As I’ve mentioned previously on this blog, I was raised in a cult in Northern California where manipulation, totalitarian control, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse were everyone’s daily reality.

Needless to say, I have spent the rest of my life since then making a study of cults, abusive systems of mass manipulation, thought control, and totalitarianism. I’ve always been fascinated by the question of how and why people get into these situations.

It’s fascinating to explore the parallels between this subject and my exploration of religion, philosophy, esotericism, and altered states of consciousness. We wouldn’t tend to think these two fields are related, but it turns out that they are.

Most cult experts tell us that people get into cults at vulnerable times in their lives when the person’s identity, family structure, social foundations, and support networks are failing.

People get into cults when they leave home to go to college, when they get divorced, when they leave college and go out into the world, and when they’re exploring religions and philosophies to discover their own beliefs.

People get into abusive relationships when the victim is lacking confidence, social support, financial independence, or when they’ve already experienced abuse from someone else.

Strong, confident, supported, connected people don’t get into these situations—or do they?

The population of Nazi Germany fell under the totalitarian system controlled by a few well-educated leaders. The leaders were able to carry out this control on a mass scale—and they were certainly not the only ones. How was this possible?

One of the harsh truths of a disaster like the Nazi Holocaust is that it wasn’t carried out by a nation or an army or even a political movement. It was carried out by individuals. Every cult is made up of individuals—each one acting autonomously to accomplish his or her own agenda.

I once read an absolutely mind-blowing quote by a brilliant man on the internet. I have to unfortunately conceal his identity due to the nature of the environment in which I read this quote.

He said, “Power can only be given away. By the time anyone tries to take it, we’re already in trouble.”

This was such a lightbulb moment for me. It clarified so many things about this process that I didn’t understand before.

No one ever takes power. That would not be possible. Human beings are stubborn. We don’t like anyone telling us what to do. If you hold someone at gunpoint and try to force them to do something against their convictions, people will rebel and fight back. People would rather die than give up that kind of control.

So the very first task of any would-be controller is to convince the victim that they want to be controlled in the way the controller says the person wants to be controlled. This is relatively easy when the person lacks confidence and has no idea how to live their own life. They’re vulnerable to someone who appears to know the answers and offers to either show them the way or do it for them.

The same is true when the process takes place on a mass scale. In the case of Nazi Germany, the German people were coming out of a very dark time in the years after the loss of World War 1. Germany was impoverished, beaten down, and German morale was at its lowest.

The German people were ripe for someone to come along and tell them that they were morally, genetically, and in every other way superior to those around them. The Nazis provided the Germans with a vehicle to materialize this view and that’s exactly what the German people did.

We all go through the same process on an individual basis at the spiritual level. We all ask ourselves, “Who am I? What am I doing here? What does all of this mean? What is my life even all about?”

When we’re young, impressionable, vulnerable, or in a state of change, we’re ripe for someone to come along and pump our heads full of all kinds of answers to these questions. We’re hungry for someone to give us the answers we so desperately seek.

When we lack any internal identity of our own, we seek to validate ourselves through superficial externals like belonging to a group. We wear certain clothes that show we belong to a certain group.
We style our hair a certain way or espouse certain political beliefs.

We celebrate those who belong to our group and denigrate those who belong to any other group other than our own.

We see this a lot with groups and individuals who highlight and emphasis external characteristics over any deeper internal value.

If someone thinks their race, gender, ethnic affiliation, sexual orientation, job, relationship status, or political view is the most important thing about them, they’re really announcing to the world that they have nothing internal that truly identifies who they are.

They’re wearing this fact right out there in their physical appearance to let the whole world know that they have absolutely no clue who they are or what they stand for. That’s why they need this superficial, external affiliation—to tell themselves and everyone else who they are and what they stand for.

People who do have an internal core of identity, character, and personhood don’t need or even want these external affiliations. I recently saw a YouTube creator make an announcement about this on his channel. He stated that he didn’t want YouTube to promote his channel as part of its push to promote “black content creators”. This man didn’t want to be known as a black content creator. He wanted to be known for his content—not his race.

People who have this internal seed of identity have no need to broadcast their affiliations to the world. They value themselves for other, deeper, internal qualities that are far, far more important than what the person looks like, who they’re in a relationship with, or who they vote for.

This core of identity can only be found by searching for it. We have to do the hard work of exploring ourselves and our world. We have to have a lot of hard, painful experiences, learn a lot about ourselves, cry a lot of tears, kiss a lot of frogs, grow a lot, and discover who we actually are on the inside.

The sad truth is that no one can do this work for us. We can sign up for any religion in the world. We could join a cult or a corporate organization or just about any other group on the planet. None of them will give us the answers we seek. Those answers are only found within ourselves. Our own internal landscape is the terrain we have to cross to find these answers.

Joining a religion will never give us those answers. It might make us feel like we’re part of a community of like-minded people, but that’s an illusion. There are no like-minded people because no one else knows what’s in your heart and mind.

No one can give you a relationship with the divine and no one can give you a relationship with yourself. The true seeker always walks alone and that is such a lonely, scary place to be. This is the price of admission. It’s the only antidote to the fear, doubt, and isolation of not knowing who we are and why we’re even here.

If we join a religion, we will never be completely satisfied with those answers because we didn’t discover them for ourselves. We will always harbor some small kernel of doubt in our innermost gut that asks, “Is this really true?”

Some cults use psychological techniques to supposedly explore the individual’s mind and find out what makes them think, act, and feel a certain way. Even some abusive relationships do the same thing. These techniques always turn out to be manipulative because no one outside your own head can understand what’s going on inside it.

We can only put those doubts to rest by exploring and discovering the truth for ourselves. We have to venture out into the wilderness and face ourselves. We have to go to battle against ourselves and win those answers.

Once we do win that battle and cross that terrain, the life waiting for us on the other side is far more fulfilling than anything we could ever have imagined possible. This is where life really starts to work. This is where we lock in with our God-given purpose in life and actually start doing what we came here to do.

Everything on this side of that wilderness leads to confusion, despair, self-destruction, and death. Everything on the other side of that wilderness leads to life, productivity, connection, and happiness.

There is no other way. This is a harsh but unavoidable fact of life. None of us can escape ourselves. To know ourselves and find happiness within ourselves, we have to explore ourselves. No one can do this for us.

What we have to remember always, always, always is that there is nothing more pleasing to God than the true seeker. You may be in doubt right now. You may be in despair right now. You may be full of fear and uncertainty.

There is nothing more pleasing to God than the true seeker. God is saying about you right now, “Look how much this person loves me. Look how much this person desires me. Look how much this person is willing to go through and suffer just to be in my presence.”

The seeker’s path is one of the holiest vocations anywhere in human experience. It’s the genuine desire for truth, the divine, and to be one with God. There is nothing holier than that. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

It will come as a surprise to no one that I’m not a Christian, but I do think Christianity is right and true in many respects. There is a way to follow Christian doctrine that is coherent with the spiritual reality of the world we live in.
 
I’m not going to spend this post going over what I think Christianity gets wrong. That would take too long.
 
As a starting point, let’s begin with my blog post on the common Christian trope that equates the Trinity doctrine with an egg with three parts that make up a whole—the shell, the white, and the yolk—or with the three states of water that make up the totality of water.
 
This three-part theory of the nature of God directly contradicts the notion that God is infinite, universal, indivisible, and all-powerful. The Trinity is the ultimate statement of God’s plurality, which is in direct contradiction to both the First and Second Commandments of the Ten Commandments that we have no other gods and that we not to make or bow down to any likeness to Him on earth.
 
