JANUARY 2026 SULLYGRAM:  On the heels of a spiritual holiday known as Christmas in my tribe and as “Bah, humbug” to the profane of any tribe, I am moved to start 2026 with some reflections that would have gotten me crucified by the Romans at Golgotha, encased in an Iron Maiden by the Inquisition’s Torquemada, and yawned out of all the saloons I’ve ever been in with my friends. Not exactly philosophy, not exactly religion, just call these musings about immortality the kind of thing you first start to reflect on before you lose your baby teeth and after your pet turtle dies.

Mortality is a bitch. Just when you think you’ve figured it out, you die. Must’ve been a real brain-buster to the earliest abstract reasoners in our tool-making, fire-using ancestry two million years ago. Put homo erectus on a delta somewhere after a flood or a lethal thunderstorm, trembling and questioning forces that have no clear cause, and you have the first instance of delving life-and-death imponderables. No doubt our earliest thinking ancestors took catastrophes personally and tried to appease or win favor with the unseen power(s) that inflicted them. File it under superstition, philosophy, or just sheer terror. So, do you discount their families, clans and tribes from the pecking orders of spiritual beliefs over millions of years of evolution? Apparently, we do. Current religions (some several thousand with nine billion names for gods, sayeth Arthur C. Clarke) invariably believe in an abrupt creation within just the last few millennia. The question they all purport to answer, however, is still the perennial one about life and death: what are we doing here and where is this going?

Parse that in uncountable ways, filtered through shamans, priestesses, oracles, dreams, divine revelations, etc., and you can trace organized major religion back five millennia, a mere .0025 of one percent of those two million years. Within that tiny history of global religions, Hindus claim seniority. Christian fundamentalists agree with their timeline – calling Humans #1 & 2 in the Garden of Eden the very first – but then they cut their own tenure in half with Jesus Christ not arriving until some 2,500 years later as an offshoot of Judaism. Islam’s Messenger doesn’t enter the picture until five hundred years after that. All of which leaves well over 99% of thinking antiquity spiritually rudderless, unless you bring them under today’s religious rubrics through things like reincarnation or metaphors. Awkward, to say the least. And chauvinistic, if not ironic. Christianity, Islam and Judaism all claim descent from Abraham. Family squabble? Worse, archaeological discoveries keep pushing back the origin of advanced societies to well before the creation myths of record – e.g., the sophisticated settlement at Gobekli Tepe dating back nearly twelve thousand years.

Academic. Doesn’t change those imponderables, does it? Why are we here/where are we going? Ten out of every ten of us will physically die. No exceptions. Embalming, glass coffins, cryogenics – our bodies rot. Begs the question of a soul or some residue of conscious identity that survives as energy instead of matter.

I’ve never been an atheist – maybe an agnostic – and I was always looking for the great equalizer that would put all religions, eras, cultures, demographics, et al, on the same footing. Doubting Thomas here wanted a universal message, something in common to all man-made religions and to nature itself. I read everything as a teenager from the Code of Hammurabi to Manetho’s king list, the Hindu Vedas to the 66 books of the Bible (three times cover to cover), even what I could find of the Apocrypha and the Councils of Nicaea color-coded votes, as I grew steadily more disenchanted with human gestalts and hierarchies.

Born Presbyterian, then migrating through a number of denominations, my reading expanded beyond traditional religions to cults and sects. I read historical summaries like Tabori’s SECRET AND FORBIDDEN and was struck by the narrow and naked contortions of doctrine and dogma. Some of it appealed to light. Some of it appealed to darkness. All of it appealed to power and control of both self and others. It was competitive and demanding. Was truth so coy? The devil is in the details, they say, but so are the particulars of angels. The dualism of good and evil is never more tangled than when humans try to define it in accordance with the moralities of a single time and place. And it gets worse every time we rationalize and re-interpret details to retro-fit societal change.

