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Blog Gurus: Escaping One Cage and Stepping into Another
I see it so often these days, drifting across the online world like a familiar tune. On YouTube, in podcasts, on channels devoted to faith and doubt, ex-Mormons, former Jehovah’s Witnesses, disillusioned Baptists gather around new voices. The teachers come thick and fast. They are clever with their titles and startling in their claims, inviting you in with the promise of hidden knowledge. Yet behind it all is the quiet push for more views, more followers, more money. What troubles me most is how easily we fall into the same error again, as if escaping one cage only to step into another, unable to break the habit of looking to men rather than to God.
I understand the pull. Psychology reminds us that when someone leaves a controlling faith, they do not emerge whole. They come out wounded, uncertain, and torn by the strain of reconciling what they once believed with what they now see as false. That discomfort presses for relief, and the quickest way to soothe it is to seek fresh voices that sound certain, teachers who offer explanations that fit the ache. The internet is ready with a thousand such voices. And we, being human, are drawn to novelty, to alarm, to what shouts the loudest. “What they don’t want you to know” is a magnet to the bruised heart. We long for revelation, and these voices promise it in abundance.
Yet it is only the same old cycle repeating. The faces change, the language shifts, but the habit remains. One group’s dogma is replaced by another’s, one echo chamber by a newer, louder one. Instead of healing the need for belonging, we transfer it. Instead of learning to think freely, we outsource our conscience yet again. And the pattern continues, as though nothing has really been learned.
But there is another way, though it is quieter and easily overlooked. It lies not in accumulating teachers or chasing arguments but in hearing again the simplicity of Christ’s words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The Gospels do not need a clever title to catch our attention. They do not cry out with startling claims or trade in the currency of outrage. They wait, still and steady, inviting us to turn the page, to pray, to listen. In that stillness there is no hook, no algorithm, only the presence of God who has always been near.
Paul’s warning to Timothy comes to mind, that people would accumulate teachers to suit their itching ears. That warning is not locked away in the past, nor confined to the walls of churches. It is for all of us. We are always in danger of replacing God with another voice, whether it be a prophet, a pastor, an online guru, or even our own restless ego. Prayer and scripture feel too quiet in comparison with the drama of online debates. But that quiet is where truth lives, where God speaks without the need for spectacle.
Perhaps that is the heart of the matter. We search endlessly for someone else to tell us what to think, when all along the invitation has been there: to sit with the Word, to open the Gospels, to lift a prayer. The truth does not need to startle to be real. It only needs to be lived, quietly, patiently, in the presence of Christ who remains the way, the truth, and the life.
