A Place For Us

Your Gut Already Knows. Your Brain Catches Up Later

I have spent most of my life afraid of making the wrong decision. Not in a paralyzing way — I functioned, I decided, I moved forward. But there was always a low hum of anxiety underneath it. What if I missed something? What if more research would have changed the answer? What if the other choice was better? It took me decades to figure out what was actually going on. And once I did, something shifted. I’ll tell you what but you have to stay to the end. First, let me tell you about a car. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe [https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

When Half Of Your Brain Becomes Your Enemy

I spent yesterday watching two women fight the same battle — and neither one knew it. One was my client, sitting across from me in the morning, wearing her daughter’s engineering school sweatshirt. The other was a stranger at a John Edward show that night, who stood up to ask a question about skeptics — and then admitted that the “skeptic” was her. Same wound. Same brain doing the same thing. Both wanted to believe. Both believed at one time. But both admitted they were sabotaging their own happiness. Their brains were sabotaging their fulfillment. Maybe yours does it too. The Problem With Being Smart My client is not naive. She’s done the work — read the books, listened to hundreds of hours of podcasts, sat with some of the most respected mediums alive. We’re talking Mark Anthony, Fara Gibson, Suzanne Wilson, and Suzanne Giesemann. Some readings hit her like lightning. Others didn’t land as well. And here’s where it gets painful: her brain took both of those facts and used them against her. The readings that didn’t resonate? “See — maybe it’s not real.” The readings that were extraordinary? ”Well, they probably looked me up.” It was like confirmation bias in reverse. She wanted to believe. But her “skeptical” side kept telling her she was deluding herself. I sat with her and said something I say a lot: we live in a world with 200 years of materialist culture at its back. For most of human history, the prevailing view was that we are spiritual creatures with lives beyond our biological limits. This culture tells you, quietly and constantly, that consciousness ends at death, that what you can measure is all that exists, that hope beyond the grave is wishful thinking. Religion- pre-scientific nonsense. Realists live by science, what we can prove, what we can measure in the laboratory. You have to actively work against that materialistic current. The faith that grief cracked open in you? It doesn’t maintain itself. I’m Still a Skeptic Too Here’s something I don’t say often enough: I haven’t arrived. I’ve sat with some of the most gifted mediums alive. I’ve had breakfasts, lunch, and dinners with them. I’ve attended dozens of demonstrations. I’ve designed experiments that ruled out cheating. And I still walk into every one of these events questioning. That’s not a contradiction. That’s the only honest way to do this. I told my client yesterday that this isn’t a destination you reach — it’s a never-ending journey of discovery. You don’t get to a point where you’ve collected enough evidence, and you’re done. The questions keep coming. That’s not a weakness. That’s intellectual integrity. This past week, I engaged with a woman on YouTube who had posted what I’d call a hit piece on Helping Parents Heal and the mediums we work with. She told me, pointedly, that she’d be willing to share what she knows when I was ready to listen. I took that seriously, even knowing her history and her hatred for mediums. I don’t want to only look at one side of this. The moment I stop being willing to hear the other side is the moment I’ve become exactly what I’m arguing against — someone who’s decided what’s true and stopped looking. My client asked me directly: do I believe any mediums are fraudulent? Absolutely. Without question. I think fraudulent mediums — people deliberately deceiving grieving families for money — are a small percentage. But there’s a larger group that deserves the criticism it gets: mediums who speak in generalities, who fish for hits, who throw out vague statements and work hard to make something fit. They may not be frauds in the intentional sense. They may genuinely believe they’re making a connection. But they’re not doing what the best mediums do, and they give skeptics legitimate ammunition. That’s a fair criticism. I’ll own that. What isn’t fair is taking that legitimate criticism and applying it to everyone — including the mediums who operate at a completely different level. Because here’s the paradox: the better a medium is, the more likely they are to get accused of fraud. John Edward told a story that night about a woman he read for on Crossing Over — a reading so precise, so accurate, that she walked away an unbeliever. She was a believer walking in and an unbeliever after. It was too good. Her brain couldn’t accept it as real, so it recast it as deception. The same thing happened with someone I referred to a medium whose a friend with the utmost integrity. The sitter emailed me after and accused her of fraud. Why? The reading had been too accurate. The medium knew things so precise she must have looked them up. Evidential mediumship