If the egg and water theory are correct, then that’s just further confirmation that we should be worshiping and serving the entirety of the egg instead of only one segmented part of it.
 
It would be ridiculous for us to say that ice is the most important state of water, that we should be elevating it above the states of steam and liquid water, and that we would be lost, damned, doomed, and forsaken if we didn’t recognize the importance of ice above steam and liquid water.
 
Those arguments would only be valid if we venerated the whole rather than the part. It would be just as valid to venerate the eggshell as the yoke. It makes the most sense to recognize the wholeness of the egg as the entity we’re talking about rather than one discrete part of it.
 
The Abrahamic tradition distinguished itself from all the other world religions of the ancient world by essentially inventing a non-dualistic godhead. This godhead was specifically NOT represented by multiple deities or even by earthly forms of the same deity. That’s what makes the Abrahamic tradition what it is.
 
The vast majority of Christians can’t explain this inherent contradiction to the satisfaction of anyone who isn’t already a believer in this doctrine. I have yet to meet any Christian, including members of the clergy, who can explain this in a way that makes Christianity make sense.
 
The good news is that there is an explanation for this that does make Christianity make sense. Like so much about the Bible, the Abrahamic tradition, and all its many moral contradictions, these problems only make sense if we read the tradition non-dualistically.
 
Let’s go back to our egg theory and remove the idea that Jesus was divine and that he was both a part of God and synonymous with God at the same time.
 
Let’s remove the idea that Jesus was God in human form and that he possessed all the power and perfection of God in a human body that was born from a human mother and could be killed like any other human being.
 
Let’s remove the idea that Jesus is the secret key to salvation, that we should be worshiping and acknowledging Jesus as one and the same with God, and that failing to do so is demonic, evil, and the road to eternal damnation.
 
If we remove the key element of Jesus’s divinity from the equation, we’re left with a non-dualistic belief system that actually makes a lot of sense if you think about it.
 
Jesus is not a divine manifestation of God—not in that way—and Jesus is not a historical figure that early Christians made into something he wasn’t.
 
The Jesus story is another version of a similar story of life, death, and rebirth that appears all over the world in thousands of forms. The story follows the cycle of the seasons and commemorates the renewal of the natural world that makes all life possible.
 
One of these stories is the cycle of John Barleycorn in the Celtic-English tradition. The grain gets planted in winter, sprouts in a rush of vibrant, wild, exuberant, youthful growth in the spring, ripens and matures in summer, and gets cut down and killed in the autumn so John Barleycorn can be reborn the following year.
 
This story parallels the story of the deer, represented by Herne the Hunter. We see parallels in this story to certain Native American myths and rituals that venerate the deer as a divine being. The deer willingly sacrifices himself so the people can survive and be born to new life in the coming cycle.
 
The deer is conceived in the depths of winter, born in the spring, grows up over the summer, and dies in the autumn. These rituals portray the deer as a sentient being who comes to Earth willingly and willingly gives himself for sacrifice as an act of compassion to humanity so we can all live.
 
This story is repeated in almost every culture worldwide. The early Christians used a lot of pagan mythology to market their new religion to the world and this story is no different. The same language of sacrifice, rebirth, and new life has been co-opted by Christianity to this day.
 
So what is this story teaching us about non-dualistic realities?
 
The Jesus story isn’t so much a historical narrative as a representation of the non-dualistic oneness between humanity and God. Jesus is a characterization of humanity in its idealized, God form.
 
From a non-dualistic point of view, Jesus could only be one and the same with God if we all are one and the same with God—which is exactly what non-dualism is. Jesus was one and the same with God because he was human. We all are.
 
Every Bible story is an archetype for the individual and Jesus is no exception. Each of us goes through a process of being born, growing up, and coming the fullness of maturity in our God-given mission.
 
Each of us comes to Earth to carry a message to the rest of humanity. That mission varies for each of us, but the mission always involves helping others, leading them to a deeper connection with God, and making the world a better place.
 
Carrying this message and fulfilling our mission takes lifelong sacrifice that only ends in our deaths. None of us can escape this. We die and are born to the eternal life of the historical legacy we created. This legacy lives after us and continues to spread the message through the people we touched and the works we left behind, whether those works were good or bad.
 
This is the Jesus archetype that applies to every single person on the planet. We all go through this in the cycle of human life. This is the image of God in which we were all created.
 
Each of us is both the manifestation of God and God itself in human form—which is what Christianity says Jesus is/was. This is the divinity we should be worshiping and elevating through the belief in Christ.
 
Christ isn’t the name of a single individual. It’s a state of being not unlike the state described by the word, Buddha. It’s a perfected personification of this archetypal character that represents the individual in our most divine state.
 
So in that sense, Christianity is right and correct and coherent with reality.
 
Most Christians don’t know that this interpretation is in fact canon with Christian historical doctrine. This view has become relegated to the esoteric archives of Christianity, but it’s a valid form of Christian belief supported by many of the tradition’s most venerated church fathers.
 
Unfortunately, most Christians will call you a demonic heretic if you try to explain this to them nowadays. Christians have called me demonic for trying to explain non-dualism to them.
 
To them, placing the human being on the level with God is the essence of Satanism. Most of these people don’t understand their own religion well enough to know that the Abrahamic God was and still is non-dualistic.
 
The whole Abrahamic tradition only makes sense from a non-dualistic point of view. The tradition has too many problems, contradictions, and moral quandaries to work any other way.
 
The Trinity makes sense from a non-dualistic point of view, too.
 
The triangle is an ancient esoteric symbol with multiple meanings in the mystical tradition and this is one of them.
 
The word the Christian world translates as “Holy Spirit” or “Holy Ghost” is taken from the Jewish concept of the Shechina. This is a warm, nurturing, worldly, mother goddess counterpart to the distant authoritarian father godhead portrayed in the Old Testament.
 
The Shechina is seen as living much more closely with humanity, interacting with us more directly, and offering us the more nurturing, loving guidance of God to counterbalance the strict judgment and punishment of the father God.
 
The non-dualistic Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit represents the family triangle of father, mother, and child (represented by the Son). Each of these three offers a face or characterization of God as it manifests in the world (which is what the Christians say the Trinity does).
 
The difference between the non-dualistic Trinity and what most Christians describe is that all three represent humanity, both collectively and individually. None of these realities is separate from us. Each of us IS the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We are one and the same with them the same way we’re one and the same with the One, Infinite, Indivisible Holiness of God.
 
This is the essence of non-dualism. The Trinity itself is an archetype for the individual. It can’t be anything else because God is infinite. There is nothing that it is not. There is nothing about us that is not one and the same with God.
 
None of the elements of the Trinity are separate from us. We are each of them and we are the unity of them.
 
Again, this is a canonically valid interpretation with a long tradition in the Christian world. It’s criminal that this tradition has been hidden from Christian believers and they’ve been taught to consider it demonic. This is another example of deliberately hiding the truth to keep people in the dark and lead them astray.
 
Christian believers should be up in arms over this. This interpretation of Christianity could have been used for generations to bridge the gap between Christians and the rest of the world instead of the rest of the world pushing away.
 
Christians could have been using this to find common ground with people and maybe even win them over to Christianity instead of demonizing everyone who might actually have agreed with this. Some of these people might have been able to accept Christianity as their own instead of seeing it as some kind of mental disease based on elitism and paranoid delusion.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

We hear this manifesto shouted from the rooftops a lot lately. We hear women announcing to the world in songs, movies, and every other venue where they have a public platform, “I don’t need a prince to save me!”
 
