What if God didn’t have an Instagram account? (Faith, power, free Will, and misunderstood pentagrams)

Some mornings I wake up feeling like I’ve been cast in a low-budget Black Mirror spin-off—shot entirely in my 9m² Parisian flat, co-starring two induction burners and a judgmental cat who watches my existential choices from the top of the fridge. And then there are days when it hits me: maybe the real dystopia... is just the history of religion.

I grew up in a chaotic cocktail of whispered prayers to "baby Jesus," Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Scientology personality tests, new-age pendulums, and a heavy silence around the things that should never be said. A spiritual mess with notes of guilt, anxiety, and control. The kind of faith you don’t choose—it’s force-fed in childhood and gets lodged somewhere between your solar plexus and your cognitive biases.

Today, I don’t really believe anymore. But I wouldn’t call myself an atheist either. It’s messier than that. I believe in the rule of three. I believe we reap what we sow, but karmic weather is notoriously unstable. I believe that wearing a pentagram isn’t a call to Lucifer, but more like wearing a compass—one that points to meaning, even when you haven’t found your true North. I believe faith doesn’t need temples, and that inner silence can be worth more than all the sermons in the world.

So in this episode, I’ve set the table again. Black coffee. Warm croissant. And a question most people wouldn’t dare to ask outside of an awkward family dinner: what do you do when you believe… without believing? When you reject dogmas, institutions, and scripture rewritten by men to legitimize their own power—but you’re also not interested in sinking into the chic nihilism of overpriced Paris brunches?

Is it possible to build an ethic, a spirituality, a kind of faith—without falling into a cult or a crystal-saturated Instagram feed?

I’m inviting you into an intimate, sharp-edged conversation. One that slices through the history of religion, dips into neuroscience, maps cognitive bias, and brushes up against personal memories that still sting. It’s a deep dive where the point isn’t to provoke, but to uncover meaning—especially in the places where it hurts. And maybe, just maybe, it’s an honest attempt to ask one last question: what if believing is, above all, the choice not to give up on complexity?

God, beta version

There’s something almost absurd about the idea that faith was born in a cathedral. Long before dogmas, commandments, and priests in cassocks or tailored suits, humans were burying their dead in symbolic positions and painting bison on cave walls with a kind of fervor no algorithm could have anticipated. We like to believe that religions are structured systems, built rationally on sacred texts—but the religious instinct predates language itself. It is visceral. Archaic. Older than alphabets and rituals. At its core, religion was born in the gut. Out of fear. Out of grief. Out of the void.

The word “religion” comes from the Latin religare, to bind, to connect. It sounds charming—almost poetic. But in practice, that connection quickly shifted from metaphorical to instrumental. Man didn’t invent God. He institutionalized a flaw in his own perception of reality. Wherever the mind hit a wall, it projected a higher authority. Something greater. Stronger. More comforting than chaos.

The earliest known religious structures—be they Mesopotamian temples, Göbekli Tepe in modern-day Turkey (dating back to 9500 BCE), or ancient female fertility deities—do not tell a story of divine revelation. They tell a story of hierarchy. These were not just places of worship. They were centers of organization, tools for structuring tribes, for designating who "knew," who "spoke to the beyond," and therefore… who ruled. From the very beginning, belief was tangled with power. And strangely, that confusion was never untangled.

The major monotheistic religions didn’t break that pattern. They refined it. Judaism emerged in a context of exile, oppression, and fractured identity. It introduced a single, invisible, and therefore unassailable God. Christianity, following in its wake, became the weapon of empire. Far from the revolutionary figure Jesus may have been, Rome recognized the strategic value of uniting the masses under a single dogma. Islam, in turn, consolidated tribal societies under a single Law, anchored in a supposedly incorruptible text—transmitted, of course, by men. At every stage, the tool became sharper. The doctrine clearer. The control tighter. Religion stopped being a quest and became an administration. Complete with judges, officials, and penalties.

This isn’t an indictment of believers. It’s a historical observation. Even supposedly secular or philosophical systems haven’t escaped the desire to organize chaos into hierarchy. Confucianism, for instance, shaped imperial China for centuries—not by imposing a deity, but through a strict moral hierarchy in which every person had a place, a role, a responsibility to the order. You don’t need heaven to control a population when shame will do.

