The Double Refuge 🌎 Many Tribes
A Specific Version of Infinity
Deity & Exemplar - Orthodox vs. Open - Crusaders, 2026: Graft & The One and Only
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Deity & Exemplar
When Christians see their ideal as a deity, insisting that the historical Christ is more than just an exemplar, many people of religious intent can’t make this jump to deification. Even if they’re of a mystical bent, and fully open to the idea that there may be some mysterious Force that brings the universe together, they find it hard to accept deification because, as far as they can tell, no such thing as a supernatural being exists in the physical world. This idea of a supernatural being has never presented itself to them as anything more than an ideal or, at best, an image in a dream.
Once there is a stark separation between those who belive in Jesus as Lord and those who believe in Jesus as exemplar, the latter are overtly or subtly cast out from the core of the faith. These secular, liberal, doubting outcasts look back at the temple of their ideals and sadly think of it as having been taken over by a cult, whose members are secluded from the world and who appear to be under some form of group hypnosis.
This is putting it rather crudely, but it gets at the point. It’s crude because the process is far more complex than sitting down in front of a swinging silver cross and succumbing to the words, You are getting sleepy. You believe the Bible is the Word of God. You believe Jesus is the Son of God. You believe that Jesus is the Lord. Rather, the process involves dozens of things: 🔺 being part of a group (instead of being an alienated existential individual); 🔺 reading and singing the same message over and over (instead of reading different texts which present different views of the world, the soul, and God); 🔺 finding a coherent meaning in one holy text (despite philology and comparative theology); 🔺 finding a coherent message about history and the nature of humanity (despite diversity, complexities, and ambiguities); finding a message that unites and transcends the pain and difficulty of this world (despite continual suffering); 🔺 uniting one person to the other, even after death (despite the fact that no one knows if there’s an afterlife; even the early Jews and Greeks were not optimistic); 🔺 being forgiven for all the stupid things we’ve done and continue to do (despite the fact that psychological scars can’t be easily erased); 🔺 seeing the universe as no longer random, but humming to the sound of the angelic choir and the harmony of the spheres (despite the cacophony).
From https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/knowhy/what-is-it-to-speak-with-the-tongue-of-angels
Becoming convinced is no simple process, but a complex one which combines elements of history, culture, and psychology. It’s also extremely well-tuned, offering us a human incarnation that we can relate to as human beings. This historically-bound figure is also God and therefore He can take us beyond human limits to the very edges of the dimension of this universe, where Heaven awaits. He exists in our human timeline yet He also takes us from this timeline to Eternity.
It’s a deeply appealing idea, one which makes the agnostic sigh and speak in tongues both Arabic and Spanish: ¡Ojala! ¡If only! ¡God willing!
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Orthodox vs. Open
A unified sense of Christianity becomes difficult here, given the divide between orthodox believers and open theists. The orthodox believe that others must believe what they believe if they are to find the capitalized Truth. Open theists on the other hand don’t care if others believe differently from them. They assume that just as they’re free to find their own truth, so others are likewise free. Their truth is an uncapitalized, many-sided thing. It can be reached by many paths, many of which are hidden or may even seem contradictory. The open theist imagines that there’s more than one way to define truth. And where there are two, there may be three, and where there are three…
Because orthodox Christians deify their ideal, they’re extremely convinced about it. Or, because they’re so convinced about it, they deify it. Either way, the two, as causes, both become effects. As a result, orthodox Christians are loathe to have their deification challenged, lest it dissolve back into a dream or a mere ideal, and lest others don’t share, and hence don’t magnify, the group belief.
The combination of fervor to believe and stricture not to question wasn’t invented by the Christians, however: the Jewish scripture has a great deal of stricture or Thous shalt nots, chief among them being, Thou shalt have no god (with a small g) before God (with a capital G). Orthodox Christians, heir to the Jewish tradition, naturally have commandments of their own, chief among them being, Thou shalt believe the ideal to be the Reality — with a definite article and a capital R.
This ideal Reality isn’t just a Truth in the most sacred and inviolable sense; it’s also an actual Being that stands separate from us and who is the only Reality that can save us. Even if open theists believe in all the positive things the ideal or exemplar stands for, and even if they dedicate their lives and sacrifice their own well-being to living out all the good things in this ideal, it still doesn’t suffice for orthodox Christians, who still demand that they must believe in the incarnation if they are to reach Truth and eternal life.
In this sense, orthodox Christians are their worst enemies: they alienate whoever is in tune with their ideals and values but can’t believe these values have a divine incarnation who is the only way to salvation. These Christians, however, are also their own best friend: their intense specificity of belief — in a God that can’t be seen and in the specific actions and words of this God in human form — creates an intense solidarity with other believers. While atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Buddhists, and Daoists may see them as cutting themselves off from the rest of the planet, their singularity of vision only magnifies their sense that they are, even more than their Jewish forebears, The Chosen People.
Not that Christians are unique in their sense of religious superiority. Not surprisingly, their most persistent and aggressive opponents — Muslims — are also from the same Abrahamic line. This religious branch of humanity asserts 1. its religious narrative is historically real (rather than speculatively or mythically real) and 2. it possesses the one and only Truth.
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Crusaders, 2026
When I look around today (March 2026), I see a world in which all sorts of religious distortions and absurdities exist. Yet the most widely violent seem to come from the three Western religions. Christians, Muslims, and Jews say God is all about peace, and yet they seem to go to war so often.
Two of the worst aggressors in the world at the moment, Putin and Trump, are admired by the most fervently religious in their countries. Trump opposes abortion and promotes other conservative values, and he also actively promotes the Bible (his "God Bless the USA" edition sells online for $59.99). Putin on the other hand lauds the Russian Orthodox Church and promotes a historic and religious view of Russian identity (the Patriarch even sprinkles holy water on bombs on occasion). The two have recently created enormous global conflicts by attacking Ukraine and Iran. They thus pit 🔺 Orthodox Russians against fellow Orthodox Ukrainians (the Ukrainian Church recently severed itself from the Russian Church), and 🔺 Christian proto-fascist democracy against Islamic revolutionary dictatorship.
It doesn’t surprise me that humans continue to fight, but it surprises me when they use religion to motivate their people to kill others of the same religious line — which we call the Abrahamic line and Muslims call The People of the Book. The continued internecine violence between Christians, Muslims, and Jews is starting to remind me of the Crusades, so many years ago…