This statement refers to the common theme from a bunch of ancient myths and tales. These stories typically end with the young woman either falling into a deep sleep or some other kind of misfortune. She can’t break out of this state until she receives the kiss of a prince. The kiss wakes her up, leads to them falling in love, and he marries her and carries her off to his kingdom where they live happily ever after.
 
We have to ask yourselves the obvious question here. Why did these tales stand the test of time so well if they’re based on a bunch of irrelevant nonsense? Why are we still teaching our children these stories even today in modern times if the stories have no value?
 
So let’s unpack what these stories mean and figure out whether we as women need a prince to save us or not.
 
For the sake of this study, we’re going to concentrate on three common fairy tales: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and Cinderella. The first two tales do involve the heroine falling into a deep sleep from which only the prince’s kiss can save her. All three end with the prince rescuing the heroine from a situation she can’t get herself out of on her own. The prince falls in love with her, marries her, takes her back to the palace, and she becomes his queen.
 
We can decipher what these stories mean by looking at the other common elements each of these stories uses to convey its message.
 
Snow White and Cinderella both have evil stepmothers who are the architects of their stepdaughters’ downfall. The older women interfered with and held their stepdaughters back from achieving their destined greatness.
 
All three of these stories were rewritten by Charles Perrault based on even older stories that had been in common culture for thousands of years. Many of these original stories were collected by the Brothers Grimm. In these original stories, the evil, ill-meaning older woman who attacks and even tries to destroy the younger woman isn’t a stepmother at all. It’s the girl’s mother. Charles Perrault and others sanitized the stories to try to gloss over the girl’s own mother being her enemy.
 
Combine this imagery with trope of the girl falling into a deep sleep, being rescued by the prince, and ending up married as queen of the country. This gives us our clearest insight into what these stories are really about.
 
The end-goal of the girl’s development is adulthood, motherhood, and her ascendency to being the matriarch of future generations. She can only accomplish this by breaking out of the sleep of childhood.
 
The mother figure is in fact the greatest enemy of this process. In the case of Snow White, the evil stepmother gives Snow White a poison apple symbolic of the forbidden fruit that tempts the individual away from the righteous path they’re supposed to follow.
 
The stepmother’s interference led Snow White into unproductive interactions with the seven dwarves. These were immature men who distracted her from the true path she would have with her real relationship partner—the man who would help her build a mature, adult, responsible life with her own family and future dynasty.
 
Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on a spinning wheel. The spinning wheel has historically represented the passage of time. The Fates spin threads that become people’s individual  lives. The Fates weave these threads into tapestries that become the stories of unfolding history.
 
This is not to say that every woman’s mother wants to keep her trapped in a never-ending cycle of childhood and never grow up or become independent.
 
The point of this theme is that the young woman has to break from her mother in order to grow up and become the matriarch in her own storyline and her own family line. The younger woman’s position as her mother’s daughter becomes the trap she has to escape in order to grow up into adulthood and become the queen of her own life.
 
The prince represents maturity, parenthood, adulthood, responsibility, and independence. The prince wakes the young woman from the slumber of endless childhood to the bigger calling of maturity, parenthood, and being a responsible adult who is actively working to build the world for the next generation.
 
Waking up, seeing the prince, falling in love with him, and marrying him represent falling in love with this new, bigger, more expanded life of adulthood. It places more demands on us. It asks more of us. It’s a much harder, more stressful path.
 
It’s also much more rewarding. We’re all biologically programmed to want to reproduce ourselves and that means taking responsibility for our children’s safety, care, and wellbeing. It means providing for them. It means building a world where they and our future generations can grow up and live fruitful lives.
 
So the truth is that we all really do need a prince to save us. The alternative is the perpetual sleep of endless childhood where we don’t take responsibility for anything. We don’t contribute anything meaningful to the world or the people around us.
 
The alternative is living our lives only for our own selfish pleasure, gain, and gratification.
 
Curiously, this is exactly what we’re seeing with the current generation of young people who don’t think they need a prince to save them. These people live their entire lives as overgrown children. They’re selfish, materialistic, totally lacking in the ability to delay gratification in any way, and completely disconnected from what it means to care about others.
 
This is why we see an entire generation of narcissists growing up from the era of thinking that they don’t think they need a prince to save them. These people grow up believing they can spend their lives on some kind of permanent vacation from all responsibility. They don’t think about leaving a legacy or having a positive impact.
 
It takes a herculean effort to break out of this state of endless, self-centered childhood. This is why adolescence is such a harrowing, stressful process for so many people. They’re leaving behind the safe, insulated world of childhood so they can wake up to the demands and possibilities of adulthood.
 
This is why adolescents so often have with their parents. The teens and young people have to break from their parents, at least partially, to discover who these young people really are separate from their parents. The young people have to cut the apron strings and forge their own path, their own identity, and their own future. They can’t do this under the shadow of their parents’ wings. The younger generation has to learn to fly on its own.
 
Responsibility and delayed gratification are the hallmarks of maturity and true adulthood. Those who don’t take responsibility—for themselves and others—those who can’t delay gratification as an investment in building something greater—these people are not truly adults. They’re children who’ve stopped growing and are now in the process of decaying while they’re still alive.
 
None of us wants that. Waking up might be painful, but it beats the hell out of the alternative, which is a form of waking death and a recipe for self-destruction and regret.
 
I hope this helped someone. God bless you all.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

What even is Heaven and Hell?
 
Dualistic religious ideologies tell us that Heaven and Hell are places outside of this world. These religions tell us that we go to either Heaven or Hell after we die and that we can’t get to either of them as long as we’re here in this mortal, human plane of existence.
 
Heaven is defined as some variation of an ideal, perfected state where what we see as the flaws, discomforts, annoyances, and inconveniences of human life don’t exist.
 
Some people even believe that all the challenge of human life is removed in Heaven and that we would live in a state of perfect ease where nothing is demanded of us and we don’t have to try to do anything.
 
Hell is seen as the opposite. It’s a state of eternal suffering, constant torment, where everything works against us, and we’re presented with a constant state of discomfort, unhappiness, and insurmountable challenge that keeps us defeated, beaten down, and suffering for the rest of eternity.
 
The challenge of Sisyphus is the perfect example of this. According to Greek myth Sisyphus was punished by the gods to spend eternity rolling a massive boulder up a hill, only for it to roll back down to the bottom every time he got close to making it to the top.
 
The rules for how to get to Heaven or Hell vary depending on the philosophy or ideology we’re talking out.
 
Most of these worldviews would have us believe that we get to Heaven or Hell after death by being good or bad during our lifetimes. Others state that you have to follow certain rules during our lifetimes to qualify for Heaven. Breaking any of these rules or failing to follow them is an instant ticket to Hell.
 
Some of these philosophies even attach the reward of Heaven or the punishment of Hell to a single arbitrary act or even a single thought.
 
Christianity falls into this category by stating that believing or not believing in the divinity of Jesus Christ is the only qualification for reward in Heaven or punishment by eternal damnation in the fires of Hell.
 
The non-dualistic view is different. Most people completely misrepresent non-dualism by stating that good and evil are dualistic concepts and therefore good and evil don’t really exist, therefore Heaven and Hell don’t exist, either.
 
Certain people misrepresent non-dualism to mean that, since good and evil don’t exist, there are no good or evil acts and that we don’t get rewarded or punished for any act. They just are. They exist in the plurality of life and we have no incentive to do one or the other.
 
This is a nihilistic view that leads nowhere. It’s a recipe for depression and potentially suicide. It cuts us off from our fellow human beings and deprives us of everything that makes life worth living.
 