is about exactly that. But because the medium was too good. She must be a fraud. In this world of Google and Facebook, you have to dig deep to find something that people couldn’t look up. Mediocre mediums get dismissed because they’re mediocre. Exceptional mediums get accused of cheating because they’re exceptional. The cynical mind always finds a door out. What I Saw Last Night A few hours later, I was at John Edward’s show. I want to be clear about something before I describe what happened: I’m not someone who takes this on faith. I’ve spent years building relationships with mediums — having breakfast with them, dinner, drinks. I’ve had one of them in my home. I’ve watched them behind the scenes, seen what drives them, understood why they do what they do. I worked for Thomas John for a couple of years. I’ve volunteered on John Edward’s platform for a year and a half. I speak regularly with others. This is not performance for them. It’s a calling. And I’ve designed experiments — with Thomas John, for example — where cheating was structurally impossible. Not just unlikely. Impossible. So I come to these events with eyes wide open. What John did last night wasn’t a magic act. It was not entertainment. It was something far harder to dismiss. And it’s something way more profound. John is a teacher as much as he is a medium. You might come to his “show” wanting a connection. You might come to be entertained. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of life, your role in it, and how you can do better in this life and the next. That is what John wants you to get out of his show. In the way of evidence, he described to a woman about the moment she had to tell her son’s father — a man she wasn’t married to — that their son had died. He described her driving to that man’s house. He described the house itself. He described them meeting outside and walking in — and then said they didn’t sit down. Try to look that up. He said someone had a horse that died. While working with her, he seemed to get a detail wrong — two horses — but the woman sitting directly beside her had lost a horse too. The energy of both losses had arrived together. The horses had been stabled together. He spoke about a family’s time in a critical care unit, and knowing that staff don’t allow families to eat and sleep there, he asked whether they had been given special permission to stay. They had. It was unusual. He knew. He described detailed familial relationships between grandmothers, mothers, and daughters, generational patterns and encouraged the person getting the reading to be aware and careful— teaching! These aren’t things you get from hot reading — from looking someone up before the show. They’re not in anyone’s Facebook profile. And all of that was almost secondary. What John Actually Does for Two Hours John Edward could just deliver messages. That would be enough for most people. He doesn’t do that. For two full hours — and another 45 minutes for the VIPs — he teaches. About how to live. About how to interpret the patterns in your life using whatever language speaks to you: astrology, numerology, past life regression. About how to recognize the ways you’ve been carrying wounds from before you even knew you were carrying them. A woman in the audience asked the question I’ve heard a hundred times: What would you say to a skeptic who wants to believe? John said, “Skeptic or cynic?” Then she paused, smiled a little, and admitted she was the skeptic. She had believed once. And then — like my client, like so many of us — she had slowly reasoned herself back out of it. John gave her a beautiful answer. I won’t try to reproduce it here because part of the power was in the room. But the short version: your doubt doesn’t mean you’ve gotten smarter. It may mean you’ve gotten more defensive. The Doctor Who Washed His Hands This morning, I was listening to Mayim Bialik’s podcast. The host — a neuroscientist — said something that tied everything together. She was talking about how many people reject an idea simply because they can’t explain the mechanism. Mayim is like I am. She wants to know the mechanism. She wants to know how. It reminded me of a story I love. In the mid-1800s, a doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis noticed something that no one else wanted to admit: women were dying from childbed fever at alarming rates in hospitals where doctors had just been working on cadavers. He had a radical idea: what if doctors washed their hands between the autopsy table and the delivery room? He was mocked. Ridiculed. Eventually driven to a breakdown. Not because the evidence was weak. The evidence was clear. He was ridiculed because no one could explain why it would work. Germ theory didn’t exist yet. Without a mechanism — without a story that fit the current worldview — the evidence didn’t count. Women kept dying while they waited for the mechanism. I think about that every time someone says, “I’d believe in the afterlife if someone could explain how it works.” The evidence for consciousness surviving death is substantial. NDEs, after-death communications, mediumship under controlled conditions, children who remember past lives in verifiable detail, a John Edward demonstration. You don’t have to understand the mechanism to let the evidence speak. What It