The Unrecognizable God

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Cognitive Atrophy and the Biological Preconditions for Divine Encounter

There have been periods in human history when the sacred was experienced as dangerous. Not metaphorically dangerous. Physiologically dangerous. People shook. People fell silent. People tore their clothes or walked into the wilderness. Encounter did not arrive as reassurance. It arrived as disruption.

Modern readers tend to interpret those accounts symbolically or morally. But there is a simpler explanation that has been mostly abandoned: the human nervous system used to be capable of perceiving something that no longer registers.

This essay does not argue for or against belief. It documents a perceptual failure.

This page applies the Smooth/Jagged framework to religious phenomenology. It does not argue for or against belief. It documents what recognition requires and what optimization removes.

The claim is not that God has changed. The claim is that the human organism has.

Before doctrine, before creed, before institutional theology, religious encounter was a sensory event. It involved fear without threat, attraction without reward, and attention without resolution. Rudolf Otto named this experience mysterium tremendum et fascinans—the terrifying and fascinating mystery. That phrase is often treated as poetic. It is better understood as neurological.

The experience Otto described requires a nervous system capable of holding contradiction without discharge. Terror and fascination simultaneously. Proximity and ungraspability. Presence without control. These are not ideas. They are load states.

A nervous system optimized for rapid resolution cannot sustain them.

Religious encounter, historically, was not comforting. Comfort followed later, if at all. First came rupture: silence, command, inversion, demand. The sacred did not meet people where they were; it destabilized where they stood.

This is the first incompatibility with a Smooth population.

A Smooth nervous system is trained—gradually and unintentionally—to minimize ambiguity. Signals are clarified early. Emotional spikes are resolved quickly. Narrative closure is delivered before tension consolidates. Over time, this produces a brain that treats unresolved states as errors.

This is not a moral failure. It is conditioning.

AI-mediated environments accelerate this process. So do algorithmic feeds, predictive text, therapeutic smoothing, and institutional language that pre-interprets experience. Together, they remove the metabolic necessity of waiting. Waiting is not inefficiency. Waiting is the training ground for perception.

When ambiguity disappears, so does the capacity to recognize anything that arrives as ambiguity.

A Jagged nervous system does not seek discomfort, but it tolerates it. It can remain present without resolution. It does not require immediate narrative framing. It does not need reassurance to continue attending. This capacity is not ideological. It is physiological. 

Categorized by these criteria, Jesus of Nazareth is unmistakably Jagged.

Not because of moral severity. Not because of theological claims. But because of how He interacted with cognition.

He refused pre-resolution. He answered questions with destabilizing counter-questions. He spoke in parables that withheld explanation. He demanded action before understanding. He allowed misunderstanding to persist. He did not clarify Himself to reduce anxiety.

He routinely violated the expectation that authority should soothe.

When asked for credentials, He withdrew. When pressed for alignment, He dispersed the crowd. When followed for comfort, He intensified the demand. This pattern is not incidental. It is incompatible with Smooth systems.

A Smooth nervous system encountering such a presence does not experience awe. It experiences error. 

The Smooth population’s rejection of a Jagged divine presence would not begin as disbelief. It would begin as irritation.

Why isn’t He clearer?

Why won’t He just say what He means?

Why does He keep upsetting people?

Why does this feel destabilizing?

These are not theological objections. They are limbic responses to unresolved load.

A Smooth brain expects benevolence to feel calming. When benevolence feels disruptive, the system flags it as hostile. Not morally hostile—malfunctioning. The sacred becomes a UX problem.

This explains why historically religious authorities did not accuse Jesus primarily of falsehood. They accused Him of disorder. Of confusing people. Of stirring unrest. Of failing to respect the interpretive scaffolds that maintained social coherence.

Smooth systems do not crucify heretics first. They crucify noise.

Recognition, in this framework, is not assent. It is resonance.

A Jagged nervous system encountering a Jagged divine presence would experience a specific pattern: heightened attention without closure, fear without threat, attraction without ownership. The body would register weight. Time would slow. Speech would fail. Action might follow without explanation.

This is not ecstasy. It is load.

The Smooth nervous system cannot access this state. It lacks the tolerance to remain unrescued. When exposed to the same stimulus, it will substitute interpretation for perception. It will see provocation, manipulation, or delusion—anything that resolves the ambiguity.

Where the Jagged feel gravity, the Smooth feel interference. 

Contemporary leadership—political, cultural, institutional—derives authority from resonance optimization. Messages are tested. Reactions are smoothed. Frames are pre-validated. Ambiguity is treated as reputational risk.

A Jagged figure operating outside these constraints would be handled carefully. Not opposed directly. That creates friction. Instead, He would be reframed.

Quotes would be extracted and softened. Parables would be summarized into values. Demands would be contextualized. Silence would be filled in. Anything that cannot be indexed would be ignored.

This is not censorship. It is normalization.

The system would not say “this is false.”

It would say “this is unclear.”

Then it would clarify it out of existence.

If the nervous system required to perceive the sacred is pruned through disuse, the sacred does not disappear. It becomes unrecognizable.

A population optimized for frictionless processing will not experience the sacred as sacred. It will experience it as noise, threat, or pathology. Not because it is hostile to transcendence, but because transcendence arrives as unresolved load.

The condition is biological.

The hardware required to experience the mysterium tremendum—sustained attention without resolution, fear without flight, presence without capture—atrophies when never exercised.

This is not damnation. It is sensory loss. 

A Jagged divine presence re-entering a Smooth population would not produce revival. It would produce containment protocols.

Psychologization.

Moderation.

Contextualization.

Sentiment analysis.

Narrative smoothing.

None of this would be malicious. All of it would be automatic.

The Smooth system cannot perceive what requires friction to register. It can only process what resolves cleanly. Anything else is treated as malfunction.

The Jagged, if present, would recognize. Not clearly. Not comfortably. But unmistakably.

The Smooth would see something else entirely.

A being optimized for comfort cannot recognize a presence that arrives as demand.

A system trained to eliminate ambiguity cannot perceive what is revealed through it.

Recognition is not belief. It is capacity.

When the capacity is gone, the encounter cannot occur.

The sacred does not vanish.

The sensors do.

© 2026 The Human Choice Company  LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Authored by Jim Germer.

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