My memory of the week is hazy. The exact location is obscure. Were we near a beach or in the woods? Where did we sleep? What did we do during the day? These details are lost to me.
What I do remember is that on the last evening of this Southern Baptist summer camp, the youth pastor—a sweaty, overweight man in his early 30s—stood in front of us and prayed that God would open the hearts of the children at the camp, that God would lead us to the altar to accept Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
The pastor’s words—drumming and echoing through the summer night’s breeze—seemed to come straight from God, directed solely toward me. It must have been humid, the air thick with mosquitoes and mystery. I stood up slowly and walked through the rows of white plastic chairs filled with other fourth and fifth graders. In the outside darkness, a few large lanterns lit up our faces. I remember feeling like I couldn’t breathe; my heart was on fire.
That night, somewhere in the north Florida wilderness, I gave my life, my actions, and my thoughts to an invisible force in whom I believed with all my might.
***
People believe in a lot of crazy things. This seems to be a truism. For example, according to YouGov polls, around eight percent of Americans believe in vampires and nine percent in werewolves. From a study conducted by the Carsey School of Public Policy, ten percent of Americans believe the Earth is flat, and nine percent believe that when you get a vaccination, you’re actually getting implanted with a microchip. Finally, according to the National Center for Science Education, fifty percent of Americans believe God created the world in six days.
***
A few years after my conversion experience, when I was around 11 or 12 years old, I came across a poster with this quote: “Life is like an onion. You peel off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep.” I laugh now at its facile message, but at the time, I thought it was the most insightful thing I had ever heard. The profundity wasn’t in the poster’s message, though; it was rather what the words suggested—that the meaning of life could be sought after—and that it could be partly uncovered in a figure of speech. This thrilled me.
After this, I began to collect all sorts of metaphors for life.
Life is a journey, a roller coaster, a puzzle, a candle, a battle.
It’s a tapestry, a garden, a symphony.
It’s a canvas.
A teacher.
***
In the 8th century, the Tibetan Book of the Dead introduced the world to the concept of tulpamancy—a meditative practice that, by the sheer power of the human mind, can bring into existence spiritual beings. They might be long-dead ancestors, but they might also be all kinds of imaginary creatures and deities. Indeed, the number of tulpas humans can conjure up is infinite.
Modern-day psychologists suggest that children’s imaginary friends are actually tulpas, created—and brought into existence—by the children’s minds. In the Tibetan tradition, once tulpas become real to one’s mind, they take on an agency of their own. They are freed from the creator’s thoughts and become independent, doing as they wish.
It was my son who introduced me to tulpas, hearing about them during a MeetUp Group one afternoon last summer. It was also my son who asked me one day: “Do you think God is a type of collective tulpa?”
***
Let’s consider a few more conspiracy theories that Americans believe:
The world ended in 2012 when the Earth was sucked into a black hole (we just don’t know it yet).
The Earth is hollow.
The moon is not real—it’s just a projection.
The internet died in 2016 and, since then, all new content has been produced by bots.
The Denver International Airport is the headquarters of the New World Order, aka, the Illuminati.
Of course, this list is just a drop in the bucket. Perhaps, like the potential number of tulpas, the potential number of conspiracy theories is infinite—as infinite as the human mind.
***
I’m not sure exactly when I lost my faith in God. I do know it was a slow—very slow—journey from belief to non-belief. In college, as knowledge of the world’s history, philosophical movements, and diverse cultural practices moved into my mind, I realized the Baptist evangelists from my youth could no longer answer the questions I was asking. I needed something more. Still, I didn’t initially turn away from God; instead, I turned toward the Christian mystics. I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov twice, enthralled by Alyosha’s compassion. I read Brother Lawrence’s Practice of the Presence of God and Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. I spent a lot of time with Frederick Buechner, Walt Wangerin, and Richard Rohr. What I most wanted was the truth—but the more I read, the more truth escaped my grasp. I watched, as if outside of myself, the solidity of my childhood faith become soft, my feet sinking into the quicksand of new perspectives.
***
When I was in my 30s, I led a week-long children’s summer camp on the Greek gods. In preparation, I spent some time studying the Greek myths. I already knew that ancient heroes were given unique birth stories, a way to set them apart from others. What I didn’t know, however, was that virgin births were also routine in ancient myths. For example, in some stories, Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome, were born to the virgin Ilia. Ra, in Egypt, was born to the virgin Net. Dionysus was the son of the virgin Persephone. Even Plato and Alexander the Great were said to have been born to virgins. And these stories do not just spring from Greco-Roman and Egyptian cultures. Virgin birth stories pop up in Hindi, Buddhist, Chinese, Aztec, and Mayan myths as well.