Takes to Hold Onto What You Know My client and the woman at the show are not weak. They’re human. We all have a left brain that runs threat assessments on our hope. It wants certainty before it lets you rest. Our brains evolved to keep us alive, not make us happy. Alive but unfulfilled. Alive but not fully living our best lives. Certainty was never the deal. The deal is: you keep showing up. You surround yourself with people who take this seriously and have the character to back it up. You don’t just read about the evidence — you build a relationship with it. You stay curious about what you don’t understand without letting the unknown invalidate what you do know, what you see in front of your own eyes. Faith isn’t the absence of doubt. It’s what you choose to do with it. Do you keep exploring? I do. I still try to understand the mechanism, even knowing it’s unlikely I ever will. If this resonates, share it with someone whose left brain has been winning lately. And if you’ve had an experience that helped you hold on — a reading, a sign, a moment that cracked you back open — I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss. Subscribe at grief2growth.substack.com [https://grief2growth.substack.com/]. This is a public episode. 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Waiting On The World To Change

I grew up being told Jesus could come back at any moment. Not someday. Not eventually. Any. Moment. As a kid, that hung over everything. Plan for the future? Why? Build something? For what? Some people I knew didn’t go to college because of it. Didn’t save for retirement. Didn’t make long-term plans. Why plant seeds in soil you’d never harvest? It took me until my 40s to learn the uncomfortable truth: the theology behind all of it — the literal clouds-parting, trumpet-blaring return — wasn’t ancient doctrine. It was invented in the 1800s by a man named John Nelson Darby, a British preacher who systematized the whole framework between 1827 and 1833. Before him, eighteen centuries of Christianity hadn’t taught it. The church fathers didn’t preach it. The Reformers didn’t assume it. It was new. And yet it reshaped millions of lives. When the Savior Changes, the Waiting Stays the Same Here’s what I’ve noticed. We stopped talking about the rapture quite as much. But we didn’t stop waiting for rescue. Now it’s disclosure. Any day now, the government is going to reveal what it’s known for decades — that we’ve been visited, maybe even in contact, with beings not from here. Congress has held hearings. Whistleblowers have testified under oath. President Trump directed federal agencies in January 2026 to begin releasing classified UAP files. UAP is the new acronym for UFOs. The machinery of “something big is coming” has never been louder. And maybe something is there. I hold that open. The universe is vast, and consciousness is stranger than we pretend. I don’t dismiss it. When I attend IANDS meetings, many people talk about aliens. But I’ve also watched how the disclosure movement works. Barack Obama was supposed to be the disclosure president. Then Hillary Clinton. Then Biden. Then Trump — the first time. The cast keeps changing. The promise never arrives. The government’s own All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office released a report in 2024 saying it found no evidence of extraterrestrial beings. The Wall Street Journal revealed that hundreds of Air Force personnel had been fed false stories about secret alien technology programs — described as something like a hazing ritual that got completely out of hand. I’m not saying nothing is out there. A lot of people believe it and there’s a good chance it’s true that aliens are out there. I’m saying: notice the pattern. Rapture. Aliens. The New Age shift. The Age of Aquarius. The Great Reset. Pick your version. We are very good at believing that someone — or something — from outside is about to arrive and change everything. Why We Love the External Savior I understand it. Deeply. The world is exhausting. The problems feel too big. We have enough energy, food, and technology to end poverty many times over — and yet people are starving. We have enough wealth to transform lives — and instead we invent more precise ways to end them. Drones. Hypersonic missiles. AI-guided weapons. And then there’s Epstein. I used to roll my eyes at people who talked about Satanic pedophile rings as a shadow government. That was tin foil hat territory. Conspiracy thinking for people who couldn’t accept that the world was just ordinarily corrupt. I’m not a conspiracy-minded person. I had to eat those words about conspiracy-minded things. Because what came out wasn’t a theory. It was a documented reality. A billionaire ran a trafficking network that serviced some of the most powerful men in the world — politicians, financiers, royalty — for decades. People knew. People looked away. People were protected. People are still being protected. We’re finally just talking about the “Epstein class.” And barely anyone was held accountable. That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s a confession, hidden in plain sight, that power at the highest levels operates by rules the rest of us don’t get to know about. I’m not prone to seeing shadows everywhere. But I also can’t unsee what I’ve seen. And I