nature is where God needs for us to consider how the world works. As an engineer, I am clumsy with mathematics, but in this world where we understand the workings of God’s kingdom, we all need to become mathematicians. Our new facility with Internet tools suggests how we might shut down our toxic social media and apply ourselves to collective research about the true nature of the reality in which we live. It’s about time.