And yet, spirituality was never meant for this. Or at least, not always. On the fringes of empires, at the edges of official texts, there have always been pockets of resistance. Often led by women. By sages without churches. Healers, shamans, mystics who refused to reduce the sacred to an organizational chart. They were called witches. They were burned. Ridiculed. Forgotten. But their existence proves one thing: free faith is a threat to order.

That’s where the sarcasm gets caught in my throat. Because if you scrape away the gloss, you see the erasure. Of those who didn’t fit. Of those whose faith couldn’t be standardized, reproduced, commodified. Believing wasn’t enough. You had to believe properly. The right way. The way you were told.

And that’s exactly where my own faith broke. Or rather, where it refused to kneel. I never stopped searching. I never stopped feeling. But I stopped obeying. Because deep down, I cannot believe in a god who demands to be validated like a CEO. I cannot accept a sacred narrative where every word was transcribed, selected, altered, and interpreted—by men, at key historical moments, for political reasons. I’m not against the texts. I’m against how they’ve been wielded as tools of domination.

When you look at the history of religion with clear eyes, you begin to understand: it’s not faith that builds civilizations. It’s fear. And that’s why religions endure. Because they know how to speak to fear. The fear of death. The fear of abandonment. The fear of the void. The fear of chaos. The atheist must build themselves alone in a world without inherent meaning. The believer has a script. A promise. A code. A punishment. It’s more comfortable. And more dangerous.

The real question isn’t whether God exists. It’s what we’re willing to justify in their name. The Crusades. The Inquisition. Patriarchal law. So-called honor killings. Forced conversions. Mutilations. Exclusions. At what point does faith become a pretext for stripping others of their free will? And more urgently: when will we stop pretending it’s God speaking, when it’s clearly men writing?

Maybe it’s time to uninstall the beta version. To stop downloading updates to the dogma. To write our own code. Not to deny the sacred—but to wrest it away from those who confused it with power.

God Inc. and the cognitive glitch

People often say that belief is a matter of the heart. That true faith rises from the gut, a kind of soul-tingling certainty, a light in the dark. Sweet. Also wildly incomplete. Because in truth, believing is first and foremost a chemical reaction. A well-orchestrated neural shortcut, triggered by a brain that despises chaos and prefers a flawed answer to no answer at all. Faith is less a sacred act than a survival mechanism — an elegant, sometimes desperate attempt to give shape to the inconceivable.

Neuroscientists are still scratching their frontal lobes in awe: fMRI scans show that devout believers activate very specific areas of the brain during prayer or meditation. The insula. The medial prefrontal cortex. The limbic system. The same circuit we use when we feel love, safety, or that calm kind of ecstasy you don’t talk about at family dinners. So no — it doesn’t prove that God exists. But it proves that the brain is literally wired to seek meaning, and it freaks out when it can’t find anything to hold onto.

That’s where cognitive biases crash the party — like messy toddlers spilling coffee all over your table and repainting your critical thinking with looping logic. Confirmation bias is the loudest of the bunch. It whispers that if you believe your God protects you, then everything that doesn’t kill you becomes proof of divine grace. And if it does kill you? Well, maybe it’s a test. Or a lesson. Or a mysterious plan beyond mortal comprehension. This bias loves spirals. It turns randomness into signs, absurdity into messages, failure into sacred missions. It locks down interpretation until there’s no air left in the room.

But it’s not alone. Authority bias walks in right behind. Well-dressed. Confident tone. Quoting texts, often in a language no one actually speaks anymore. It asserts. The book is true because the book is sacred. And the book is sacred because God said so. And God said so because the book says it. Voilà. Circle closed. No exits. This is the bias that convinces crowds to obey rules they don’t understand, to submit to figures they never elected, to chant mantras they’ve never questioned. It’s at the heart of every organized religion. And let’s be honest: it’s also at the heart of every political ideology, every guru brand, every influencer in white linen selling you inner peace at €49 per masterclass.