think a lot of people are in that same place right now — not paranoid, just paying attention for the first time. When the problems are that entrenched, of course, we want a deus ex machina. Of course, we want the clouds to part, Jesus to come back and save us. But here’s what I’ve come to believe after years of sitting with grief, with loss, with people who’ve had to rebuild their entire understanding of reality from the ground up: The external rescue isn’t coming. And it never had to. Taking Jesus Seriously, at His Word I’m not dismissing Jesus. I’m taking him seriously — at his own word. The mystics — Meister Eckhart, Thomas Merton, the early contemplatives — understood the Second Coming differently than the Darby crowd that influenced the church I grew up in. Not as a man descending through clouds, but as the Christ consciousness awakening within human beings. The teachings finally being lived, not just recited. Love your enemy. Care for the poor. The last shall be first. The kingdom of God is within you. That last one is straight from Luke 17:21. Jesus said it plainly. Not: the kingdom of God is coming from the sky. Not: wait for the event. Within you. Now. We’re seeing the government, our government in a fight with the Pope who is preaching Jesus’ words and our government asks God to bless their war. What if the return isn’t an event on a calendar? What if it’s a threshold — one we cross collectively — when enough of us finally start actually living those teachings instead of just professing them? That’s not a diminishment of the idea. That’s a deepening of it. From 3D to 5D — And Why I Think We’re Already Moving In the circles I run in, I keep hearing about 3D and 5D and us making the shift from one to the other. In consciousness circles, people talk about dimensional shifts — not physical dimensions, but states of awareness. Ways of being in the world. Let me explain what that actually means, because it’s not as abstract as it sounds. 3D consciousness is where most of humanity has operated for a long time. It’s the world of pure physical reality — what you can see, measure, accumulate, defend. In 3D, life is fundamentally about survival and competition. There’s not enough — not enough money, love, safety, status. So you protect what’s yours. You sort people into us and them. You numb yourself to suffering that isn’t directly in front of you because you simply can’t afford to feel it all. It’s not evil. It’s just limited. 5D consciousness is something different. It’s the awareness that we are not isolated selves in competition — we are expressions of something interconnected. Love isn’t a scarce resource to be rationed. It’s the ground of reality itself. Separation is the illusion. What you do to another, you do to yourself. Service isn’t sacrifice — it’s just recognizing what’s actually true. When you serve another, you serve the whole, and you serve yourself. The mystics have always lived there. Most of the rest of us visit occasionally. 4D is the in-between — and I believe that’s where we are now, collectively. 4D is the awakening that hurts. It’s when the old stories stop working but the new ones haven’t fully formed yet. It’s when you can no longer pretend the system is fine, but you don’t yet know what replaces it. It’s disorienting. It looks like chaos from the inside. The Epstein reckoning is 4D. The collapse of institutional trust is 4D. The exhaustion with performative politics, the hunger for something real, the spiritual searching that cuts across every demographic — all of it is the signal of a consciousness that is outgrowing the container it’s been living in. I genuinely believe we are moving from 3D to 4D right now. Not as a metaphor. As a description of what I watch happening in real time — in the people I work with, in the conversations I’m having, in what I see people reaching for. The question is whether we get stuck in 4D — in the disillusionment, the anger, the paralysis — or whether we use it as the threshold it’s meant to be. What Grief Taught Me About This Moment Here’s where I have to speak from my own ground. In 2015, I lost my daughter Shayna. Fifteen years old. Gone in her sleep, without warning, without a chance to say goodbye. That event did not slowly make things worse. It ended one world completely and forced me to either build a new one or not survive. I’ve spent the years since sitting with hundreds of people in that same place — the place after the rug gets pulled out. After the diagnosis. After the phone call. After the marriage ends, or the career collapses, or the faith shatters. Here’s what I know from all of that time: Transformation doesn’t arrive gently. It arrives as destruction first. The breakdown is not the opposite of the breakthrough. It is the breakthrough, in its early form. Every single person I’ve worked with who found their way through — who built something real on the other side of their loss — went through a moment when the old world became completely, undeniably, unlivably over. There was no going back. The only direction was through. That’s not comfortable. But it’s how it works. I look at our world right now, and I see the same pattern I’ve watched in grieving people. The old operating system is failing visibly. The contradictions are becoming undeniable. The gap between what we say