Week in Review (2025: Week One)

My Street Corner Sign, the Crazy Uncle Guru, an Un-Annual Report, and a Curious History of Sex

Jan 04, 2025

It’s Week One of 2025. Only 51 weeks left to go to 2026!

I wrote my annual “This-is-NOT-A-Year-End-Post”. This year’s edition is titled: Un-advice, Un-lessons, Un-resolutions and Un-goals for 2025.

In the article I discuss:

five reasons why I refuse to write a year-end article
why New Year’s Resolutions are bad for your health
need for defiance and disobedience to create the life you want
what is “radical acceptance” and how to live it
why the most important freedom is freedom from our own self-judgment
one lesson I learned worth repeating

2025, known as the Year of the Snake in the Chinese Zodiac, emphasizes transformation, spiritual growth and rebirth. Snakes are known for their ability to shed their skin, symbolizing the process of letting go of the old and embracing the new.

The Chinese Zodiac calendar, which dates back over 2,000 years, is based on a 12-year cycle, with each year represented by an animal from the Chinese mythology. The snake, being the sixth animal in the zodiac, takes center stage in 2025.

The snake has long been recognized as a mysterious and multilayered being. It carries various symbols; sometimes as a symbol of wisdom, as a guardian deity and sometimes as an incarnation of regeneration and transformation. These symbols and imaginations are embedded in myths, legends and folk narratives in the East and the West.

Living both underground and aboveground, the snake was thought to know all the secrets of life, symbolizing it as a beacon of wisdom. Throughout history, humans have perceived snakes as both fearful and sacred beings, giving the serpent different positive and negative associations.

I am currently publishing a series of articles on the psychology of religion. In one of these articles I discuss Carl Jung’s work. Jung believed that animals represent archetypes, or universal symbols, that are present in the unconscious mind. He considered the snake a universal symbol that can represent transformation and transcendence.

For Jung, the snake is a key symbol that can cross between the conscious and unconscious worlds. In The Red Book, Jung wrote:

“I have united with the serpent of the beyond. I have accepted everything beyond into myself.”

One might take this statement to mean that Jung experienced a transformative integration of his conscious and unconscious psyche.

The unconscious mind is made up of thoughts, memories, and instincts that are buried below our conscious awareness. While we may not be aware of them, they can have a significant impact on our lives, relationships, choices and behavior. Integrating the conscious and unconscious mind is a process called “individuation” in Jungian psychology. It involves getting to know every part of your mind, including the parts you may have hidden away, also known as the “shadow self”. I address these dynamics in my article mentioned above.

The obvious question here might be: How does someone access their unconscious? By definition, if it’s “unconscious”, you don’t have conscious access to it. Here are a few pathways for exploring the unconscious with links to assist you:

This week I published Part Four of my series on the psychology of religion. The point of this series is NOT to question, undermine, debunk and dismiss all religious faith and experience. What I hope to achieve in this series includes:

Introduce people to the field of the psychology of religion to aid their process in cultivating a meaningful and liberating non-religious spirituality.
Point out ways that the insights from the psychology of religion can aid people in a faith transition, existential crisis, religious deconstruction process, or addressing the dynamics of Religious Trauma Syndrome.
Demonstrate how to utilize the field of the psychology of religion to develop critical, nuanced, balanced, compassionate thinking about the phenomenon of religion.

So far, the series has unfolded in three parts:

Part One: It’s All in Your Head (Or Is It?) → Series Introduction
Part Two: Is Religion Illusion, Delusion or Prehension? → Work of Sigmund Freud
Part Three: Does Religion Unlock or Shut Down Our Transcendence? → Work of Carl Jung

Part Four is titled, “Is ‘God’ Our Unconscious?” In this piece I explore some of Jacques Lacan’s psychological insights into religion. Lacan wrote, “The true formula of atheism is not 'God is dead' — the true formula of atheism is that God is unconscious.” What??? God is unconscious? What does that mean? This is one item I discuss in the article.