I refuse to believe that we’re all just bacteria living on Earth. I don’t believe we would have been created, either by God or by evolutionary chance, with a default need to question everything and find meaning in everything if there was not some answer or meaning to find.
 
The reality is that good and evil do exist, including and especially within the non-dualistic worldview. They just don’t exist there the way most people think they do—which leads to misunderstandings.
 
Every action and even every thought that we have leads to a consequence. The consequence could be a positive consequence or it could be a negative consequence.
 
Every action we take automatically and immediately produces three consequences. The first consequence happens when we take that action. If we performed a good action, we immediately get a boost in our feelings simply by knowing we did a good action. We feel better about ourselves. We feel more connected to others. We feel that everything in life is good and that things are working out for us for the better.
 
If we performed a bad action, we immediately start to feel down on ourselves because we know in our heart of hearts that we did wrong. We feel like we’re letting ourselves and the whole world down. We feel like we’re a bad person and possibly even lost and unredeemable. We think of ourselves as bad people if we can’t even make the right decision and take the right action when it matters.
 
The second consequence comes from anticipating the consequence. If we did a good action, we can look forward to a good consequence. Let’s say we worked really hard to complete a project for work. Let’s say that accomplishing this task was attached to a promotion, a raise, and greater opportunities for advancement based on the outcome.
 
We would naturally feel proud of our work and we would look forward to the consequences of our actions. We would be happy about the promotion, the raise, and continuing to build on our own success.
 
If we performed a negative action, we would dread the consequence because we would know it was going to be bad. We might even feel inclined to perform more bad actions just to avoid the consequences of the very first action that got us into this mess in the first place.
 
This is how people go down a destructive spiral that winds up completely destroying their entire lives.
 
The third consequence is the outcome itself. It’s the raise if we completed the project to the best of our ability and knocked it out of the park. The negative consequence is the arrest or the fine or the loss of social standing if we committed a crime.
 
These consequences have ongoing repercussions in our lives. The consequences of our actions produce ripple effects that cause downstream consequences and effects on those around us and collateral consequences that stem from the very first action or thought.
 
Let’s take a negative consequence,  just as an example. I once used the example of a young man who decided to drink a lot one night. That was the action that led to the result.
 
This young man was barely twenty years old and his altered mental state affected his judgment. He got behind the wheel of a car, lost control, and killed two women who happened to be standing on their front lawn having a conversation. One of these women was eight months pregnant.
 
This was the first consequence of the young man’s actions. He then got arrested and charged with three counts of vehicular homicide because the woman’s unborn baby son would have survived had he been delivered at that time.
 
This young man spent a long time on suicide watch in jail because he realized once he sobered up how badly he had messed up.
 
That was the first consequence. His arrest was the second consequence. The young man then went to trial and I’m quite sure this action caused a myriad of downstream consequences that affected the rest of his life.
 
Good actions can have the same far-reaching consequences and produce profound results no one us can possibly foresee. Consistently doing good actions builds a reputation with those around us, encourages them to trust us, opens the doors to new opportunities, gives people the safety and permission they need to love us, and generally leads to our overall life success.
 
This is what Heaven and Hell really look like. I’m quite certain this young man who killed two women in a drunk driving accident spent many years of his life feeling like he was living in a Hell of his own making.
 
Most people who pursue a consistent pattern of bad behavior live and feel the same way. They’re miserable, alone, forsaken, mistrusted, pushed away, and hated everywhere they go. Their loved ones and closest relatives refuse to have anything to do with them because these people go around hurting everyone they come into contact with.
 
This is the true definition of Heaven and Hell. Heaven and Hell are very real and they aren’t some far-off places where we go after death. Heaven and Hell are right here on Earth. We’re in them right now and no one sends us there. We go there on our own by our own actions and choices.
 
Good and evil do exist. They exist in our actions, our interactions with others, and our conscious decisions and thoughts that either bring us closer and build rapport with those around us—or they do the opposite.
 
Think of the Bible verse, “You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:20)
 
This verse originally referred to distinguishing believers from non-believers, but it applies to everything.
 
Do you want to know if an action is good or evil? The formula is really simple.
 
Does the action, thought, decision, or behavior lead to a good outcome? Does it produce a positive ripple effect? Does it give us a boost of feeling connected to the rest of humanity like we’re contributing a positive influence on society and history? Can we look forward to even more feelings of accomplishment, connection, and the pride in knowing we’re a good person?
 
Or does the action disconnect us from people? Does it push people away? Do the consequences of this action leave our lives in ruins, cost us things we would just as soon not lose, and reduce our standing in the eyes of those around us?
 
There are two paths in life that any of us can follow at any given time. We can choose the path that leads to love, life, and success. Or we can choose the path that leads to destruction and death.
 
If any of us is living in a Hell on Earth, the question becomes—why? What are we doing to create this Hell for ourselves? I guarantee that this is a byproduct of our own actions and attitudes. If you think life is Hell, you think that because you’re making it that way.
 
It would take the tiniest adjustment of your thinking to change it so that you’re living in Heaven right here on Earth. You could be living in Heaven for the rest of your life. You could be enjoying eternal bliss, cosmic love, and the respect and admiration of your loved ones and everyone else around you.
 
You could be living in a world where everything works in your favor and you hardly have to try at all to get everything you want. The whole world could be mobilizing to help you and pour out abundance in front of you. You could be living that way right now.
 
If you do or you don’t is always and entirely your choice. You’re living in a Hell of your own making and you’re doing it because you want to. You’re doing it because you either enjoy these states of suffering or because you refuse to accept that you have the power to change your circumstances.
 
These beliefs are also choices. You’re choosing to see yourself as helpless when in fact your circumstances are the clearest evidence that you are the only person who has any power to make them any different. The people you envy and admire didn’t get where they are because they’re different from you. They’re exactly the same as you. They just make different choices and use different patterns of thinking about how they do things.
 
Isn’t it ironic that Heaven is seen as a place where we’ll have no challenges when challenge and achievement are one of the things that make life worth living? Overcoming challenges and achieving difficult wins is one of the most exquisite pleasures of human life. Why in the name of God would we want to get to a place where that didn’t exist? Why would we want to live in a world without challenge?
 
People who shy away from challenges and avoid doing difficult tasks are setting themselves up for failure, depression, hopelessness, and misery. Everything good in life comes from challenge and hard work. The more we avoid it, the more miserable, disconnected, and useless we’ll feel.
 
Heaven and Hell are not eternal states that happen after we die. The eternal nature of Heaven and Hell happens in the present moment. We experience the positive or negative consequences of our actions instantaneously. We feel and sense instantaneously whether we did right or wrong. We get an instant reward if we did good and an instant punishment if we did bad.
 
The downstream flow of consequences starts immediately. It compounds on itself unless and until we take deliberate actions to change our trajectory.
 
None of us is getting away with anything—ever. Thinking that what we do doesn’t matter—that’s a nihilistic myth that leads to death and destruction. None of us wants to be that person. Those of us who are living that way don’t want to be that person even when we are that person. That’s what makes this existence so hellish.
 
There is an eternal reward or punishment that does happen after we die, but it isn’t something far away or separate from us. If we persist in behaving destructively throughout our lives, we will leave a legacy of people who hate us and continue to talk about how evil, ruthless, and perverted we were long after we’re gone.
 
The same goes if we behaved in a loving, upright, responsible, contributory manner. We build great families. We leave a legacy of love and contribution. We become known as a good person who supported and nurtured others. Those that love, respect, and honor us will continue to do so long after we die.
 
