I think it’s worthy to acknowledge that some people have this in reverse. Early trauma, mental health struggles, early experience with transcendental reality, for some develop the need for capacity very early in life. Capability in this reality is secondary at first it must grow out of emerging capacity. Many must learn capacity very early. Capability is a fruit of developing capacity. We don’t do to become something. Doing for some must come out of being. Being is a fruit of capacity.
The capability-capacity distinction cuts deep – and I think there's a clarifying contribution to be made here.
Capacity isn't one thing. There are structurally different capacities with their own developmental conditions:
the ability to regulate,
to build genuine belonging,
to act effectively – and perhaps the rarest of all – to genuinely explore without an outcome imperative.
But what societies actually develop isn't simply action-capacity. It's action-capacity systematically coupled with fear. Avoid failure, secure status, don't fall behind. That's not a side effect – that's the design. Performance from protective mode rather than from genuine agency.
What makes this so stubborn is the identity coupling. When identity is built primarily from action, and that action is coupled to protection, a self-reinforcing loop starts turning. Every threat to that identity activates the protective mode – which suppresses connection and exploration – which deepens the monoculture further. The system actively defends its own narrowness. Not from unwillingness. Because the identity structure itself is at stake.
I come from an environment that didn't have these collective structures. It took decades to understand why this combination alone doesn't hold. What actually helped wasn't more action – it was slowly building the other capacities, with the right people, under the right conditions.
And what I learned in that process: capacity development doesn't simply happen through exposure. The system has to be in a state that allows integration in the first place. That's the missing layer in almost every approach to this topic – including very good ones like this.
The wisdom required can be found in our contemplative traditions, but most of our religions are stuck at a much less mature development stage, hence their failure to meet these needs. For me I think the 2500+ years old teaching of the Buddha are a good place to start in sitting with all of this.
As far as I understand Buddhism, the path toward non-attachment is itself a sequence – first stabilization, then insight. That's not accidental.
Stabilization calms the nervous system. Only when inner activation settles and enough stillness emerges does what insight actually requires become accessible: distance from one's own reactions. As long as you're caught inside them, you take them for yourself – and defend them accordingly. Anatta would then not be a belief but a state: the moment where one recognizes one's patterns as patterns. Not as truth.
That path cannot be skipped. The traditions knew this long before there was a different language for it.
Do you see it similarly – or would you draw the connection differently?
Agreed, the intellectual understanding of no-self / emptiness can be a powerful insight, but it has to be a felt experience. There are traditions that see that as something that can happen in an instant, but I'm not sure how possible that is for the busy egoic western mind. I experience glimpses but I think a more stabilised non-dual awareness will take many years of practice and the paradox is that having that as an objective reinforces the idea of a 'self' 🤪
That paradox you're pointing to is real – and I know it from my own experience. The moment presence becomes a goal, the effort itself gets in the way.
What helped me – and this sounds almost too simple – is not trying to reduce the mental activity directly, but consciously moving into experience. Something physical, something concrete, where the mind follows instead of leads. Presence then emerges as a side effect – not as an achievement. I notice this myself again and again: the more I try to understand it, the further I sometimes am from actually experiencing it. The entry through the body beats the entry through the mind every time.
Which is probably exactly what the traditions meant when they built stabilization into the path before insight. Maybe the western mind doesn't need a different destination – just a different entry point.
The entry point observation is the key. The traditions built stabilization before insight because they understood the sequence: body first, mind follows. What's missing for most western practitioners is a framework adapted to ordinary life, where that entry happens in the middle of a workday, not only on a cushion. The convergence of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience confirms the same sequence the traditions encoded. Different language, same mechanism: www.awarelife.co.il/validation
The entry point observation is the key. The traditions built stabilization before insight because they understood the sequence: body first, mind follows. What's missing for most western practitioners is a framework adapted to ordinary life, where that entry happens in the middle of a workday, not only on a cushion. The convergence of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience confirms the same sequence the traditions encoded. Different language, same mechanism: www.awarelife.co.il/validation
There's only one route Home in this Life and it is through the Heart! Religion did everything it could to obfuscate that most liberal concept and failed. Now they are the Pariah of their own making. In my world religion is Done! The Heart leads the way. The only GPS we actually need!
Jim Palmer’s piece offers a concise, empathetic reframing of religion’s appeal, followed by a humanistic alternative. Drawing from psychology of religion, existential philosophy, and deconstructionist thought, the former evangelical pastor advocates shedding institutional dogma while honoring core human needs for meaning, agency, and connection.