For me, the way out of the maze then was to dismiss details altogether. Well-meaning zealots, fanatics and manipulators rely on details to define their narratives. Details are their litmus test. Details test your conformity. Details magically morph to fit trending cultural agendas. Let not your heart be troubled by doubts, they say. But it should be let not your brain be troubled. Troubling your heart is how faith wins its contradictions and revisions. All I wanted was to trouble neither heart nor brain but to find them on the same unchanging page. I wanted a universal equalizer, something that included the shepherd on the hill who never heard of Martin Luther nailing 95 theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg; or the Kalahari bushman who knew only the ethic that if he came upon a water cache buried in an ostrich egg, he would drink just enough to survive and leave the rest for whoever was counting on it to still be there when they returned; or the jungle pygmy who could mark a honey tree (his coin of the realm) and know that no one else would steal from it… Add to the list that reasoning ancestor from two million years past trying to deduce how to interact with invisible powers that held dominion over his life and death.

Screw the details. A constant had to be my great equalizer. Look for the universal in common to every religion, every time and place, every benevolent god, I thought. Wait, wait…benevolent? Why benevolent? True enough. It’s a choice. You can worship evil, but then that becomes your destiny, your measure and lot – darkness. I’ll take the light, thank you very much.

Can’t imagine a nasty motive behind a universe that screams perpetual creation. Chaos and crass causality look evermore to me like precision, architecture and design, symbioses and synergies – light winning. Wormhole your way into a black hole, if you want details, but you emerge with light. Fiat Lux! So, that’s what I look for, the common core sans details. Not some anthropomorphized god or messenger filtered through intermediaries but the message itself.

It’s not hard to see it once you clear away the noise of hypocrisy, ulterior motives, and quaint myths peculiar to bygone times and their limited knowledge. It’s on the marquee of virtually every system of faith, though usually with a string attached. Our way or the highway. Our rites and rituals, our mentors and messiahs, our definitions of sin. Accept our detailed terms (you’ll know our truth by your heart) or pay the price. We are so tolerant…unless you are an unbeliever. Sub menu of rules included. That’s the part I don’t like. Rules get bent to justify whatever the current intermediaries determine: wars, sins, torture, land claims, morality, power, suppression. More details. Maybe recycling (reincarnation) gets factored into it somewhere, but that’s yet another detail. And yet the professed claim, the underlying motive, is remarkably the same across the panoply of religions purporting a greater good if you subscribe to their details. More satisfying to me, I find it in the ultimate healing of relationships in every fracture of our quarrelsome species. The universal message, the Great Equalizer on the marquee of life’s manifestations, is writ large and simple: Love, Mercy, Forgiveness.

Don’t get me wrong, I thrive on speculation about the method of creation, cause and effect, just as an exercise in curiosity, or even worship, but it’s not in my canon of required truths. Open source truths only: LOVE, MERCY, FORGIVENESS. Would a benevolent god expect more of me?

Yes, I identify as Christian, because that’s the manifestation of love, mercy and forgiveness I was born into. The meaning of a sacrificial Savior (Love, Mercy, Forgiveness embodied in Christ) transcends temporal details. A benevolent God wouldn’t expect me to sift through conflicting accounts and interpretations and infallibly guess right each time. Count me out of counting how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Nor am I held to account for the perfidies and errors of humans before me or for truths submerged. Whatever is ultimately true I am pre-disposed to accept with full humility and contrition for my iniquities and failings. Why should choosing a path be a guessing game colliding with fluid cultural values? My simple birthright through Jesus Christ of Love, Mercy, and Forgiveness turns out to be corroborated by virtually every other man-made religion and in human nature itself. The intriguing paradoxes of time and space – sometimes referred to as “science” – are beyond Cartesian understanding but not the WILLINGNESS to believe. Sight unseen, I believe in the POTENTIAL of any details to be true as long as they carry that universal message: Love, Mercy, Forgiveness.

So, I have no superior truth about dogma, details, recorded history or enshrined lore to offer you. Purely out of awe, I revel in celebratory speculation about the mechanisms of First Cause, Prime Movement, something from nothing – “a day with no yesterday.” Mortal brains are not up to grasping it, but tantalizing realms such as quantum offer cause for reverence. Prayer is another path. Communing with the wizard divine of willed existence is a joy. You ask me, many things we call miracles and remissions are built into our minds and bodies. We promote them with positive thinking, stimulating stem cells and immunology, renewing our DNA, and creating new neurons at any age, as recent studies have shown. Opposite is true, too. We kick-start cortisol and inflammation with negativity. Turns out, thinking young while physically aging is an option.

Manipulate God at your peril. It’s simple. Love, Mercy and Forgiveness. Rx.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan