The Distant God Fallacy
A Blueprint for the Post-Religious Age
My daughter, my son, and all you children of the light. To every dancer in the garden of paradise.
I have a dream. It is a dream that feels vast in my heart, even though I know I am only one small, utterly insignificant being in this endless universe. I am a tiny organism in an intergalactic network of life. I am a small bubble of living energy that wants to give a part of itself to the cosmic evolution of everything.Before this strange little life of mine is over, though I hope not too soon, I am burning to share this weird little dream with you.
It is a vision for a new humanity. It is a dream that has been sleeping in my subconscious my entire life, guilted down by shyness and by a mother who told me not to fantasize. But it kept glowing like a forbidden ember in the cellar of my mind until now.
Finally, I dare to lay it bare in front of you.
If we intend to become an intergalactic civilization, we must first solve the problem of God. But to solve it, we must ask a dangerous question. Why did we put God so far away?
Why did we invent deities that live in the clouds, outside of time, accessible only through complex rituals, suffering, and death?
My thesis is simple. We invented the Distant God because we rejected the Immanent God. We suppressed the one obvious biological doorway to the divine that every human possesses. We suppressed the energy of the orgasm.
Because sex is so constricted in our society, we have severed the natural connection between the human nervous system and the divine. The orgasm is a biological interface. It is a moment of total ego dissolution. It is a chemical key that connects us to the realms of the divine. But because we stamped it with shame, because we labeled it “dirty” or “forbidden,” we lost our direct line to paradise.
The void created by that suppression had to be filled. So we projected God outwards. We built a political God. A God who is very far away. A God who is very complicated to achieve. We did this because the alternative was too terrifying. We did not want to accept that paradise was right here, available in the union of two bodies. That was too obvious. That was too free. So we chose a God we had to fight for.
We start wars for two reasons. First, we fight because of pure biological frustration. Sexual suppression creates a pressure cooker in the nervous system. When the energy of life cannot flow into connection and pleasure, it curdles into aggression. It becomes the fuel for the amygdala, that ancient alarm system in the brain that screams for violence.
Second, we fight to defend the “Distant God.” Once you place God in the sky, you separate him from humanity. You create “my God” versus “your God.” You create ideologies. You create the superstition that bloodshed is holy. If we acknowledged that the divine experience is a biological reality accessible to everyone through the nervous system, there would be nothing left to fight over.
We refuse to live in paradise on Earth because we are addicted to the struggle. We use war as a distraction from the terrifying intimacy of being truly alive.
I dream of a parallel Earth. It is still this Earth, with the same sun, the same oceans, and the same species called human…
Only tuned differently.
It is an Earth where war is simply no longer an option on the table. It is a world where the old architectures of sexuality, religion, and social rank have been quietly dismantled and built again from zero.
Humanity must grow out of the superstition that God needs enemies.
One planet.
One living body.
Slowly learning not to attack its own organs. We carry animal genetics, social hierarchies, and primal instincts. We evolved with males competing violently for reproductive access. For 300,000 years, men fought other men for the right to mate. That is 300,000 years of programming running in your brain right now.
You know what happens when someone disrespects you? There is an ancient, almond-shaped structure in your brain called the amygdala. It is your alarm system.
When someone insults you, your amygdala fires immediately. Boom. Before your rational mind even knows what happened.
This is ancient software running on modern hardware. You are sitting in a coffee shop, but your brain thinks you are fighting for survival on the savanna. Someone takes your parking spot, and your body prepares for mortal combat.
These reactions made sense when losing status meant losing access to food and mates. But now? Now we have nuclear weapons attached to the same triggers that once threw stones.
The Curriculum of Consciousness
In this new world, we stop teaching religion as dogma. We teach it as psychology. We teach it as the history of our attempt to map the mind.
A student is never forced to pray. That is indoctrination. Instead, that student learns the precise mechanical differences between the Vedantic concept of Atman and the Buddhist concept of Anatta.
They should know that Atman refers to the individual spark of consciousness and Brahman refers to the universal reality. They should understand the equation Tat Tvam Asi.
That the individual and the universal are one. Then they should contrast this with the Buddhist view of Anatta, which sees the self as a temporary aggregate.
Why? Because these are not fairy tales. They are instruction manuals for the brain. We need rational thinking and physics to build the airplanes that take us to the stars.
But we need these ancient psychological maps to ensure the passengers remain sane during the journey. Science builds the plane. Religion stabilizes the passenger.
We must also rebuild our temples. We are already seeing the first clumsy steps toward this new spirituality in the gym.
For millions, the gym is a secular religion. It has rituals. It has discipline. It has a congregation. It is intelligent because it makes the body primary. It does not point to a God in the sky. It points to the muscle, the breath, and the blood.
But the gym is incomplete. It focuses on the visible hardware but ignores the software. It builds the container but ignores the fuel.
We need Temples that function as gyms for the nervous system. In my dream, these are spaces where we train the ability to find the “God in sexuality” with the same rigor we use to train a bicep.
Integration Rites for TeenagersSchools introduce sixteen-year-olds to these practices. The timing matters. Sixteen is when the adolescent brain undergoes massive remodeling. It is when sexual hormones flood the system. It is when the thinking brain remains underdeveloped while the emotional brain driving desire is hyperactive.
Instead of letting these energies explode into school shootings or anxiety disorders, we would teach teenagers to consciously work with power and submission. We would teach them to work with desire and fear through structured ritual.
Picture a classroom where students learn to hold eye contact while maintaining arousal without action. They build tolerance for intensity. They practice conscious power exchange. They learn the difference between force and strength. Young men experience being physically overpowered by women in ritual combat, dissolving the fear of the feminine that drives so much male violence. Young women learn to access their rage and power without apology. They integrate the fierce goddess rather than performing perpetual niceness.
From Power Struggle to Sacred Play
Power struggles dissolve because dominance becomes a game. It is no longer a social structure. In these Temples, a CEO might spend an evening as a slave, feeling the liberation of having no choices. A submissive person might embody a demon, discovering their suppressed power. These are not metaphors or visualizations. They are full-body experiences with real energy exchange, real arousal, real fear, and real transformation.
Because we are 300,000 years old genetically, we cannot simply wish away our aggression. We need War Replacement Games. We need spaces where aggression is not suppressed but ritualized.
In this world, violence would not be suppressed but transformed. The rapist archetype would not be imprisoned but enacted in ritual with full consent. The murderer within would not be denied but would kill in sacred space, dying and being reborn. The abandoned child, the devouring parent, the tyrant, the slave. All would be consciously embodied and integrated rather than projected onto others as evil.
We have a choice. We can continue to worship a Distant God, protecting our purity while we burn the planet in his name. Or we can accept the “obvious” truth.
We can accept that the human body is the temple. We can accept that the nervous system is the ladder to heaven. We can accept that the energy we have been suppressing is the very thing that could set us free.
It sounds too simple. It sounds like a cheat code. But maybe that is why we have fought it for so long. We are afraid that the paradise we have been searching for across the galaxy has been right here, pulsing in our own veins, waiting for us to simply let go.
Michael Perin Wogenburg
love@forbidden-yoga.com