Unless you have a background in psychology, you’ve probably never heard of Jacques Lacan. Most people know famous psychologists such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers… but not Lacan. It is said that Lacan may be the best and least known psychoanalyst. He is perhaps the least known because he is difficult to understand, which may be the biggest understatement ever made other than the Dallas Cowboys needing a new coach… and maybe an entire new team.

These are the stages I have gone through in my journey with Jacques Lacan:

Stage One: Ignorance → Lacan’s name popped up. I had never heard of him before, and I surmised that if he was all that important I would have heard of him by now.

Stage Two: Déjà Vu → The more I explored psychology and religion, Lacan continued to appear now and again. I browsed his Wiki page and forgot about him.'

Stage Three: Seriously??? → Years ago, I was reading

Slavoj Žižek

and Jacques Lacan appeared in a few of his articles and he even published some books about Lacan. I looked into Lacan, and I was like, “Seriously??? This guy makes no sense! I don’t have time to get a PhD on Lacanianism. I’m out!

Stage Four: You Can Do Hard Things → Of course now, having explored Lacan loosely, he started popping up repeatedly. It was then I learned that Google weaponizes your browser searches against you. I started seeing Lacan everywhere. I’m convinced I saw a ghost of him at the Waffle House down on 2nd Avenue. I decided it was time to pony up and tackle Lacan.

Stage Five: #@%! Lacan → At first, the more I studied Lacan, the less I understood his work. It was frustrating. I contemplated hanging it up and moving to a remote island in the Indian Ocean, but I’m someone who wouldn’t have lasted even through the first episode of Naked and Afraid. So I walked away from Lacan for a season, and then returned to him later.

Stage Six: Lacan Love → I can’t say to have completely figured out Jacques Lacan. That’s not so bad. Does anyone really completely understand Lacan? But I grew to deeply appreciate his insights into the human psyche, the unconscious and religion. I would count his work as some of the most important to read in the fields of psychology and religion.

Stage Seven: Street Corner Sign → Next to running 135 miles in one ultramarathon race, presenting Jacques Lacan in one brief article may be one of my greatest feats. Imagine me standing on a street corner holding a sign that reads, “Please Study Jacques Lacan”. That’s how far I’ve come!

In my Lacan article, some of the themes include:

why Jacques Lacan is the best and least known psychoanalyst
what Lacan understood that Freud and Jung never did
why religion’s “God” is a fantasy that can never work but will never go away
understanding the “God”-shaped hole left in the un conscious of religion-leavers
interpreting the biblical metanarrative though a Lacanian lens
how the death of religion’s “God” may be a doorway to true liberation

Next week article will be covering the work of Julie Reshe.

What Subscribers are Saying

Thanks Tracy! I appreciate your kind and encouraging words. What particularly caught my attention about what Tracy wrote is the struggle to make Jesus work inside Christian sub-culture. I would even go so far to say that you can’t really make Jesus work inside Christian theology. I’ve learned that Jesus is a figure of interest far beyond the Christian religion, and that one can find meaning in Jesus without being a Christian. In my view, you can’t pin Christianity on Jesus. He didn’t start the Christian religion and I don’t believe he would endorse what is often passed off as “Christianity” today. I wrote about this in my fifth book, Inner Anarchy: Dethroning God and Jesus to Save Ourselves and the World.

Week in Photos

Speaking of my above point about Jesus and Christian culture, in the image above David Hayward illustrates it well.

A light show and fireworks illuminate the Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest building, during New Year's celebrations in Dubai.

This next week in my psychology of religion series, I’ll be covering the work of Ukrainian-born philosopher and psychoanalyst, Julie Reshe.

Any predictions? It’s hard to say. I’m wondering if Ohio State is so ticked about losing to Michigan in Columbus they they will win the whole thing. My Father was a huge Notre Dame fan throughout his life and Rudy is one of my favorite feel-good sports films… so I’m sort of silently rooting for the Irish.