The Christmas story, it seems, is merely a slight riff on the multitude of myth-narratives created by humans throughout time.
This knowledge broke the last brick in my wall of faith.
It may or may not be worth pointing out that during the same week as my “Gods of Greek Mythology” camp, a church across the street—the church I sometimes attended—was holding its annual Vacation Bible School.
It was just a coincidence.
***
Religion is not the only human invention that finds and asserts power through collective belief. After all, paper money and metal coins have no intrinsic worth. They only work to buy a loaf of bread because we agree on their value. Paco de Leon, the author of Finance for the People, puts it like this: “Money is a shared delusion.” Other examples of social constructs include beauty standards, gender roles, the concept of race, the partition of time, and the idea of
countries. We conjure up these “shared delusions” from sheer collective will power. These are our modern-day tulpas—and we believe in them with all our might.
***
Many years ago, a friend and I met for a weekend at my parent’s beach house. The home looks over a bay where dolphins swim daily. I mentioned this to my friend upon our arrival, but over the course of two days, we never saw them. We weren’t looking, of course. We were out exploring the beaches and restaurants or inside the house talking and watching movies. On our last day, though, as we were leaving, we spotted three dolphins gliding in the waters below us.
My friend surprised me with her excitement.
“I prayed I would get to see them,” she said, her voice filled with joy—and, it seemed, a bit of relief.
“I told you they come by all the time,” I said. The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them, and I immediately felt sorry. But I saw right away that I didn’t need to worry that I caused offense. Her enthusiasm couldn’t be dampened; her belief was unshakable.
“It’s a sign from God! He heard my prayer,” she said.
I saw then that life held only one important metaphor for her—a one-to-one correspondence of God to Reality.
I was equally intrigued and alarmed.
And, if I’m honest, a tiny bit jealous.
Through the years, I’ve often thought about this incident, and I always come to the same split conclusion: On the one hand, who am I to say that God did not send the dolphins by for my friend’s delight? On the other hand, the dolphins swim in that inlet daily.
I cannot solve this riddle. There is no correct answer.
***
In 300 B.C.E., the Greek adventurist, Pytheas, traveled by boat from southern France, through the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. He stopped on the west coast of Spain and then traveled north to the British Isles. Eventually, he reached the Arctic Circle. When he returned home, he told stories of the “Hyperboreans” (the inhabitants of the extreme north) and their land made of ice where the sun never set.
Many mocked him. Few could believe such wild tales.
I bring this up because I want to point out that clearly some unbelievable things in life should be believed. Our never-ending task as humans seems to be to constantly try and figure out who and what to believe.
This is not an easy task.
***
Ralph Lewis, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, explains that many factors contribute to conspiracy thinking, such as “stress and the need to feel in control over one’s life, a need for certainty and the need to make sense of a highly complex world, a desire to be uniquely knowledgeable, … the sense of belonging to an in-group …, and having an urgent sense of purpose.”
In a world as mysterious and disturbing as the one we inhabit, these reasons make sense, even if we recognize their faulty logic.
All any of us want is to make sense of the world.
***
In an article discussing the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election, Joshua Rothman, the Ideas Editor for The New Yorker, writes that everyone believes himself to be both good and reasonable. “We treat each other badly, do and say mean things, and repeatedly discover that
we’ve been mistaken, ignorant, careless, or worse. Yet, despite our missteps, we still see ourselves as basically decent,” Rothman writes.
Apparently, a fundamental part of our individual belief system is that we are good people. If we stop believing this, it is hard to go on with life. According to Keith Paine, the author of Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide, we employ “flexible reasoning” as part of our “psychological immune system.” We believe in our own goodness so we can withstand the disappointment of our own faulty logic and regrettable actions.
At least sometimes, then, our beliefs focus not on the truth, but on survival.
***
In the 17th century, Bishop James Ussher, an Irish scholar and priest, announced that he had discovered the exact time and date that God had created the world: 6 p.m. on Oct. 22, 4004 B.C.E. (The precision is impressive.)
Upon Ussher’s death in 1656, the cleric was buried in the graveyard of Westminster Abbey, a mark of his notoriety. He died a much-esteemed man.
Roughly two centuries later, another celebrated scholar was buried not too far from where Ussher’s bones lay in the ground—Charles Darwin.
I like the fact that the bodily remnants of these two thinkers lie near each other. It seems to point to some fundamental fact about life: truth is forever in front of us—beckoning us onward—and perhaps always just out of reach.
***
Four years ago, my mother died unexpectedly. On the day of her death, my belief in the sturdiness of the world died, too. This quicksand of new perspectives followed me everywhere, and I spent a lot of time wondering: where did she go?
I have not figured out what I believe about death.
What can I possibly believe about the unbelievable?
***
Humans have invented all sorts of creation stories. Yet, surprisingly, these narratives can be placed in roughly one of four categories: creation out of chaos, creation out of nothing, creation out of existing nature, or creation from a divine couple. The creation story in which one believes, of course, directly corresponds to when and where and to whom one is born.
I wish I could see what creation stories will be like in 500 years. In 2,000 years. In 5,000 years. They will look back at our beliefs now and smile.
They will say, “How quaint.”
***
Yuval Harari argues in his recent book on artificial intelligence that while human culture has always created and propagated belief systems, we are headed into a new era, one in which humans will no longer be the source and enforcers of ideas. In the not-too-distant future, Harari writes, computers will “eat the whole of human culture—everything we have created over thousands of years—digest it and begin to gush out a flood of new cultural artifacts.” It will be, he explains, the end of human-dominated history. Our “cultural prisms and traditions” will be designed by A.I.; it will tell us what to believe—and what not to believe.
I don’t know if I believe this.
***
My son was about seven years old when he accidentally left his favorite stuffed animal at a park. For years, he had believed that all of his toys came alive at night. Sometimes before bed, he would construct elaborate obstacle courses in his room for them to play on while he slept. So on the night he lost his stuffed pelican, he was understandably distraught.
“What will he do when he comes alive?” he asked. “He’ll be so lost and cold and afraid.”
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “We can go look for him tomorrow.”
But he was inconsolable.
I think a part of me thought he didn’t really believe the toys came alive, that he was playing a game, and, if nudged, he would acknowledge this.
“You know,” I said slowly. “Pelican doesn’t really wake up at night. He’s just a toy. Toys aren’t alive. They can’t come alive.”
“They do,” he cried. “They do!”
I shook my head, already wondering if I was doing the right thing.
“Stop saying that! Why are you saying that?” His small voice broke.
But I was too far in; I had to keep going.
“No, sweetie. I’m sorry. They don’t come alive. I should have told you earlier.”
He looked at me with appalled anger and fear. Then, for several minutes he didn’t speak.
Finally, as if the Tree of Knowledge had sprung awake inside of him, he asked, quietly and unexpectedly, “So that means there is no Santa Claus?”
I could see the dominoes of his belief system begin to fall. I knew I had to tell the truth. There was no other way forward.
“No, there’s no Santa Claus,” I conceded.
His eyes widened. “And there’s no Easter Bunny?”
I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head. “No, there isn’t.”
“And no Tooth Fairy?”
“No,” I said.
I felt sick to my stomach. Tears formed in my eyes. He walked over to me, and we hugged each other—and then, together, we cried.
***
Years later, when my youngest daughter finally realized there was no Santa Claus, she had a bizarrely similar reaction to her older brother. I watched as the dominoes fell for her, too. There was one big difference, though. She wasn’t disappointed and sad; she was furious.
“How could you lie to me?” she cried. “How could you?”
Then, her voice rising in anger, she added one more domino that my son had left out: “So, there’s no God either?”
“That’s different,” I said quietly.
“How?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. It just is,” I said. But I wasn’t sure I believed my own words.
***
A few weeks ago, I passed a church billboard that read, “If you don’t like change, then you’re gonna love God.”
I shook my head at the sign—so many things to break down here, I thought. Then immediately I remembered my daughter’s announcement one evening when she was about 12 years old.
“I’ve discovered the meaning of life,” she said.
“Really? What is it?” I asked.
“It’s change,” she said. “The meaning of life is change.”
***
I see now that life is like an onion. With each new generation, we peel off another layer of human belief and thought—and sometimes we weep.
Certainly, it’s hard to let go of the ideas of our younger selves or of our ancestors, but sometimes letting go is the only way to move forward. It’s the only way to keep our hearts and minds open to the true mysteries of our world.
***
In the mid 1990s, Australian philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “the hard problem of consciousness.” What he meant was that studying the gray matter of our brains is relatively easy compared to explaining our subjective experiences in terms of neural networks. In other words, we have yet to figure out how matter becomes thought—how physics becomes philosophy.
And so, here we are.
In the past few years, I’ve come to realize that letting go of my childhood concept of God does not preclude me from recognizing the inherent wonders of human existence.
Nowadays, when someone asks me what I believe, this is what I say: “I believe in Mystery.”
Then I add, because they can’t see the word as I see it in my mind. “With a capital M.”
This seems to me to be as solid a belief system as I can muster. My own personal tulpa.