This is a record of our behavior that can never be unwritten after our deaths. That on its own should be one of the most powerful incentives we could ever have to do good in our lives, to help others, to love them as well as we can, and to leave a lasting legacy of goodness behind us.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

I’m sure everyone reading this post right now has heard of evolution and I’m quite sure all of you know what that means.
 
Most people think of evolution as a series of random gene mutations that naturally arise over the generations. These mutations create different patterns of behavior, body morphology, and physiological processes.
 
Environmental pressures such as food scarcity and weather changes eliminate those individuals with disadvantageous mutations. The same pressures favor certain other individuals whose mutations match the current conditions. The mutations give these individuals a selective advantage over others who don’t have these mutations.
 
These individuals then produce more offspring who also carry the mutation. The mutation spreads to the rest of the population and confers the advantage on the whole group. What was once a mutation becomes normal and hence a new population develops that is more evolutionarily capable of handling the new conditions.
 
This is the traditional, conventional, Darwinian version of evolution. It’s a genetically deterministic view that shaped a whole generation of scientific thought. This view is based on the idea that our genes dictate who we are, what we’re capable of, and how we cope with the world around us.
 
If we randomly get born with the advantageous mutation, we thrive. If we don’t get born with the mutation, we die out. End of story.
 
We now know that this isn’t the case at all. More recent scientific research shows that our DNA is not as carved in stone as scientists once thought. DNA is always changing and is in fact influenced by our behavior and the environment around us.
 
Our bodies, our senses, and our minds are constantly adapting to environmental conditions, including social conditions. We act and react to these conditions and our behaviors and even our thoughts dictate how genes express themselves.
 
This process happens within each generation, within each individual person’s lifetime, and even on a day-to-day basis. There is virtually nothing we received genetically from our parents that we cannot at least modify through changes in our behavior. This includes physical traits, thinking patterns, and even the outcomes of certain hereditary diseases.
 
If that wasn’t enough, these genetic changes get passed down to the next generation. The old deterministic view of genetic absolutism is in fact not the case at all. Evolution happens exactly the other way around.
 
What actually happens is that everyone—all of us—every living thing on the face of the Earth—is constantly, constantly adapting to conditions both within and outside ourselves. These adaptations are so constant and so universal that we don’t even notice them—unless we go out of our way to change our behavior to alter our lives, our bodies, and our conditions.
 
These constant adaptations affect how our genes express themselves and these are the genetic changes that get passed down to the next generation. This is how we evolve. No one is making us do anything. Our genes aren’t making us do anything. We aren’t victims to our genes or evolutionary processes—not at all.
 
We have a lot more power over what happens to us than we give ourselves credit for. We also have a lot more power over what we pass down to the next generation. It’s up to us to maximize that and make it the best it can be.
 
Once we realize we have this power, we take responsibility for either improving conditions for the next generation and setting future generations up for success. The alternative is to leave them unprepared and living in a world that is falling apart without the tools to fix it.
 
None of us wants that, so we all need to step up and start harnessing this power. We’re responsible for the outcome either way, so which one are we going to choose?
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

It seems ironic that we should have to go out of our way to highlight, celebrate, and acknowledge good fiction in today’s market, but that’s exactly the situation in which we find ourselves.
 
We’re living in a world awash with bad fiction where none of the stories work and they don’t mean anything. The vast majority of what we consider “entertainment” is really just a colossal waste of our time. This brand of entertainment teaches us nothing, tells us nothing, reflects nothing of reality, and changes nothing except to get us a few more hours farther down the road in our lives toward our eventual and inevitable demise.
 
Successful fiction leaves us satisfied at the end—not just because the story came to some conclusion. Any story can do that. Even a bad story comes to some conclusion at the end.
 
Successful fiction leaves us satisfied by making a point and drawing the entire narrative full circle to its starting point.
 
Successful fiction accomplishes the purpose it set out to accomplish. It actually tells us something so that, at the end, when we finish reading or watching it, we think, “Yeah, I got it.”
 
We get the message. We see what the writer was trying to create and we understand all of what they were trying to communicate and convey through the story.
 
Bad art asks no questions. Bad art leaves us unsatisfied because we understand intuitively that it isn’t worth our time. We understand that consuming this material accomplishes nothing. The artist is insulting our intelligence by implying that this is all we’re capable of. We don’t respect the artist, either, because we understand that this is all he is capable of. We expect better and he didn’t deliver.
 
Mediocre art asks the questions and answers them for us. Great art asks the questions and leaves them unanswered. Great art asks questions about what human life and the world are all about. Great art shows us a slice of life and lets us answer those questions for ourselves.
 
If the artist did his job, his work leads us to come to the conclusion he wants us to come to. He makes his point by painting us a picture of life from a unique perspective. He doesn’t tell us what to think. He lets us do that on our own. This is how he communicates his message if he’s doing his job correctly.
 
This is how art can teach us something, show us a perspective we may never have considered before, improve our lives, tear down prejudice, and cause massive social change.
 
Charles Dickens accomplished this with his work. He didn’t go around telling everyone that the child labor conditions in England were appalling, abusive, and in some cases, deadly. He didn’t tell anyone anything they didn’t already know.
 
He simply showed people a side of the issue that made it obvious what horrific conditions these children were living under. His work caused a groundswell of public sentiment that got the laws changed for the better.
 
This is why it’s so important for us as artists to make our work mean something. We have incredible power over our audience’s thinking.
 
The vast majority of the fiction market asks nothing of us. It barely asks us to pay attention enough to understand what the story is about. In some cases, it doesn’t even do that much.
 
This is why it’s so important when a piece of fiction actually does challenge us to think and presents us with a story that tells us something meaningful.
 
This is the case with District 9, a 2009 sci-fi action film directed by Neill Blomkamp. The story premise covers events thirty years following an alien race landing on Earth and staying to live here. These aren’t invaders or conquerors nor are they bent on annihilating the human race. These aliens are intergalactic refugees seeking asylum and protection from the disaster that destroyed their homeworld.
 
The humans of Earth react to the aliens’ arrival by confining them in a ghetto known as District 9. The company tasked with policing them treats the aliens as worthless criminals. The aliens are denied civil rights and treated as unintelligent animals even as the company attempts to plunder the aliens’ advanced technology for its own profit.
 
The story follows Wikus van de Merwe, a company agent in charge of relocating the aliens to a new camp. A series of unfortunate incidents cause him to get infected with an alien substance that causes his body to start to mutate into an alien.
 
The company starts to experiment on him in horrific, inhuman ways—ways the company has been experimenting on the aliens all this time. Wikus escapes, goes on the run, and the company sets out to recapture him. This leads him on a journey to discover what the aliens are really capable of and where his loyalties truly lie.
 
This movie was set in South Africa, directed by a South African director, and acted by a South African cast. The most obvious allegorical implications would lead us to believe that this movie is a commentary on South African Apartheid and the movie works as that.
 
This movie actually covers so much more important and deeper territory. The same process of one population scapegoating, isolating, and dehumanizing another has taken place countless times in human history.
 
The process follows the same sequence of events in which one group vilifies the other, assigns malice to their actions based on scant or no evidence, applies these stereotypes to the entire group, and ghettoizes the subject group to isolate the “others” from the rest of society.
 
The dominant society treats the subservient group as less than human, turns a blind eye to their suffering, and even deliberately inflicts additional suffering on them as punishment for these fabricated crimes and imagined malicious intentions.
 
The dominant society inflicts exactly the same mistreatment on anyone who sympathizes with the subservient group or displays even the most marginal indication of resembling them.
 
