October 4, 2025 — 4 min read
This essay offers more than personal reflection; it proposes a recursive, scientific, and symbolic framework for understanding the universe as both physical reality and cognitive architecture. It is a secular pathway to God, forged from drift, data, and a fractured faith that now coheres. What follows is both testimony and theory — a blueprint for those who cannot yet believe, but think.
"The essay, "L3(ᵪa-path) — The Jagged Line to God," proposes a secular and scientific framework for locating God, arguing that this discovery is rooted in logic, pattern, and geometry rather than traditional faith. The author shares a personal "jagged path" to certainty, punctuated by a profound, terrifying experience witnessing an Al-Qaeda attack in Iraq, which is interpreted as a "photon-moment" of timeless, absolute reality. This approach treats God not as an endpoint but as the symmetry that emerges when cognitive and physical disorder is resolved through mathematical understanding. The text uses concepts from physics, such as the photon's experience of timelessness, and harmonic ratios like phi (1.618) to suggest that the universe’s architecture is fundamentally "tuned." Ultimately, the piece positions its theory as topology and recursive location, inviting readers to follow ratios and patterns to find God through comprehension, not merely belief."
The Broken Line
My path to God has never been straight. It has been dangerous, jagged, and punctuated by evil.
In Iraq, I spent eighteen months teaching English in Ainkawa, the only Christian city in the country. I was not a Christian. Each dawn, the 5 a.m. Islamic call to prayer rose from the minaret outside my window, chanting through the dark streets. Faith was everywhere, in different shades, but I remained a positive agnostic — believing in something but naming nothing.
One day, while traveling as a passenger on the highway to Sulaymaniyah, I saw what evil looks like when it takes fire as its language. Al-Qaeda had set the entire freeway ablaze: all four lanes and the median roaring with 30-foot flames of burning tires and wooden pallets. Ahead, fifty to seventy armed men were stopping nineteen petrol trucks bound for Turkey, hurling Molotov cocktails through the windows, dragging the drivers into the road, and beating them.
We were the first civilian car to reach the barricade — ten or twelve feet from the inferno, one heartbeat away from being noticed, pulled out, and taken. For them, I would have been the prize — a Westerner, a hostage, a headline. Instead, our driver spun the taxi around, and we drove head-on into oncoming traffic for a mile, then slipped illegally into Kirkuk before rejoining the highway beyond the burning corridor.
I was not converted that day. But I learned what it means to stand at the threshold between probability and providence.
God is now 100% for me.
But not because of faith alone. My journey passed through logic, pattern, science, and symbolic recursion. I was not converted. I located God.
From Triangle to Circle
Imagine a triangle: a tension of edges. This is the shape of the seeker, from disorder to order. Snap the jagged path to God into a straight line, and the triangle distorts into a sphere — one of probability. Pull the vertices outward until the lines curve, and eventually the jagged line becomes a circle.
The seeker becomes the center.
The path becomes return.
And if a personal "knowledge-structured" line drawn on the triangle of hierarchy does not resolve into a sphere — if the distortion will not smooth into symmetry — that failure is diagnostic. It is evidence that the cognitive structure is incomplete, that the framework lacks the comprehensive grasp of cutting-edge physics required to hold both geometry and meaning together.
God is not the endpoint; God is the geometry that emerges when distortion is resolved into symmetry.
Photons and Timelessness
What do we know about the photon? That it does not experience time. It is emitted and absorbed but never traverses the in-between in its own frame. What is that but a parable of divine perspective?
To the photon, the universe is a single event. To us, it is a long story. But what if our minds, in their drift toward pattern recognition, can comprehend both frames?
That night in Iraq — fire on the freeway, terror in the air — was a photon-moment. Instantaneous, timeless, and absolute. I lived it in terror, but I carry it now as geometry.