Then there’s cognitive dissonance — the internal crunch when belief and reality just don’t match. When you’re told God is love, but children die under bombs. That prayer heals, but hospitals are overflowing. That karma exists, but the worst people always seem to win. So you rationalize. You invent reasons. You build exceptions and smokescreen theories to keep the universe moral in your mind, even when it clearly isn’t on the ground. This one is the quietest. The most intimate. The one that gnaws at former believers, survivors of cults, those who tried so hard to believe but finally fell silent because admitting they were manipulated hurt too much.

The truth is, the human brain isn’t wired for uncertainty. It’s wired to survive. To interpret. To fill in blanks with stories. And religion, in that system, is one hell of a smart operating system. It gives meaning, even where there’s none. It organizes the invisible. It filters emotion. It offers profitable comfort — as long as you never question the code. And it works. Brilliantly. For centuries, empires and entire nations have been governed with nothing more than a book, a promise, and the fear of hell.

But in shielding ourselves from the void, we forgot to imagine freedom. The real kind. The kind that doesn’t need a god to justify its existence. The kind that doesn’t rest on a law carved in the sky, but on a human conscience brave enough to admit it doesn’t know everything. It’s less cozy. Less cinematic. It doesn’t come in verses. But it’s a hell of a lot more honest.

And me? I’m like one of those grey zones no dogma wants to map. I prayed as a child. Believed as a teenager. Fled as an adult. Now I teeter somewhere between intuition, selective spirituality, and brutal clarity. I listen to synchronicities. I follow the rule of three the way you follow etiquette: not because I blindly believe in it, but because it feels like a form of soul hygiene. I don’t believe in divine punishment — but I believe in the resonance of actions. It’s not a religion. It’s not even a system. It’s a stubborn refusal to hand over my critical thinking for the sake of cognitive comfort.

Because deep down, if God exists, I refuse to reduce him to a mental reflex. And if God doesn’t exist, I refuse to live as if the absence of meaning justifies cynicism. Somewhere between the two, there’s still a space. An in-between. A quiet thread where my own rules are woven. Fragile. Reversible. And profoundly human.

Sects and the City.

There’s a moment in every spiritual journey when faith stops feeling like a sanctuary and starts sounding like a cage. When what once soothed now constrains. When sincere devotion morphs into silent submission. You don’t see it coming — not right away. At first, it’s just a promise. Of belonging. Of purpose. Of order. And then, somewhere along the way, you catch yourself doubting in secret, afraid to think differently, second-guessing your words, your clothes, your books, your friends. And suddenly, you’re not serving God anymore — you’re serving a system. A mechanism. A control structure wrapped in transcendence.

We talk about cults like they’re exotic oddities, fringe folklore. We name Scientology, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Raëlians, off-grid healing communes in the middle of nowhere. But we forget that every religion was, once, a cult that worked. The word itself is slippery — it doesn’t describe beliefs, it describes behavior. A religion becomes a “cult” in the eyes of the law when it isolates, manipulates, exploits, controls. Legal status doesn’t protect against abuse. And history is filled with “great” religions that have used the same playbook as marginal sects: fear, indoctrination, rewriting reality, weaponizing guilt.

There’s no dark magic here. Just a well-oiled psychological machine. It starts with a fracture. A grief, a loss, a vulnerability. An existential crack. And into that void slips a voice: Here, you’ll find your place. Here, you’ll understand your suffering. Here, you’ll be loved, guided, protected. The siren song is comforting. And honestly? It works. Because we all want to believe. Because it’s human — painfully human — to crave someone telling us what to do when everything’s falling apart.

And then the mechanisms kick in. A new language forms. Closed. Insular. A kind of spiritual Newspeak that replaces doubt with vague, weighty words: purification, awakening, truth, fall. The outside world becomes “dangerous,” and we’re told this isolation is protection. Priorities get reshuffled. Family, friends, personal desires? Distractions. The group becomes the compass. Everything external is seen as a threat, a test, a temptation. You stop thinking. You start absorbing.

Research on cult dynamics always reveals the same trajectory: progressive detachment from reality, emotional reconditioning, identity absorption by the group, erosion of independent decision-making. And maybe the most insidious part? You don’t even realize it. Because the control is wrapped in love. Because the psychological violence is slow, subtle — one hand caressing while the other tightens the grip.