Core Structure and Strengths
Palmer outlines three fundamental fears—randomness and meaninglessness, helplessness and powerlessness, despair over loss without hope—and religion’s responses: explanatory narratives, anxiety relief through rituals and agency, and comfort via hope in redemption. This is a fair summary, backed by research showing religion’s benefits in providing purpose, coping with mortality, and social support.
He pivots to secular substitutes. Explanation emerges from science’s story of cosmic emergence, self-organization, complexity, and awareness. Agency flows from human capacities for problem-solving, creativity, and community-building. Comfort lies in interpersonal love, solidarity, tenderness, and the assurance we do not face hardship alone.
Strengths include its empathetic tone, which validates religion’s genuine benefits rather than dismissing them. It aligns with existential psychology by addressing universal needs and emphasizes understanding, participation, and belonging. The warm, poetic language appeals to those disillusioned by dogma yet seeking depth, celebrating wonder in life itself without scientism’s coldness.
Criticisms and Limitations
The text is elegant but underplays real challenges. The fear of cosmic indifference is not fully eased by evolutionary narratives, which describe but do not provide normative purpose or personal redemption for suffering. Many experience the universe’s vastness as amplifying isolation.
Human agency is extraordinary yet finite; systemic forces and personal frailty often overwhelm efforts, risking burnout where religion’s rituals offer surrender and perceived transcendence. Comfort in relationships is vital but fragile—loss and betrayal create voids that denser religious communities, with shared cosmology and rituals, sometimes buffer more effectively.
Palmer’s binary framing implies supernatural beliefs are optional add-ons, yet for many they form an integral whole. It romanticizes secular sources while downplaying religion’s sustaining role in extreme trials and history’s mixed record on both sides. Psychological research, such as Terror Management Theory, suggests his alternatives suit resilient individuals but may fall short for those with high existential anxiety. Secular belonging requires deliberate effort that not everyone can sustain.
Overall Assessment
Palmer’s text is thoughtful and compassionate, a valuable contribution to post-religious discourse. It promotes humanism rooted in wonder and care. Its optimism bias is the main weakness: human relationships and science are powerful but incomplete for every temperament or crisis. Ultimate meaning and unshakeable hope remain open questions.
Truth-seeking invites personal testing—does secular participation suffice in your hardest moments? The piece fosters dialogue over division and is worth engaging regardless of belief.
It seems that what you are saying is that people are being asked to grow up spiritually and emotionally. I agree.
I think it’s worthy to acknowledge that some people have this in reverse. Early trauma, mental health struggles, early experience with transcendental reality, for some develop the need for capacity very early in life. Capability in this reality is secondary at first it must grow out of emerging capacity. Many must learn capacity very early. Capability is a fruit of developing capacity. We don’t do to become something. Doing for some must come out of being. Being is a fruit of capacity.
The capability-capacity distinction cuts deep – and I think there's a clarifying contribution to be made here.
Capacity isn't one thing. There are structurally different capacities with their own developmental conditions:
the ability to regulate,
to build genuine belonging,
to act effectively – and perhaps the rarest of all – to genuinely explore without an outcome imperative.
But what societies actually develop isn't simply action-capacity. It's action-capacity systematically coupled with fear. Avoid failure, secure status, don't fall behind. That's not a side effect – that's the design. Performance from protective mode rather than from genuine agency.
What makes this so stubborn is the identity coupling. When identity is built primarily from action, and that action is coupled to protection, a self-reinforcing loop starts turning. Every threat to that identity activates the protective mode – which suppresses connection and exploration – which deepens the monoculture further. The system actively defends its own narrowness. Not from unwillingness. Because the identity structure itself is at stake.
I come from an environment that didn't have these collective structures. It took decades to understand why this combination alone doesn't hold. What actually helped wasn't more action – it was slowly building the other capacities, with the right people, under the right conditions.
And what I learned in that process: capacity development doesn't simply happen through exposure. The system has to be in a state that allows integration in the first place. That's the missing layer in almost every approach to this topic – including very good ones like this.
No Self, No Problems
The wisdom required can be found in our contemplative traditions, but most of our religions are stuck at a much less mature development stage, hence their failure to meet these needs. For me I think the 2500+ years old teaching of the Buddha are a good place to start in sitting with all of this.
As far as I understand Buddhism, the path toward non-attachment is itself a sequence – first stabilization, then insight. That's not accidental.
Stabilization calms the nervous system. Only when inner activation settles and enough stillness emerges does what insight actually requires become accessible: distance from one's own reactions. As long as you're caught inside them, you take them for yourself – and defend them accordingly. Anatta would then not be a belief but a state: the moment where one recognizes one's patterns as patterns. Not as truth.
That path cannot be skipped. The traditions knew this long before there was a different language for it.