Many well-known people died in 2024. One of them was Charles Osgood. His voice and host of CBS News Sunday Morning for 22 years became a regular feature of my post-religion Sunday morning life. There was something comforting about his voice and demeanor, and I always felt like I gained something valuable from watching the show. I post the brief below video of his show opening as a remembrance of him. Farwell Charles Osgood and thank you.

2024 Substack Newsletter Un-Annual Report

I started my Substack newsletter a year ago. I’ve never been someone motivated by social media statistics in terms of “friends”, “followers” or “subscribers”. It’s deceiving. Some people have an impressive social media following because they are good at branding, promotion and marketing. Nothing wrong with that. Just saying. On the other hand, some of the most brilliant people I know are not social media savvy and don’t have a huge following.

There are those, say Van Gogh and Bach, who never received the respect they deserved during their lifetime. Many extraordinary writers and thinkers only become famous posthumously, such as Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Simone de Beauvoir, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s works never reached a wide readership during his active writing career. Social media is complicated. A TikTok video of a cat driving a car might get one million views, while a Carlo Rovelli post may only get twenty.

Whether it’s 14 or 14,000 subscribers, I want my Substack publication to inspire and aid people in becoming more profound, liberated, compassionate and fully actualized human beings. It’s a process that involves a lot of unlearning and relearning, deconstruction and reconstruction, shedding and reshaping, examining sacred cows and the courage to think and be differently.

So for this year’s un-annual report I decided I’d identify my 5 least popular articles that I most want people to read.

1. Audre Lorde

In my series, “Philosophers You Have Never Heard Of”, I included an article on Audre Lorde titled, Your silence will not protect you. If you haven’t heard of Audre Lorde, it may be because the intellectual labor of black women is unfairly unrecognized. In the article I discuss:

the dirty little secret why you have never heard of Audre Lorde
how intersectionality applies to feminism... and religious deconstruction
why silence is the loudest statement we make
how to stop looking at people and truly seeing them
why the LGBTQ+ community suffers from Religious Trauma Syndrome

2. Simone de Beauvoir

The second piece that was not a top-read article was also from my philosophy series. The article explored the work of Simone de Beauvoir. Google top Western philosophers and the top ten will likely be white men. Women don’t do philosophy? Of course they do but for many reasons (some of them quite unsavory) you never hear about them. Most people know Simone’s lifelong partner, Jean-Paul Sartre. Let’s just say a few of Sartre’s ideas may have originally been Simone’s, without receiving any credit.

In the article, I discuss:

how Simone de Beauvoir got robbed of her just due as a philosopher
why Simone left Catholicism for Atheism
why Simone de Beauvoir referred to women as "the second sex"
how Simone saved existential philosophy from going off the rails
why I am indebted to Simone for teaching me how to see people as they really are and not how I was told to see them

3. Murray Bookchin

See that guy in the above picture? He kind of seems like that gruff and eccentric uncle that you do your best to avoid at family gatherings. You’ve probably never heard of Murray Bookchin. Even if you had, you might have been put-off by his association with “anarchism”.

When you hear words like “anarchy”, “anarchism” or “anarchists”, you think of revolt, mayhem, violence, lawlessness, and insurrection. Right? It’s understandable, anarchist revolutions throughout history have often been violent. At it’s core, anarchism is a political theory that is skeptical of the justification of authority and power. Anarchism is usually grounded in moral claims about the importance of individual liberty, often conceived as freedom from domination. Anarchists also offer a positive theory of human flourishing, based upon an ideal of equality, community, and non-coercive consensus building.

By the way, I do not politically identify as an “anarchist”, and the fact of my saying so is a concession to the stigma associated with the word. Then article is titled, When Murray Came to Town: Will It Take a Revolution to Save the Planet?