And these mechanisms aren’t exclusive to religious groups. That might be the scariest part. You’ll find them in some companies. In certain self-help circles. In political movements. In hyper-identity fandoms. Wherever there’s a powerful narrative, a charismatic leader, a promise of transformation, rejection of outsiders, and pressure to conform — the ground is ripe for manipulation. The style shifts. The structure stays.

Of course, not all belief systems are traps. Not all groups are prisons. Some communities heal. Some uplift. Some liberate. But the danger always begins in the same place: when doubt is no longer allowed. When a message, however inspiring, becomes immune to contradiction. When a guide, however gentle on the surface, starts speaking “on behalf” of something bigger than themselves.

And me? I never formally “belonged” to a religion. But I’ve known dogma. I’ve known the pressure to obey a truth you can’t question without being accused of betrayal. I grew up in spaces where thinking for yourself was dangerous. Where doubt was a sin. Where shadows were to be eradicated — never understood. I’ve worn crosses. Then silences. Then scars. And even now, I carry reflexes. The urge to explain myself. The fear of displeasing an invisible authority.

What I’ve come to understand is this: faith can be precious. But it should never justify the erasure of self. To believe shouldn’t mean to disappear. To walk a spiritual path shouldn’t mean giving up critical thought. Spirituality shouldn’t be a gilded cage where we sing while learning to ignore our own voice.

And if I speak now, it’s not to shame believers. It’s for those who, like me, once thought they had a problem with faith — when the real issue was the toxic structure surrounding it. I speak so they can breathe again. So they know it’s possible to believe without being bound. To search without surrender. To doubt without getting lost.

Because maybe real faith begins there: when you dare to ask whether what you believe makes you freer — or just more obedient. Whether the path you follow lifts you up — or erases you. And whether what you’ve placed your trust in… truly deserves your silence.

The art of selective faith

There’s this persistent notion that religion is the root of all morality. That without God, anything goes. That ethics is merely a side effect of transcendence — a functional offshoot of the sacred. It’s convenient. It’s comforting. And, historically and philosophically? It’s deeply questionable.

Because long before gods had names, humans already knew that killing wasn’t exactly a brilliant idea. Not because some higher being was frowning down from the clouds, but because living together demanded cooperation. Resources had to be shared. Conflicts had to be resolved. Ethics didn’t emerge from theology — it emerged from the necessity of coexistence. Religion may have codified this morality later on, but it didn’t invent it. It merely sanctified it — and sometimes pushed it into the absurd.

Take free will, for example. In most major monotheistic doctrines, it’s framed as a divine gift — the freedom granted to humanity to choose. But of course, only if you choose correctly. Suddenly, this “freedom” becomes a constant test, a tightrope walk of eternal consequences. You’re free — but make the wrong choice, and you’ll suffer. Forever. No appeal. They call that free will. But functionally, it looks suspiciously like freedom with conditions — under celestial surveillance.

And if God sees all, knows all, anticipates all, then that “choice” isn’t really a choice. It’s the illusion of agency inside a script that’s already written. Like an RPG where you can customize your character, but you can’t skip the main quest. This is a theological paradox that few doctrines dare to confront: how do you reconcile divine omniscience with genuine moral responsibility? How can you be freely judged for actions that were predicted, permitted, or even preordained by a supposedly perfect creator?

Which brings us to a bigger question: is the monotheistic conception of God even compatible with the idea of inner democracy? Can you worship an all-powerful entity without surrendering, at least partially, your own capacity for autonomous judgment? Because a god who declares his truth the only truth isn’t a guide. He’s a monarch. And obedience becomes the virtue — not conscience. Thought is replaced by compliance. And in that shift, morality fades. What remains is submission.

Maybe it’s worth remembering that real morality — the kind that survives dogma — isn’t built on fear of punishment or hope for reward. It grows in the gaze we offer others, in the way we listen to pain, in the recognition of shared humanity. You can be an atheist and profoundly ethical. You can be a believer and deeply destructive. The two don’t cancel each other out. Believing doesn’t make you better. And not believing doesn’t make you immoral. They’re intersecting axes, not opposites.

And then there’s this other idea, sneakier: that personal spirituality is always good. Always legitimate. Always “pure.” But that’s not true either. The individualization of faith — this contemporary trend of DIY mythology built with tarot cards, guided meditations, and “high vibration” playlists — can also lead to spiritual ego, to denial of reality, to political apathy wrapped in the word “energy.” Just because it’s personal doesn’t mean it’s healthy. Isolation can become a bubble of self-satisfaction. A narcissistic fortress.