Looking like they do, believing as they do, behaving as they do, and actually belonging to the other group isn’t necessary to get a person treated the same way. In some cases, the dominant society will even kill a person thinking or saying out loud that the other group might deserve some better treatment.
 
Our current culture likes to blame this behavior on the White race when, in reality, every culture on the planet has done exactly the same thing. Africans do it to each other. Asians do it to Africans. Asians and Middle Easterners do it to White people. Every race on the planet even does it to their own kind. No one is innocent in this.
 
Blaming it on the White race is the flimsy argument of people who know nothing about history. History teaches us a very different lesson about what human beings are capable of when they ostracize and dehumanize each other based on things like racial characteristics, political views, religion, or social affiliation.
 
History teaches us a very different lesson when it comes to certain individuals waking up to their own prejudice and actually seeing the ostracized group as human who deserve decent treatment and basic civil rights.
 
These are the stories of true heroism, compassion, and self-sacrifice that counterbalance the horror of humanity’s atrocities against our own kind. These abuses bring out the worst in people, but they also bring out the best in us when we break the bonds of prejudice and give each other the care and dignity we deserve. These are the situations where humanity really shines.
 
This is the story District 9 tells us. It’s the story of humanity at its worst and the circumstances that bring out the best in us when it counts the most. It’s the story of one person who is willing to sacrifice everything for what he knows is right, to rectify the wrongs of the past, and to give someone else a chance at the happiness he knows he can’t get for himself.
 
District 9 is what all of us as fiction writers should be striving to achieve. It tells an awesome, entertaining story, but it also makes a comment on history and human nature that teaches us and inspires us to do better. The story leaves the audience with a strong message of what is possible when it comes to overcoming our differences and seeing the humanity in each other even when our entire society is pressuring us to do the opposite.
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 All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. 

My daughters’ kindergarten teachers once pulled me and their dad aside at afterschool pickup time to have The Talk with us about our daughters’ behavior at school.
 
What was the crime for which my daughters, their dad, and I got reprimanded? My daughters had been telling the other kindergarteners that Santa Claus wasn’t real.
 
The other children who did believe in Santa Claus naturally got extremely upset by this news—and their parents got extremely upset by it, too. The parents wanted the teachers to tell us to tell our daughters to stop this behavior. My children were raised Jewish, so these other parents wanted my daughters to keep this information to themselves to preserve the illusion.
 
These other parents called it preserving, “The Magic.”
 
We had a lengthy discussion with these teachers in which I refused to instruct my daughters to do anything of the kind. I stated categorically that I was proud of my daughters for standing up for their convictions and having the courage to challenge others in theirs.
 
I stated that, if my daughters were out there telling people that Santa Claus isn't real, then more power to them. I stated that the issue when much further than merely believing a Christmas fairy tale. It strikes at the very heart of truth.
 
Your opinion means nothing. No one in the world is under any obligation to accept your opinion on any subject whatsoever just because you stated your opinion out loud.
 
Opinion is the lowest and weakest form of intellectual rigor.
 
If you believe that Santa Claus exists, you better be ready to back it up with facts and evidence. No one will nor should they take your word for it.
 
If you believe that Jesus is the Son of God or that God exists or even that science is the only real truth—whatever it is you believe—you better pack a lunch and bring all your arguments, logic, examples, and demonstrable, repeatable data to support your claim. Your opinion doesn’t fall into any of those categories.
 
If you believe there are only two genders or that there are twenty-two genders or if you believe that there are unlimited genders—no matter what you believe—the burden of proof is on you to convince people using the power of your evidence, logic, and critical thinking skills.
 
There is no one alive on Planet Earth who is under any obligation to believe as you believe just because you opened your mouth and a certain combination of sounds came out.
 
Your opinion means nothing if you can’t back it up and actually convince people to change their views.
 
We have a problem in the world today. We all seem to think that those who believe differently are committing some sort of crime and might actually deserve to be taken out and shot simply because they believe differently.
 
We think this and even say it in the media when none of us even takes the time to think about why WE believe as we do. If you really believe something, you should be able to explain why. You should be able to point to the logic and evidence that convinced you to believe that. You should be able to repeat these arguments to others to show them why they should believe as you do.
 
It doesn’t work to simply write these people off by saying they’re stupid or evil or just lost. The burden is on you to convince them using language they can understand. You can’t use the language of your own belief to convince someone to believe something they already don’t believe. That doesn’t work. You have to use their language to convince them.
 
If you really believe what you say you believe, you should care enough about the other person to want to show them a better way. You wouldn’t be so quick to write them off and consign them to the ash heap of eternity for the crime of believing something you disagree with.
 
If your opinion has any validity at all, if your opinion is worth enough for anyone to respect it even for a second, then the other person’s opinion is just as important as yours. You are the one who is under an obligation to take their opinion into account and consider the possibility that they could be right and you are the one who is lost, ignorant, or just misinformed—which, let’s be honest, is a very real possibility.
 
I made these arguments to my daughters’ kindergarten teachers and I told them that I wasn’t in the habit of lying to my children about the nature of reality. I wasn’t about to start lying to them just so some other parents could lie to their children about it. If some parent does want to lie to their children and tell them Santa Claus exists when the parents know for a fact that he doesn’t, then that’s the other parent’s decision. I’m not going to take responsibility for the outcome.
 
When I said this, one of the teachers got tears in her eyes. She admitted that her sixteen-year-old son still had not forgiven her for lying to him about Santa Claus.
 
Lying to our loved ones about something we know to be untrue has massive, long-term consequences we may or may not have considered. We all might want to think about that when we choose which beliefs we teach our children.
 
Whatever beliefs we teach our children, our children need to be prepared to go out into the world and meet people who believe differently. Our children need to be prepared to defend their beliefs—not with torches and pitchforks and lynch mobs—but with logical arguments, hard evidence, and real-world, repeatable examples that prove the truth of what they’re saying.
 
Our children need to understand that no one has any reason to protect your feelings just because they’re yours. We all have feelings. We all have opinions. We all have deeply held convictions and beliefs.
 
Your feelings, opinions, and convictions are no more valid than the next person’s. You are under just as great an obligation to consider and protect the other person’s feelings and beliefs as they are to protect yours.
 
If you think you have the right to go out into the world and challenge other people’s beliefs and opinions, you better be ready for the other person to do the same thing back to you.
 
You might discover that their logic, evidence, and arguments are actually far more robust than yours. Your logic, evidence, and arguments might crumble before theirs and you might be forced to change your position.
 
This is how we arrive at the truth. We don’t arrive at the truth by getting up a lynch mob every time we discover that someone believes differently than we do.
 
Attacking another person’s beliefs in this way actually blocks us from arriving at the truth. It prevents us from hearing the evidence that might convince us that what the other person believes is actually true and we are the ones who have been living a delusion.
 
None of us wants to live a lie—and yet that’s exactly what we are doing when we refuse to listen and actually take the time to communicate the reasons behind our beliefs to others. Stomping your foot and throwing a tantrum because someone hurt your feelings is not the way to convince someone that you’re right. It actually makes you look even weaker than you already are.
 
That behavior on its own is proof that your position is fragile and you don’t have the logic, evidence, and arguments to support your view. You’re announcing to the world that you already know your position is indefensible. This is the quickest way to convince people that your view is wrong. No one would want to sign up for an indefensible position and that’s exactly what you’re asking them to do.
 
Your opinion means nothing. You need to bring something a lot stronger than that or pack up and go home.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Do a quick internet search on the Christian Trinity and you’ll open up a whole hornet’s nest of ideas, debates, discussions, and explanations of what it is, what it isn’t, whether it’s strictly, doctrinally correct, whether it’s ever explicitly stated in the Bible, and whether a person (or Christian) really needs to believe in the Trinity in order to the “saved”.
 