we value and what we actually do is out in the open in ways it hasn’t been before. That’s not the end. That might be exactly where we need to be. The breaking point isn’t the destination. It’s the door. The Shift That’s Available Right Now Here’s what I’ve come to believe the new age actually looks like — if it comes. Not aliens landing on the White House lawn. Not a trumpet sounding. When I was a little kid, a guy actually stood up in the back of the church and blew a trumpet as was supposed to sound when Jesus returns. I nearly had a heart attack at around eight years old. Not a single dramatic event that changes everything from the outside. It looks like millions of individual people doing the hard, quiet, unglamorous work of waking up. Grieving their illusions. Questioning the stories they inherited. Looking honestly at where fear is running them. Choosing presence over performance. Choosing connection over competition. Choosing love — not as a feeling, but as a practice. Every person who does that internal work becomes a slightly different presence in the world. They parent differently. They vote differently. They spend differently. They show up differently in their relationships. And that ripples. It doesn’t make the headlines. It doesn’t go viral. But it changes things in ways that last. The mystics called it transformation. The contemplatives called it awakening. The consciousness researchers call it a shift in the attractor field. Grief workers call it the rebuilding after the breakdown. Call it whatever you want. The invitation is the same. What Will Your Breaking Point Be? I work with people every day who are doing this work. Every single one of them was driven here by grief. By something that happened that they did not choose and could not prevent. A loss. A diagnosis. A betrayal. A moment when the world as they knew it ended. That ending — as brutal as it was — turned out to be the thing that cracked them open. Not broken. Cracked open. There’s a difference. The question I keep sitting with is this: does it have to be that way for us collectively? We’ve been waiting for the rapture for nearly 200 years. We’ve been waiting for disclosure for at least 70. We’ve been waiting for the age of peace to arrive from outside for as long as there have been humans to wait. And here we are. The corruption is visible. The system is straining. The old stories aren’t holding. Maybe that’s not a catastrophe. Maybe that’s the rug being pulled out — exactly the way it needs to be — so that we finally stop waiting for someone else to do what only we can do. The shift rises. It doesn’t descend. It rises from inside each of us, from the slow and difficult and beautiful work of becoming more fully human. That’s where I’m placing my hope. Not in clouds. In us. I work with people every day who found their way through a breaking point they didn’t choose. Are we at one collectively? What would it take for you to stop waiting — and start doing the internal work? I’d love to hear where you are in the comments. Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss. Subscribe at grief2growth.substack.com [https://grief2growth.substack.com]. 📣 Join the First 100 — Founding Member Rates Substack promotes its bestsellers. Bestseller status helps me reach people who are hurting and don’t yet know this community exists. You can help get me there. 72 of 100 seats are filled. 28 remain. Click the tier to sign up 💛 [https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561]The Lightbearer [https://grief2growth.substack.com/67746561] — $2/month ($20/year) You believe this work matters. That’s enough. 💚 [https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6]The Steady Hand [https://grief2growth.substack.com/328bb6e6] — $4/month ($40/year) Present, consistent, quietly holding space. 💙 [https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833]The Shoulder-to-Shoulder [https://grief2growth.substack.com/ebf18833] — $6/month ($60/year) Walking beside those who are carrying the most. After year one, your subscription renews at the standard rate — cancel anytime before then. No penalty. No guilt. 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I Was Afraid Time Would Take Her Twice

The morning after Shayna passed, I lay in my bed and thought about disappearing. Not because I wanted to die. Well, not exactly. But because I couldn’t bear the thought of what time might do to her. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I was terrified that if I kept living, she would fade. That grief would do what grief supposedly does: soften at the edges, blur, retreat. That the sharpness of her — her laugh, her voice, the particular way she moved through a room — would eventually smooth itself into something vague and distant. I didn’t want a memory. I wanted her. And I was afraid that the longer I lived, the more time would take from me. That she would become a ghost — not the kind that haunts, but the kind that disappears. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe [https://grief2growth.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Deadly 10%

