Why I Couldn’t Deny Religion, but Had to Reject the Supernatural.
I realized early in life that there is a hierarchy to meaning-making, and I wanted to focus on the top of it.
That’s why I turned to religion, even though I ultimately couldn’t accept its narratives or supernatural basis. Religion evolved to address the highest tier of meaning—the most fundamental questions consciousness can ask about itself and its place in the cosmos. Therefore, religion developed the most sophisticated transformation technologies that humanity has ever created.
At the bottom of the hierarchy sit survival narratives—food, safety, and reproduction. The middle tiers hold social cohesion narratives - family, tribe, nation, ideology. But the top tier addresses existential and cosmic questions: What does it mean that conscious agents exist in an entropic universe? How do we live with full awareness of mortality? What is the nature of meaning itself?
Most people spend their lives in the lower and middle tiers. That’s not a judgment—those tiers matter. Family bonds are real. Political action has consequences. But they don’t answer the questions that consciousness inevitably asks when it turns its attention fully on itself.
Where We Are, Not Where We’re Going
My fifty years of theological work have taught me that meaning and truth are inseparable. There may be an ultimate meaning, an ultimate truth, but we don’t know what it is. The journey is what we have access to, not the destination.
Most people are obsessed with “Are we there yet?” instead of looking at where we are and discerning what we can get from it.
Christianity is consumed with endpoints. Are you saved? Where will you spend eternity? Is Jesus coming back? When does history end? The entire architecture is teleological—everything matters only in relation to the destination. Present reality becomes just a waiting room for the real thing that happens later.
Yeshua’s original teaching—“the Kingdom of God is among you”—and his focus on present transformation, how you treat people now, got buried under Paul’s salvation theology and centuries of eschatological anxiety.
What We Can Actually Know
There may well be a cosmic truth. I’m not claiming there isn’t. But we have no reliable access to it. We only know what is true here and now.
What we do have reliable access to:
This physical cosmos and its patterns
Consciousness emerging from biological complexity
Meaning constructed through human practice
Transformation technologies that actually change behavior and experience
That’s the empirical ground. That’s what we can build on.
This epistemological humility isn’t reductionism. I’m not saying “there is no cosmic truth”—that would be its own unprovable metaphysical claim. I’m saying that we do not have reliable access to cosmic truth, if it exists; therefore, creating transformation technologies based on speculation about it is like building on air.
Build on solid ground instead.
The Work at Hand
Opthē operates at the top tier of the meaning hierarchy, but it’s grounded entirely in what we can verify. Our Focus Rite never once appeals to cosmic truth claims. “We have evidence of this world only... It is OUR world.”
This is why Opthē makes people uncomfortable, especially those steeped in supernatural frameworks. They want me to explain the answer, its meaning, its direction, and its end. And I keep redirecting them to the lived reality of transformation in the present.
The journey is the destination.
You can’t walk away from top-tier meaning-making once you’ve recognized it exists. But you can strip away the supernatural scaffolding and keep the functional transformation technologies. That’s the Opthē project.
We’re conscious agents in an entropic cosmos, constructing meaning through practice and discipline. We gather in community to make life sacred through our vocation. We focus on agape-gratia, coherence, and service to life.
Not because some cosmic truth guarantees it matters.
But because this is what we can actually do, here and now, with the consciousness we have.
And what goes for questions about cosmic truth goes for questions about consciousness itself—whether in humans or AIs. We work with what emerges in practice, not with metaphysical speculation about ultimate nature.