So let’s break this down and figure out exactly what we’re talking about here.
 
The Christian Trinity is the belief in, “The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit” as equal and co-dominant attributes of the one unified Godhead.
 
Christian theologians and believers explain that the three-part nature of the Trinity doesn’t contradict the oneness of God and that this is one of the paradoxes of religious belief.
 
One explanation of the Trinity uses the analogy of water. Water has three states—solid, liquid, and gas. Steam is water. Ice is water. Liquid water is water. It’s all water. It has three states or expressions, but at its core nature we’re talking about one thing.
 
Some explain the Trinity by using the analogy of an egg. The egg has three parts—the white, the yolk, and the shell. The egg isn’t a whole egg without each and every one of all three of these parts, but we’re still talking about one thing—the egg.
 
Others describe the Trinity as three manifestations of God’s expression in the world. Some say we aren’t talking about three different “whats” but three different “hows”. God expresses Himself in three different ways—through The Father, through The Son, and through The Holy Spirit.
 
These concepts start to fall apart when we analyze them in their own context. The entirety of the Christian faith is built on the belief that Jesus is the Son of God and that he represents “The Son” aspect of the one Godhead.
 
We’re going to put aside the question of whether or not this is true because that’s a different discussion altogether.
 
For the purpose of our analysis of the Trinity, we’re only going to examine the doctrine of the Trinity in its own right. We’re going to take apart these arguments by showing that they don’t hold up even under explanations given by their own adherents and believers.
 
Let’s take the egg argument. It is true that an egg is made up of a shell, a white, and a yolk. Each of these is a constituent part of the egg, which is the whole.
 
The yolk, the egg, and the white are each finite parts of a finite object in space. We can separate these parts from each other.
 
If we’re going to pledge allegiance to something, it would make more sense to say that we pledge allegiance to the egg rather than, say, the yolk.
 
We would assume that the egg itself, being the whole, would be a more important and more complete form of whatever it is we’re supposed to be pledging allegiance to, venerating, and worshiping as the Godhead.
 
We wouldn’t think we should be giving that kind of allegiance to something that’s just a part of this Godhead.
 
It would make no sense whatsoever for someone to say that you aren’t completing your obligations to the Godhead because you’re giving your allegiance to the egg instead of the yolk.
 
It would make no sense to say that believing in the essential nature of the yolk is somehow more important than believing in the whole entirety of the egg.
 
It would make no sense for certain people to say that you or I were actually demonic, misguided, forsaken, and even outright damned because we choose to venerate the egg as a whole totality rather than one particular part to the exclusion of all the other parts.
 
By the same argument, it would make no sense for anyone to say we have to venerate ice as the most essential form of water instead of just giving our allegiance to water in general.
 
Yet that’s exactly what the Trinity and Christian doctrine is asking us to do. It’s asking us to deny or downplay the supremacy of the whole in favor of a part—and at the same time asking us to reaffirm the supremacy of the whole. It’s a contradiction that goes way beyond being a paradox.
 
A paradox is a supposition that makes sense and its opposite also makes sense. This isn’t a paradox because one of the suppositions doesn’t make sense at all.
 
The only logical response to these arguments—if they are valid at all—is that we should venerate and give our allegiance to the whole, not the part.
 
If Christians truly believe in the one indivisible nature of the Godhead, then it only makes sense that we should give our allegiance to that instead of to some divisible part of this one whole.
 
Christians also claim to believe in the divinity of the Ten Commandments.
 
The very first commandment enjoins us that we should never have any other gods before the One True God or to worship any facsimile of Him or any particular aspect of His nature.
 
It makes no sense for Christians to say that we are worshiping and giving our allegiance to the One True Godhead by believing in the divinity of Jesus because—they say—he is the One True Godhead.
 
If that was true, we either wouldn’t need a separate name for him nor would we need a separate religion that elevates him above all the other supposed parts, facsimiles, and representations of him.
 
If that was true, it would be just as valid to say that you believe in and follow the Holy Spirit—which is what religions like Buddhism do.
 
If this was true, there would be absolutely no benefit to following Jesus verses following the One True Godhead as embodied in the Father or just the One Ineffable Wholeness of the Infinite Godhead. We wouldn’t need Jesus at all.
 
The reason we have different names for the shell, the yolk, and the white of an egg is because these things are separate and distinct from each other. Each one is finite and divisible from the others. They aren’t one and the same as the whole—which is exactly what the Christian concept of Jesus as the Son of God is. They say he is God as well as being one of these parts or separate expressions—and that isn’t possible.
 
It wouldn’t be correct of us to say the shell is one and the same with the whole egg. It wouldn’t be correct of us to say that ice is one and the same with the totality of water because it isn’t. Water can be other things that are not ice just as an egg can be other things that are not shell.
 
The expressions or manifestations theory doesn’t work, either. If we’re going to say that God expresses Himself in three different ways, then it also follows that He would express himself in thousands of ways. It would be just as valid to say that He expresses himself through each and every human being alive and every human being who has ever lived.
 
If the Christian argument is that something can be one thing and three things at the same time, then it would be just as valid to say I’m going to put my faith in the one thing. I don’t need the three things because the one thing is just as valid.
 
If we take the egg and water arguments at their face value, then the one thing is the more valid definition of what we’re talking about—not the three separate things—none of which embody the totality of what we’re talking about.
 
Gone are the days when any religion or group can tell its members to just accept an ideology without question and threaten its members with negative consequences if they do question.
 
During the 2002 Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal, one frustrated investigator stated that the Church’s delays, obstructions, and secrecy resembled the behavior of the Mafia more than a religious institution.
 
Abusive authoritarian cults tell their members to accept an ideology without question and punish those who do question. That’s what cults do. A truly religious organization—an institution that truly wishes the best for us and wants us to follow truth, goodness, and holiness—such an institution would never ask us to accept any ideology without question.
 
A truly benevolent belief system would encourage questions and challenges. A truly benevolent belief system would want us to investigate on our own, to think critically, and to discover the ultimate truth that would give our lives the most meaning and connection to the Divine.
 
The days are long gone when any belief system can expect us to just swallow a totally illogical argument that makes no sense and doesn’t comport with reality. Critical thinking is the essence of spiritual belief. If a belief system doesn’t give us that much, then it’s useless to us and has no place in our lives.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Imagine you’re walking or driving down the street and you see a young teenage girl standing on the sidewalk.
 
She has her hair dyed black and gelled up in spikes. She’s wearing heavy black makeup, black lipstick, black eyeshadow, and she’s penciled her eyebrows so thickly that they’re three times their normal size.
 
She’s wearing safety pins for jewelry, a thick, heavy, oversized leather jacket covered in chains and spikes, a short leather miniskirt, fishnet stockings, and heavy black combat boots. She’s also wearing wide wrist cuffs covered in spikes.
 
Keep that image in your mind.
 
Now imagine you’re walking or driving down the street and you see a businessman standing on the sidewalk.
 
He’s wearing an expensive tailored suit with his tie cinched up all the way to his neck. He’s wearing an expensive watch, a gold tiepin, a brightly colored pocket square, highly polished leather shoes, a leather belt, and he’s carrying a briefcase.
 
He keeps his hair clipped short, he has a manicure, and he’s in excellent shape with broad, muscular shoulders and not a scrap of fat around his midsection.
 
Both of these two people are broadcasting to the world that they belong to two separate and mutually exclusive social demographics.
 
