Chapter I: The Question of God’s Existence

The question of God’s existence appears to be the ultimate lock on human thought. Not because it inspires innovative answers or transcendent quests, but because it traps the masses in a loop with no exit. Every individual or group, convinced they’ve solved the enigma, retreats into their answer, proclaiming their truth and dismissing all others as fatal errors. Believers and atheists, the religious and the agnostic, all settle into positions that block any real intellectual or ethical progress.

The Camp of Truth

Believers, for example, often find comfort in the certainty that they are “on the right path.” In the face of atheists, they sigh with relief: “Thank God we escaped their spiritual emptiness.” In the face of other religions, they reassure themselves: “We found the true faith. The others are lost.”

This dynamic creates a cycle of mutual validation and rejection, where each remains blinded by their own conviction. Once this certainty is acquired, reflection dies out: believers believe they’ve reached the ultimate goal. This mental lockdown, reinforced by the fragmentation of belief systems, condemns the masses to irreversible intellectual inertia. Paradoxically, perhaps one single world religion might have broken this impasse. But with a multitude of competing cults, each convinced it is the chosen one, the lock snaps shut. Evolution is no longer the question—except maybe within the chosen system itself, and only by respecting its rules and dogmas. The existence of other “wrong” beliefs even acts as proof that one is on the winning side. “We are already among the victors,” people think, “among those who are right.” The error lies wherever the others stand.

This mental locking extends beyond faith itself. The pursuit of ethics, goodness, justice—even moral perfection—is systematically sacrificed in favor of mere conformity to dogma. Most believers do not act based on universal principles, but out of hope for divine reward or fear of eternal punishment. Good and evil become secondary; only obedience to a perceived higher will matters. Religion transforms faith into a game of submission, where ethics is subordinated to command. To put it plainly: ethics dies every time a context falls within the moral spectrum already addressed by dogma. And that is, in itself, utterly fascinating.

And Then We Invent Irrefutable Proofs…

Paradoxically, religious rituals—often praised for their soothing power—only reinforce this stagnation. Collective prayer, meditation, or community celebrations may offer real well-being, even feelings of transcendence. But these feelings have nothing to do with the truth of the beliefs they are attached to. They operate like a psychological placebo: universal to all religions, even those that contradict or battle each other.

How can it be that a Christian ritual, a Muslim one, or a Hindu practice all produce the same calming effects or feelings of moral elevation—something distinct from ordinary life—when each of those faiths claims the others are false? Clearly, the effect has nothing to do with the truth of the belief. These practices work not because they reach an authentic transcendence, but because they exploit shared human mechanisms—diverting the masses from true philosophical and especially true ethical concerns.

And It’s Not Just the Believers

Atheists and agnostics, though spared from religious dogma, are not entirely free from the cycle. Atheist masses, for example, often fall into sterile mockery, ridiculing believers without offering any constructive alternative. Their stance boils down to denial, to rejection, without ever going beyond that negation.

Agnostics, for their part, cultivate a cautious abstention, avoiding any firm stance—as if this neutrality relieved them of all responsibility. And yet it seems obvious that nothing is more absurd than indifference in matters that carry consequences of unrivaled magnitude if, in the end, one possibility or another turns out to be true—possibilities that agnostics themselves do not dismiss. If one does not know whether something is correct, then it might be. And if it turns out to be, and this indifference leads to grave consequences, then what did that indifference really mean? In what sense was it justified, logically speaking? A rhetorical question.

These attitudes, though different, share a fundamental flaw: they evade the demand for active reflection on truth and ethics. Believers and atheists alike—and especially agnostics, who reveal an intellectually baffling and thus fascinating capacity for indecisive conviction—remain trapped in their certainties or non-choices, contributing to this great collective mental block. A block where each major group defines ethics as whatever moral system their own group happens to follow. But we will return to this in more depth in later chapters.

Back to the Notion of Cult

It is essential, finally, to reflect on the concept of cult itself. Philosophically, a cult can be defined as a structured system of practices, beliefs, and rituals centered around the veneration of a transcendent object or principle. Yet in its current form, such systems consistently prioritize emotional adherence and group belonging over rational or ethical pursuit.

Whether religious or ideological, cults offer the illusion of a quest while delivering nothing more than collective comfort. That comfort is often built on opposition to “the other”—the atheist, the heretic, the follower of another cult—and thus reinforces their grip while blocking real progress.

So the question of God’s existence is no longer a mere metaphysical issue. It has become a logical trap, a dead end in which the masses gladly dwell. Cults, by their very nature, feed this deadlock by distracting individuals from the real questions: How can we be just? What is the ethics of religion? How can one reach universal truth? And so many others that it seems almost criminal to ignore them.

To Put It Philosophically:

We live in a world where the question is no longer “how to be ethical,” but “does God exist—and if so, which religion is His?” Yet if anything is truly sacred, it must be ethics. Human representations of the sacred are overwhelmingly tied to objects, places, texts, divine figures. Religions clothe the sacred in symbols, gestures, and rituals. Politics sometimes pretends to touch it, cloaked in supreme values. But strip each of these claims down, and all that remains is naked ethics. Not the ethics of sermons, laws, or codes—but ethics as a pure, radical, inflexible demand. That inner duty of justice and respect for what is right, which precedes all institutions and revelations.

And it is remarkable that this ethics—the first thing truly worthy of the term “sacred”—is also what humanity treats with the greatest negligence. People do not regard ethics as sacred. At best, they see it as a moral imperative, a social constraint, or a behavioral preference. Never as a sacred, unalterable, supreme obligation.

They pray, they celebrate rituals, they honor traditions, but ethics itself remains outside the scope of their genuine reverence. They know it, they sometimes use it to accuse others, rarely to accuse themselves, and almost never to bow before it with the respect it deserves.

All This Time!

This is the dizzying singularity of the human condition: the one thing that is truly sacred is neglected, while imitations are exalted. Humanity worships what comforts it, not what obliges it.

And the strangest part of it all—the very thing that confirms our thesis—is that it took all this time to utter a single truth: if anything must be sacred, it is ethics. This feels like the most intuitive thing imaginable. All one has to do is ask a simple question to realize it: if God exists, what does He hold sacred?

The answer is elementary: ethics. It is self-evident. Because ethics truly exists. And anyone can follow its path.

Some may object that philosophy already walks this path. But we will demonstrate in the next section that philosophy is perhaps what strays from it the most—while claiming to follow it impartially. What it follows is a light, childish ethics that is often in complete contradiction with genuine ethics.