4. Religious Deconstruction

The first two series of articles I published on Substack were The Evolution of Religion and unChristian: Deconstruction for the rest of us. These have been my least-viewed series of articles, which I think is partly because they are almost a year old and fell of the radar.

In the evolution of religion series I explore the anthropology of religion, which I find to be a useful field of inquiry for understanding the phenomena of religion more deeply, and how this relates to a person's deconstruction process. In the unChristian deconstruction series I explore principles of Eastern philosophy, secular humanism, and Mother-Earth Spirituality, as it relates to the deconstruction process and post-religion spirituality.

5. Death

Though it’s not the most popular subject, I was surprised that more people didn’t read my article on death, titled, Do you fear death? How to cultivate healthy death acceptance. Death anxiety comes up often with the people I work with in religious deconstruction and religious trauma counseling. The need for existential certainty and security is often met though a person’s affiliation with a religious group and belief-system. But when a person leaves religion and discards many (sometimes all) of their former religious beliefs, this often results in an existential ground zero or what is commonly referred to as an “existential crisis”. The fact of death and the question of what happens when you die are on the forefront (or lurking in the unconscious) in people’s minds.

Conversely, my top ten articles in 2024 were:

It was pointed out to me that I have never published an article explicitly about sex or sexuality. Hence, my final segment below.

9 Ways Toxic Religion Messes Up Sexuality

9 Ways Toxic Religion Messes Up Sexuality:

Focusing on sexual expression as the ultimate sin and worst of all possible offenses against God, which leaves the impression that sex and sexuality is dirty, nasty and ungodly.
Teaching that sex is a duty a wife is obligated to perform for her husband whenever he desires or demands it, which results in nonconsensual sexual experiences that are damaging.
Identifying procreation as God’s utmost reason for sexual activity, making sexual enjoyment and pleasure for both the man and woman as secondary and even unnecessary.
Not advocating or reinforcing useful or proper sex education for cultivating healthy and responsible growth of one’s one’s sexuality. Rigid messaging that our sexuality is evil delays normal sexual development.
Taking sex and sexuality off the table of normal and necessary partner discussion and communication, which harbors sexual frustration, dysfunction and resentment.
Sexual repression, as well as the glorification of “denying ourselves” in religious doctrine, teaches people to distrust pleasure, and demonize what naturally feels good, which corrupts sexual fulfillment.
The purity movement within toxic religion infuses sexual education with a notion that our sexual urges are immoral, and that we are better people when we choose to abstain from them.
Toxic religion fails to make any meaningful connection between spirituality and sexuality, and has instead divided them by religious shame.
The idea that losing your virginity before marriage means you’re “damaged goods” and that this fails God’s blueprint for relationship, which instills deeply rooted shame.

Five useful books for your post-religion exploration of sexuality and sexual shame:

Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski
Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own by Matthias Roberts
You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity by Jamie Lee Finch
Wisdom of Your Body by Hillary L. McBride
A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister

In Summary

That’s me on the street corner holding the sign, “Please Study Jacques Lacan.”
TikTok cat videos prove that social media engagement might not be the litmus test for a person’s worth and value.
If you’re willing you can learn something from anyone, including the crazy uncle you avoid at family gatherings.
It’s the Year of the Snake, which you could take as an invitation to explore your unconscious.
Toxic religion does deep harm, which includes damaging a person’s sexuality.

“Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love.”

- Butch Hancock

Tracy

Jan 4

I really appreciate your work, it helps me every day in my process. Your writing is helping me not tumble into Nihilism

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Marilyn Peterlin

Jan 6

Your writing is addictive in a good way. You certainly have a very broad base of knowledge and I appreciate your ideas. I will look into Lacan. Have you ever read James Hillman? He's my Lacan: a brilliant thinker and writer. He founded archetypal psychology, studied at The C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich, wrote many books and gave many lectures. Complex and fascinating.

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