For faith to be healthy, it must be able to face opposition. It must be shakeable. It must tolerate self-questioning. Whether shared in a collective setting or experienced in the intimacy of silence, it cannot become a pretext for blindness. It cannot become an excuse for avoidance. Faith that forbids doubt is already a prison. Spirituality that rejects contradiction is already a soft dictatorship. And morality that dies without God was never morality — it was just a strategy for obedience.

So then: how far can we believe without betraying ourselves? Where is the line between faith and captivity? Between inner quest and structured delusion? The answer, maybe, lies in recognizing our own biases. In radical honesty. In the ability to ask, regularly: Does what I believe make me more humble, or more rigid? Does it connect me to others, or trap me in moral superiority? Do I allow myself to not know?

I don’t know if God exists. But I do know that true belief — real belief — isn’t about chasing safety. It’s about walking through uncertainty without turning your fear into an absolute. It’s about accepting that meaning may never arrive — and choosing to find truth in the journey anyway. Not universal. Not transferrable. Just honest.

That’s why I don’t believe in dogma. Or prophets. Or Instagram mantras recycled into carousels with golden gradients. I believe in the questions we dare to ask when no one’s watching. I believe in silences filled with doubt. I believe in clumsy, stubborn attempts to stay lucid in a world that keeps selling prepackaged answers. And if I ever meet God, I’ll ask just one thing: Did you really want me to be free — or just obedient?

Did God ghost his own creation?

There’s something oddly ironic about our times. One would think that science, technology, and hyperconnectivity would have been enough to bury faith once and for all — a relic of the past, irrelevant in the age of quantum computing and AI-generated horoscopes. And yet, here we are. Watching a bizarre two-way drift. On one side: the steady rise of atheism, at least in parts of the West where freedom of belief still enjoys a decent survival rate. On the other: a resurgence of religiosity — louder, bolder, sometimes borderline theatrical. As if the collapse of old certainties hadn’t wiped the map clean, but instead carved new borders between a need to believe and a refusal to surrender.

It’s not a paradox. It’s a diagnosis. Because those two movements don’t cancel each other out — they feed off one another. The more chaotic the world becomes, the more some people flee into the arms of reason, the tangible, the measurable. Meanwhile, others — just as human, just as afraid — seek refuge in metaphysical narratives that give structure to the collapse. Pandemics, wars, climate and identity crises — they all fuel a hunger for stability. Chaos breeds dogma. Incoherence triggers ritual.

And the newer generations? They walk this tightrope with the poise of a schizophrenic acrobat. They distrust institutions but light candles on esoteric altars. They reject the Catholicism of their parents but line up moonstones on their nightstands. They no longer enter churches, but they binge spiritual podcasts while talking about “energy” and “vibrations.” It’s not less religious — just a different liturgy. A nomadic, modular kind of faith. A self-built identity made from mystic fragments, pop psychology, and emotional anchoring.

Where their elders believed in a vertical God, they seek horizontal coherence: a belief system with no hierarchy, no obligation, no confessional booth. A faith that doesn’t impose, but resonates. That doesn’t judge, but accompanies. And above all, that doesn’t pretend to have all the answers. It’s seductive. It’s flexible. It’s postmodern. But it’s also fragile. Because this à-la-carte spirituality can quickly turn into a mirror — a self-validating algorithm where the only deity you encounter is your own reflection. There’s comfort, yes. But is there transformation?

And then there are the new religions. The ones we don’t dare call religions, because they don’t come with temples or hymns. But they’re very real. You’ll find them in extreme environmentalist discourses that sanctify the Earth to the point of wishing punishment upon humanity. In radical transhumanist circles dreaming of immortality, human-machine fusion, and algorithmically “corrected” humanity. In hyper-identitarian political movements that turn struggle into crusade, ideology into gospel, and opponents into heretics. Always the same pattern: a grand narrative, a promise of salvation, an enemy to destroy, an absolute truth.