I posted something on Facebook a few days ago that really hit a nerve. Most of my posts go largely unnoticed. This one got 2,200 reactions. Nearly 600 shares. A post about Netanyahu, Trump, and why criticizing Israel’s government is not the same as hating Jewish people. Why criticizing our government isn’t anti-American. And then the responses came. My Jewish friends pushed back. They were concerned I’d stir up anti-semitism, make the world less safe for Jews. The trolls arrived. Ugly memes I won’t repeat. Someone claiming the Talmud teaches Jewish people to defraud non-Jews. Then another person informed me that Islam is a “Satanic death cult.” I’ve been sitting with all of it. And I think I know why the post resonated. We are exhausted. We Are Tired of Being Told to Be Quiet We are tired of governments killing in our names and calling it patriotism. We are tired of religious leaders blessing wars and calling it faith. We are tired of being told that if we speak out — if we dare to say this is wrong — we are bad Americans, bad Christians, bad Jews, anti-semites, traitors. Even Jewish people who criticize Israel are being ostracized by their own communities. This is not an abstraction. I work with grieving people. I have a client right now whose grief is not about death — it’s about exile. She has been cut off from friends and family because she speaks out against what is happening in Gaza. She lost her community for telling the truth as she sees it. That is its own kind of death. And it is happening everywhere. The message is consistent: Stay in line. Don’t make waves. Don’t embarrass us. Silence is loyalty. I reject that. What a True Patriot Actually Does There’s a version of patriotism that says: my country, right or wrong. I don’t believe in that version. A true patriot doesn’t blindly follow his country. A true patriot wants to make his country right — even when that means standing against the government. Especially then. The same is true of faith. A true person of faith doesn’t follow religious leaders into violence without question. A true person of faith goes back to the source — the actual teachings, the actual words — and asks: Is this what we believe? Is this who we are? This is the journey I took for several years before I left Christianity. And sometimes the answer is no. Sometimes the leaders are wrong. Sometimes the nation is wrong. Sometimes the institution built in the name of God has wandered so far from God that the most faithful thing you can do is say so out loud. Sometimes, you even have to leave. When Prayer Becomes a Weapon This week, Pete Hegseth stood at the Pentagon pulpit — at a mandatory Christian worship service that civilian employees and uniformed military personnel were expected to attend — and prayed. It wasn’t a prayer most of us would recognize. He read from the Psalms: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them. I did not turn back till they were consumed. I thrust them through so that they were not able to rise. They fell under my feet.” Military Times [https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03/26/hegseth-prays-for-overwhelming-violence-during-pentagon-christian-service/] He then recited what he said was the chaplain’s prayer from the mission that captured Venezuela’s former president. “Behold now the wicked who rise against your justice and the peace of the righteous. Snap the rod of the oppressor, frustrate the wicked plans, and break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish.” The Hill [https://thehill.com/policy/defense/5802042-defense-secretary-pentagon-prayer/] And then this: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Military Times [https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03/26/hegseth-prays-for-overwhelming-violence-during-pentagon-christian-service/] He closed by asking God to “let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse, that evil may be driven back, and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.” Military Times [https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2026/03/26/hegseth-prays-for-overwhelming-violence-during-pentagon-christian-service/] This is the Secretary of Defense. Using the Pentagon as a church. Praying for death and damnation in the name of Jesus Christ. And I’m supposed to stay quiet about that? I’m supposed to nod along because criticizing it might mean I’m not a good Christian? Not a good American? No. As an aside, the people who cherry-pick verses from the Quran or the Talmud to condemn those religions as violent are so self-unaware that they forget these verses are in their Bibles and have been to justify all sorts of atrocities. This Is Why I Left I grew up in a church. I know the Bible. I’ve read the Quran. I’ve studied the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching, and the teachings of the Buddha. I have found profound, beautiful, life-giving wisdom in every single one of them. I have also watched people use every single one of them to justify violence, indifference to injustice, oppression, exclusion, and hatred. And I made a decision: I respect all of these traditions. I will not participate in any organized religion. Not because I don’t believe in something larger than myself. But because I refuse to let the 10% define my relationship with the other 90%. The 90% We Share Pick any major religious tradition on Earth. They all teach some version of this: love your neighbor. Do not kill innocent people. Care for the poor. Treat others as you want to be