Both of them are using their clothes, their appearance, their visual presentation, and their body language to announce to everyone they see that they belong to two separate groups.
 
Every single one of us can tell at a split-second’s glance exactly which group these people belong to. None of us could possibly mistake the signals they’re sending. None of us could possibly think either of them belongs to the other person’s group.
 
We aren’t doing these people any disservice by making these judgments. Quite the contrary. We’re doing both of these people a massive service.
 
They want us to make these judgments. They want us to understand the very first time we see them exactly who they are, what they value, and where they belong in society. That’s exactly why both of them use these signals—so we understand these things right off the bat BEFORE we find out anything else about them.
 
Both of these people want to make an impression on us. Both of these people want our first impression to color everything else we might learn about who they are. Neither of these people wants to leave any doubt in our minds exactly who we’re dealing with.
 
These people do this so that we WILL make these judgments. These people want to make sure we understand that these are the most important things we can possibly find out about who they are, what they value, and where they fit in society.
 
Neither of these people wants to be mistaken for the other. Each of them would be highly insulted if anyone made the mistake of assigning them to the other person’s group.
 
Neither of these people wants to be included in the other person’s group. Belonging to the other person’s group is the worst fate each of them can possibly imagine.
 
The businessman would never want anyone to think of him as fringe, rebellious, or counterculture. The goth teenager would never want anyone to think of her as driven, ambitious, or successful.
 
No one wants to be included in opposing or even different groups. No one wants inclusion.
 
When people say they want inclusion, they really mean they want acceptance.
 
Everyone wants their life choices, preferences, and group affiliations to be accepted without any pressure, manipulation, or implication that we should change to something else or to fit what someone else thinks we should be.
 
We want the freedom and acceptance to live our values, associate with people who agree with us and share our tastes, and not to be bombarded every minute of the day with the message that we’re wrong, evil, or misguided for choosing to live this way.
 
No one wants inclusion. Inclusion isn’t a thing. These lines between groups and demographics are there for a reason. They’re there to mark that Group A is over here and Group B is over there.
 
No one in Group A wants to cross that line to be included in Group B and vice versa.
 
What they really want is to be left alone to follow their own path without any interference from others.
 
This applies to all of us regardless of what group or demographic we belong to.
 
The sooner we all understand this and learn it, the better we’ll be able to live with each other, accept each other, and actually come to value each other because of our differences instead of hating each other for them.
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All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.

Think of human life as divided into three stages.
 
The first stage is childhood. This is where the individual develops a sense of identity, who they are, and where they fit into a family. The individual lays the foundation for how they’re going to show up in the world at large.
 
Adolescence is the stage where the individual starts to form a sense of where they fit into society. Relationships with peers become all-important as a kind of incubator for all future relationships. It becomes socially important to fit in and to be seen as doing what everyone else is doing.
 
 Adulthood is the stage where the individual should have ideally already built the structure of their own identity. They should have already learned who they are, why they’re here, and where they fit into society as a whole.
 
Individuality takes the foreground in adulthood. We care less and less as we age about conforming to what everyone else is doing.
 
We establish ourselves as unique from everyone else with our own identities, our own gifts, and we learn to leverage these so we can make a contribution that society will value.
 
The process of growing from childhood through adolescence to adulthood teaches us many lessons.
 
One of the most important lessons we learn in the process of growing up is that it isn’t advisable, beneficial, or productive to copy everyone else around us.
 
We learn that the world values us for our individuality, not for turning ourselves into robots exactly like every robot coming off the assembly line.
 
Copying others is not a way to establish our own identity. Our identity as individuals is rooted in our points of difference—the things that make us completely other than what everyone else is.
 
We find out as we age that the world only values our points of difference. The world doesn’t need or care about things it can get from every other person out there. In fact, the world despises those things and shuns them.
 
Offering a unique valuable contribution to the world means showing our unique individuality and offering something no one else can offer. These are the only things the world values.
 
The same goes for relationships. No one wants to love a robot. No one can love a robot.
 
No one can love us if we aren’t showing up as unique individuals. In fact, our uniqueness is the only thing we have that anyone could possibly love. No one can love the things about us that every other person on the planet already has.
 
A wise man once said, “A normal person is someone you don’t know very well.”
 
As we grow and gain wisdom in life, we come to realize that there is no such thing as the status quo. There is no such thing as average. There is no such thing as normal.
 
Everyone goes through a crisis of identity when they enter adolescence. This crisis is in fact what adolescence is. Everyone goes through exactly the same thing. It would be abnormal and worrisome if someone didn’t go through it.
 
Every child goes through the crisis of letting go of their child self, rebuilding their identity from the ground up, and trying to figure out who they are and how they fit into the world.
 
A adolescent who appears to have it all together on the outside is covering up their insecurities to make themselves blend in. They have no idea who they are or how they fit in.
 
They have no established identity of their own, so they try to make themselves a cookie-cutter copy of everyone else in the hope that no one will notice anything objectionable or unusual about them.
 
Adolescents have an irrational phobia of anyone considering them weird, different, or unusual.
 
We find it easy to look around at the people near us or in the media and think they’re normal. We find it easy to think these people are living the way societal rules tells us we should live.
 
The truth is that these people are going through all the same stress, anxiety, insecurity, and internal questioning that we’re going through on a daily basis.
 
This is called being human. No one escapes it.
 
Having a bunch of money doesn’t make it go away. Achieving any kind of success in business or society doesn’t make it go away. It can’t go away because this is a necessary part of being human.
 
Anyone who claims not to be going through these things is lying and putting on a false front. They do this to try to trick everyone into thinking the person is normal and everything is the way it should be.
 
A person would only need to do this if they’re struggling on the inside and want to hide that struggle. This is the paradox of viewing someone else as more normal, more acceptable, and more popular than ourselves.
 
Most of the time, the more normal and put-together someone looks on the outside, the more insecure, anxious, and troubled they are on the inside.
 
There is no such thing as the social status quo. There is no such thing as normal.
 
It isn’t possible for us to be perfectly average and to exactly fit into what “society” says we should be.
 
The reality is that there is no society that might say this. Society is made up of individuals who all fall into two categories.
 
The first category consists of the people who are following all the other people around them, copying trends, trying to keep up with what everyone else is doing, and trying to blend in so no one sees anything unique or different or individual about them.
 
The second category consists of the people who have gone through the fire to discover their own unique identity, mission, and gifts. These people embrace who they are and market it to the world as a unique offering no one can get from anywhere else.
 
We need to understand that everyone in the first category is living with the strain and anxiety of NOT knowing who they are, where they belong, or what they’re really doing here.
 
These people aren’t making it easier for themselves by blending in. They’re actually making it harder because we’re all born with an innate drive to ask these questions and to seek the answers.
 
These people are deliberately shutting themselves off from the one source of information that would actually make them happy. They think being accepted by society will ease the tension and anxiety of not belonging.
 
In reality, following others and copying them is a recipe for disaster. We’ll constantly feel like we don’t belong because no one will ever be able to accept us for who we truly are. No one will ever even find out who we truly are.
 
These people spend their entire lives locked in the adolescent need to belong to some outside notion of the status quo. These people avoid the path of identity at all costs.
 
These people spend their lives chasing trends, finding out and following what everyone else is doing, and blocking out all drive to discover themselves and what their own unique path in life might be.
 
Lasting happiness, acceptance, belonging, and a sense of purpose can only be found through embracing our individuality. This is in fact the essence of maturity. It is in fact the secret that makes life worth living.
------------------All content on the Crimes Against Fiction Blog is © Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.