Technology doesn’t dilute these beliefs — it amplifies them. Social media becomes a permanent temple: a place for preaching, excommunication, conversion. Algorithms reinforce cognitive bubbles, exaggerate biases, and make belief systems hermetically sealed. We don’t debate. We broadcast. We don’t doubt. We comment. And under the guise of progress, we build digital liturgies that mimic ancient sacred systems: totems (influencers), dogmas (viral threads), sacrifices (public shaming), miracles (exploding likes).

But this isn’t just about form. It speaks to a deep, human need: to believe that our lives are part of something bigger. Once, we called it “God.” Now, we call it “purpose,” “truth,” “mission.” The label changes — the metaphysical hunger stays. It just wears different clothes. Sometimes a crucifix. Sometimes a “conscious AI.” Sometimes a political cause or a palo santo ritual.

The danger isn’t faith itself. It’s what we do with it. When it becomes exclusive. Totalitarian. Intolerant of nuance. When it demands human sacrifices — symbolic or otherwise — to sustain itself. When it requires silence, conformity, the erasure of complexity. At that point, it’s no longer a search for meaning. It’s a weapon.

So what’s left for those who refuse both the comfort of dogma and the void of meaninglessness? Perhaps this: the delicate, necessary posture of lucidity without cynicism. Doubt as discipline. Wonder without dependency. Spirituality that doesn’t cost you yourself. A faith with no church, no master, no absolutes — but plenty of courage. The courage to resist easy truths. The courage to keep searching, even when no one’s watching.

I don’t know if the world still needs religion. But I do know it needs consciousness. And consciousness can’t be taught like catechism. It grows slowly, in friction with reality. It feeds on books, conversations, and shared silences. It doesn’t need a god — just a gaze. One that turns inward, outward, and toward the living. And maybe, just maybe, that’s where the sacred lives now. Not in heaven. But in the way we choose to stand — fully in doubt — without trying to convert anyone.

Conclusion - No maps. Just questions.

We often wish the truth would side with certainty. That it had a defined shape, a familiar face, a soothing voice whispering: “You’re on the right path.” We want to believe there’s a correct answer, a dominant narrative, a timeless wisdom to follow — like tracing a constellation across the sky. But truth, when you look for it honestly, tastes like paradox. It doesn’t show up for those who seek comfort. It reveals itself to those willing to never own it.

Maybe believing isn’t about chasing some absolute truth. Maybe it’s learning how to live without demanding one. Maybe real spirituality begins exactly where dogma fails — in the cracks, in the nuance, in the awareness that nothing is ever set in stone. Not our stories, not our wounds, not our clumsy attempts to make sense of the chaos. And if God exists — if he, or she, or it exists — then maybe God isn’t a figure, but that quiet vertigo we feel when we stare at the sky too long. When a selfless gesture knocks the wind out of us. When a song breaks our heart for no apparent reason.

What this journey has taught me isn’t whether to believe or not believe. It’s that no one gets to tell me how to believe. It taught me to reclaim the part of myself that seeks, doubts, questions, and experiments — without surrendering. To understand that faith, like everything human, can either liberate or trap. And the only way not to fall victim to it… is to look it straight in the eye. Even when it shakes. Even when it offends. Even when it contradicts itself.

So no, I don’t have a religion. I don’t follow a doctrine. But I have silences. I have instincts. I have memories where the invisible felt real. And I carry this sharp awareness that sometimes, the greatest form of reverence toward mystery is not trying to tame it. Just learning to walk with it — mindfully.

And you — what do you believe in when everything falls apart? Who do you talk to when you pretend you’re talking to no one? What lifts you — not to rise above others, but to meet them again with more clarity? There’s no right answer. But there are real questions. And they deserve to be asked. Over and over. Even if no church is ever built around them. Even if no god ever replies.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Cappuccino & Croissant. If you want to keep exploring those blurry lines between awareness, culture, and contradiction, you can check out my books, my music, and upcoming episodes on every major platform. And if you want to support sharp, free, independent creation — no filters, no shady sponsors — you can step into my world on Patreon, follow my projects on Instagram and TikTok, or stream my literary and musical work everywhere — from Amazon to Spotify to Google Books. Doubt is a luxury. So is independence. Thank you for making both possible.

See you soon.

Or not.

That too… is sacred.