Do you see it similarly – or would you draw the connection differently?
Agreed, the intellectual understanding of no-self / emptiness can be a powerful insight, but it has to be a felt experience. There are traditions that see that as something that can happen in an instant, but I'm not sure how possible that is for the busy egoic western mind. I experience glimpses but I think a more stabilised non-dual awareness will take many years of practice and the paradox is that having that as an objective reinforces the idea of a 'self' 🤪
That paradox you're pointing to is real – and I know it from my own experience. The moment presence becomes a goal, the effort itself gets in the way.
What helped me – and this sounds almost too simple – is not trying to reduce the mental activity directly, but consciously moving into experience. Something physical, something concrete, where the mind follows instead of leads. Presence then emerges as a side effect – not as an achievement. I notice this myself again and again: the more I try to understand it, the further I sometimes am from actually experiencing it. The entry through the body beats the entry through the mind every time.
Which is probably exactly what the traditions meant when they built stabilization into the path before insight. Maybe the western mind doesn't need a different destination – just a different entry point.
The entry point observation is the key. The traditions built stabilization before insight because they understood the sequence: body first, mind follows. What's missing for most western practitioners is a framework adapted to ordinary life, where that entry happens in the middle of a workday, not only on a cushion. The convergence of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience confirms the same sequence the traditions encoded. Different language, same mechanism: www.awarelife.co.il/validation
The entry point observation is the key. The traditions built stabilization before insight because they understood the sequence: body first, mind follows. What's missing for most western practitioners is a framework adapted to ordinary life, where that entry happens in the middle of a workday, not only on a cushion. The convergence of ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience confirms the same sequence the traditions encoded. Different language, same mechanism: www.awarelife.co.il/validation
There's only one route Home in this Life and it is through the Heart! Religion did everything it could to obfuscate that most liberal concept and failed. Now they are the Pariah of their own making. In my world religion is Done! The Heart leads the way. The only GPS we actually need!
Analysis and Evaluation of Jim Palmer’s Text
Jim Palmer’s piece offers a concise, empathetic reframing of religion’s appeal, followed by a humanistic alternative. Drawing from psychology of religion, existential philosophy, and deconstructionist thought, the former evangelical pastor advocates shedding institutional dogma while honoring core human needs for meaning, agency, and connection.
Core Structure and Strengths
Palmer outlines three fundamental fears—randomness and meaninglessness, helplessness and powerlessness, despair over loss without hope—and religion’s responses: explanatory narratives, anxiety relief through rituals and agency, and comfort via hope in redemption. This is a fair summary, backed by research showing religion’s benefits in providing purpose, coping with mortality, and social support.
He pivots to secular substitutes. Explanation emerges from science’s story of cosmic emergence, self-organization, complexity, and awareness. Agency flows from human capacities for problem-solving, creativity, and community-building. Comfort lies in interpersonal love, solidarity, tenderness, and the assurance we do not face hardship alone.
Strengths include its empathetic tone, which validates religion’s genuine benefits rather than dismissing them. It aligns with existential psychology by addressing universal needs and emphasizes understanding, participation, and belonging. The warm, poetic language appeals to those disillusioned by dogma yet seeking depth, celebrating wonder in life itself without scientism’s coldness.
Criticisms and Limitations
The text is elegant but underplays real challenges. The fear of cosmic indifference is not fully eased by evolutionary narratives, which describe but do not provide normative purpose or personal redemption for suffering. Many experience the universe’s vastness as amplifying isolation.
Human agency is extraordinary yet finite; systemic forces and personal frailty often overwhelm efforts, risking burnout where religion’s rituals offer surrender and perceived transcendence. Comfort in relationships is vital but fragile—loss and betrayal create voids that denser religious communities, with shared cosmology and rituals, sometimes buffer more effectively.
Palmer’s binary framing implies supernatural beliefs are optional add-ons, yet for many they form an integral whole. It romanticizes secular sources while downplaying religion’s sustaining role in extreme trials and history’s mixed record on both sides. Psychological research, such as Terror Management Theory, suggests his alternatives suit resilient individuals but may fall short for those with high existential anxiety. Secular belonging requires deliberate effort that not everyone can sustain.
Overall Assessment
Palmer’s text is thoughtful and compassionate, a valuable contribution to post-religious discourse. It promotes humanism rooted in wonder and care. Its optimism bias is the main weakness: human relationships and science are powerful but incomplete for every temperament or crisis. Ultimate meaning and unshakeable hope remain open questions.
Truth-seeking invites personal testing—does secular participation suffice in your hardest moments? The piece fosters dialogue over division and is worth engaging regardless of belief.