I’m not a theologian. I’m not a spiritual teacher.
I didn’t set out to write theology. I started trying to make sense of existence because the traditional religious explanations I grew up with created more problems than they solved.
Why do religious answers stop satisfying?
They required you to stop asking at a particular point, and the point was always arbitrary. Explanations of suffering that worked until you looked directly at any actual instance of suffering. Accounts of how things are that held together for one question and came apart on the second. Not obviously false. Simply built to be received instead of examined, and unable to survive being examined. Nobody teaching them to me was being dishonest. Most of them had never taken the second step either, because the structure doesn’t invite it and asking is treated as a failure of a different kind.
What I couldn’t do was pretend the inconsistency wasn’t there. That turned out to be less a virtue than a feature of how my brain is built.
Why did the ADHD diagnosis matter?
Because it explained forty years of an experience I had been interpreting as a character flaw.
I was diagnosed with AuADHD, autism and ADHD together, in my sixties. It finally explained why my brain works differently from most people’s, and that neurodivergent perspective probably contributes to whatever ability I have here. An autistic brain doesn’t comfortably hold an inconsistency. It’s not a choice or a discipline. If two statements can’t both be true, that produces a persistent friction that doesn’t resolve by deciding to move on. Most people can hold contradictory beliefs about important things without discomfort, a useful social capacity that I don’t have. For most of my life I understood that as being difficult. Getting the diagnosis in my sixties reframed decades of it, a strange experience to have that late.
What did the framework come out of?
Years of thinking about consciousness, suffering, relationships, and what it means to be human. Not a revelation and not a study program. A long accumulation of the same questions being turned over, mostly while doing something else, over a working life spent on technical systems where inconsistency has consequences you can measure.
Most people can hold contradictory beliefs about important things without discomfort, a useful social capacity that I don’t have.
That last part is more important than it might seem. Thirty-three years in enterprise technology teaches you that a model which doesn’t account for the observed behavior is wrong, regardless of how elegant it is or how many people believe it. Applying the same standard elsewhere is a habit.
The book on this: God Is Everything is the structure that came out of years of thinking about consciousness, suffering and what it means to be human, offered on its merits instead of on authority.
Is questioning religious answers an argument against religion?
No, and the title invites the opposite reading. It’s an argument against accepting explanations that don’t survive examination. That applies equally to confident secular accounts. They frequently have the same structure and the same instruction to stop asking at a convenient point. The book is offered on its merits. I have no authority, no institutional position, and nothing to protect. If the structure is wrong somewhere, the correct response is to say where, and I’d rather have that than agreement.
Why write down a crisis of faith?
Because the thinking was going to happen anyway and writing is how I find out what I think.
There’s also a smaller reason and it’s honest. I spent decades assuming I was the only person who found these explanations unsatisfying, because everybody around me appeared able to accept them. That assumption was wrong and it was lonely, and a book is the sort of thing that would have found me.
My take
Judge an explanation by whether it survives examination, religious or secular. A model that doesn’t match observed behavior is wrong no matter how many people hold it. I want to hear where my structure breaks more than I want agreement. If you’ve felt alone with answers that never satisfied you, you aren’t. Write your thinking down, because writing is how I find out what I think.
What is the actual position?
An answer that requires you to stop asking isn’t an answer. That applies to every side of this.
Inconsistency is information. If a model doesn’t fit what you observe, the model is wrong.
Nobody has authority here. Including me, so the book argues instead of asserts.
The questions are worth keeping even without resolution. Living with an open question is available and it’s underrated.
The discomfort isn’t a flaw. Mine turned out to be neurological, and for years I treated it as something wrong with me.
| Principle | What it means |
|---|---|
| Answers that stop the asking | An answer that requires you to stop asking isn’t an answer, on any side |
| Inconsistency is information | If a model doesn’t fit what you observe, the model is wrong |
| Nobody has authority | Including the author, so the book argues instead of asserts |
| Open questions are worth keeping | Living with an open question is available and underrated |
| Discomfort isn’t a flaw | It turned out to be neurological, not something wrong with me |
| Secular accounts too | Confident secular accounts often share the same stop-asking structure |
The structure in this book developed over a long time and I don’t present it as settled.
Religious answers that never matched what I saw led me to write God Is Everything. It describes what everything is as a structure, with no articles of faith required.