treated. There is something sacred in every human being. That’s not a guess. It’s documented. Across Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Sikhism — the core ethics are nearly identical. We agree on roughly 90% of what matters most. But we’ve built the last 3,000 years of human conflict on the 10%. The dietary laws. The holy days. The name we use for God. Whether salvation comes through faith or works. Whether Jesus was divine or a prophet. Whether Muhammad was the final messenger. We have tortured and enslaved and burned each other alive over these questions. And men like Hegseth are still doing it. Not with fire — with bullets. And calling it prayer. The Congressman Who Changed His Mind Here’s a story that gives me some hope. Mark Siljander was a congressman from Michigan in the 1980s — a hard-right Reagan Republican, a staunch member of the Religious Right. He once walked out of the National Prayer Breakfast when a speaker quoted from the Quran. Porchlight Book Company [https://www.porchlightbooks.com/products/deadly-misunderstanding-mark-d-siljander-9780061438288]. He believed Islam was dangerous, so dangerous that he would not sit in the room while someone read from the Quran. Then he lost his reelection. And he started actually reading. He had what he called a “paradigm crash” after discovering that much of what he’d been taught about his faith was nowhere in the Bible, and that the Christian and Muslim religious texts are surprisingly compatible when studied in their original languages. Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Misunderstanding-Bridges-Muslim-Christian-ebook/dp/B075TJHQ1Z] He came to realize that Islam and Christianity were “not contradictory at their core.” Amazon [https://www.amazon.com/Deadly-Misunderstanding-Bridge-Muslim-Christian/dp/0997625309] He wrote a book about it. A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide. The title wasn’t just about Islam and Christianity. It was about all of us. I read the book. It gave me hope. The deadly misunderstanding is the belief that the people on the other side of our theological 10% are our enemies. That our God wants us to defeat them. To break their teeth. To send their souls to eternal damnation. That misunderstanding has been killing us for millennia. What I Actually Believe I believe in something. I believe consciousness doesn’t end at death. I’ve spent 30 years studying the evidence — near-death experiences, after-death communications, mediumship — and I find it compelling. I believe love is the fundamental force of the universe. I believe we are all connected at a level that makes the 10% seem almost absurd. I believe what Jesus actually said, not what empires and politicians later decided he meant. I believe what Muhammad actually taught, not what has been distorted by those who want war. I believe what the mystics of every tradition have always known: that God — or Source, or the Divine, or whatever name you use — is not asking for “overwhelming violence of action.” That’s a human invention. A very old, very dangerous one. The Trolls Didn’t Teach Me Anything New When the anti-semitic memes showed up in my comments, I wasn’t surprised. Hateful people use whatever thread they can find. I didn’t create the anti-semitism. I didn’t feed it. But I did expose it. When someone said Islam was a Satanic death cult, I thought of the 1.8 billion Muslims I’ve never met — most of whom are simply trying to live with integrity, raise their children, and find meaning in a world that doesn’t offer easy answers. When I was told my criticism of Netanyahu was anti-semitism, I thought of the many Jewish voices who are also criticizing Netanyahu. Loudly. Courageously. At great personal cost. Criticizing a government is not the same as hating a people. Studying a religion honestly is not the same as endorsing everything done in its name. And praying for “overwhelming violence” is not the same as following the man who said, Blessed are the peacemakers. What Would Change If We Focused on the 90%? That’s the question I keep asking. What would change — in our politics, our foreign policy, our neighborhoods, our comment sections — if we led with what we share instead of what divides us? I’m not naive. The 10% is real. The differences matter to people. But I am asking you to consider the cost. The wars. The exiles. The clients I sit with who have lost their entire communities for speaking truth. The children in Gaza. The 150 or so girls in the school we bombed in Iran. The children in Israel. The soldiers coming home broken. The families who never get to come home at all. Is the 10% worth all of that? I don’t think it is. And I suspect, in the quiet of your own heart — away from the noise and the tribalism and the trolls — neither do you. Speak anyway. That’s not disloyalty. That’s love. Where have you felt silenced for speaking what you believe is true? I’d genuinely like to hear from you. Drop a comment, or hit reply. Brian D. Smith is a grief guide, certified grief educator, and host of the Grief 2 Growth podcast. After losing his daughter Shayna in 2015, he has dedicated his work to helping others find evidence-based hope in the face of loss. If this work supports you, here’s a simple way to support it back. 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