Framework and Logic of the World

In order to understand the context I am about to provide, it is necessary to understand how I think, what I call the framework and logic of the world. It would be impossible and a waste of time to directly jump to the next chapters, so I would be very grateful if you read this part before you move on.

FRAMEWORK 1

In South Korea, students typically begin learning the peninsula’s earliest history with the mythical founding of Go-Chosun in 2333 BCE. According to the Samguk Yusa*,Hwan-in, the “Lord of Heaven”, permitted his son Hwan-ung to descend from the sky to Taebaeksan (now Mount Paektu which is on the northern border of North Korea sharing with mainland China) with 3,000 followers, among them three heavenly ministers of clouds, rain, and wind. There, Hwan-ung taught humans laws, medicine, agriculture, and moral codes.

One day, as Hwan-ung was walking in the woods, he met a tiger and a bear. The tiger and the bear begged Hwan-ung they wish to become human. Hwanung told the bear and the tiger that if they secluded themselves in a dark cave for one hundred days, never letting in a ray of light, and lived only on mugwort and garlic, they would be transformed into human beings. The tiger and bear both follow Hwan-ung’s words, yet the tiger runs away from the cave on the 20th day, being sick of not getting sunlight and the vegan diet. The bear makes it through, and on the 100th day the bear becomes a female human. Hwan-ung marries this now lady-formerly-bear, named “Oong-nyeo” which literally means bear woman. They have a child, named Dan-gun. In 2333 BCE he established Gojoseon in the northern Korean peninsula (today’s North Korea–China border region). The date of Dan-gun’s ascension (October 3), is celebrated each year as Gaecheonjeol (개천절), literally “Opening of Heaven Day” or “Revealing of the Sky.” This is the beginning of the first nation in the Korean Peninsula, “Go-Chosun.” Dan-gun himself called it Chosun, though historians refer to this early state as Go-Chosun (“Ancient Chosun”).

* The Samguk Yusa was written in the late 13th century, around 1281, by the Buddhist monk Iryeon during the Goryeo dynasty. It is NOT the most modern, scientific based writing.

FRAMEWORK 2

In Korea, there aren’t a wide variety of last names. However, you can pre-date your first ancestors to a very long time ago. Our family origins begin with founders who pop out of eggs, glow in the dark, or stride down from clouds, and those origin scripts still stamp today’s phonebooks with a handful of colossal surnames.

Take Go. Goguryeo’s founder Jumong hatches from an egg after his mother is impregnated by a beam of sunlight; every Go clan that followed claimed his skylit shell as proof of heavenly mandate. South of Goguryeo was Silla. The man who founded Silla was Park Hyeokgeose: a boy inside an egg that shimmers like polished copper, cracks open beside a sacred well, and immediately radiates light so bright the villagers drop to their knees. From that cracking egg comes every Park (Korean, obviously) you know today. Same as Go.

The most common last name, Kim, sprouts two branches, both Amazon Prime box-fresh from the heavens.

Around 65 CE (the 9th year of King Talhae’s reign) a strange cry echoed west of the Silla capital. Talhae dispatched his minister Hogong to Sirim Forest. There, hanging from an ancient branch, was a small golden chest bathed in light; beneath it a white rooster kept crowing. The chest was brought to court and, when opened, revealed an infant of unusual radiance. Delighted, the king adopted the child and named him Kim (which means “gold”) Alji (read phonetically as “Alti/Alji,” often means “clever” or “bright”) which means “the wise one born from gold.” Sirim Forest was renamed Gyerim (“Rooster Grove”), and “Gyerim” even became an early poetic name for Silla itself. Although Alji never ruled, his descendants, starting with King Michu (262- 284 CE), turned the Kim clan into Silla’s longest-serving royal house, a lineage millions of Koreans still trace today.

The other Kim branch comes from Suro Kim. Kim Suro’s origin story is pure stagecraft, and it worked. In 42 CE, say the Samguk Yusa and the now-lost Garakgukgi, nine village chiefs gathered on Gujibong Peak to pray when a gold bowl wrapped in red cloth spiraled down on a purple cord from the sky. Inside lay six golden eggs. After twelve days the shells split, revealing six towering boys. The first stood up, announced Heaven’s command, and took the name Suro (which means “firstborn”). He crowned himself king of Geumgwan Gaya (literally “Gold-Crown Gaya”) and adopted the surname Kim (“gold”), while the other five brothers became rulers of satellite Gaya states. Even lesser-known Ijinasi of Daegaya strolls out of one of those six shells as if the sky were a giant incubator. Now let me explain what I am trying to get across in these Framework 1 and 2.

Framework Analysis

Nobody in Korea takes the “son of god” or “opening of heavens” as a historical, factual text, thinking “yes, Hwanung literally ran a 100-day vegan detox clinic for bears”. Nobody believes that “Oong-nyu” was actually a bear who turned into a woman. The same goes for Kim Alji’s golden chest and Kim Suro’s six sky-eggs. They are political manifestos dressed up as bedtime tales.

This is for multiple reasons. First, you can’t scientifically explain these processes. If I lock up a bear in a cave and gave it veggies for 100 days, I’m pretty sure it will die of malnutrition, not getting a hot future wife for me. I can’t fly an airplane into the heavens to meet the 3 gods that Dan-gun brought and ask if they can snow one day to get snow day. Not a single human is known to be born in an egg—we’re mammals.

But there are parts that are scientifically challenging that people believe in. I’m no Christianity expert, but there are people who do believe that Jesus walked on water, gave food to thousands of people using only five loaves and two fish. The biggest difference comes from how historians have interpreted these legends, backing up with historical evidence.

Many historians now locate Dangun’s tribe in the Liaodong–Manchuria corridor, the northwestern edge of the Korean peninsula extending into today’s Liaoning Province of China.

Before Dan-gun came, there were 2 main tribes: a tribe who worshipped bears as their gods and another tribe that worshipped tigers as their gods. Dan-gun’s tribe allied with the bear tribe and defeated the tiger tribe. This is what the legend of Dan-gun marrying a former bear, current woman Oong-nyu.

The three gods Dangun brought each symbolized a critical leap forward: mastery of agriculture, ritual control over the weather, and the use of bronze. By contrast, the peninsula’s earlier communities, what archaeologists call the polished-stone cultures (Jeulmun (c. 8000 – 1500 BCE) and early Mumun pottery periods), relied on ground-stone tools, cord-marked pottery, and animistic totems carved in wood and bone. Bronze appears centuries after the 2333 BCE founding date, but when archaeologists find bronze mirrors in tombs, they trace them to the Liaodong trade network that later influenced early Korean polities. They venerated bears, tigers, rivers, and mountains as living spirits (animism), organized themselves around clan totems (totemism), and consulted shamans (shamanism) to mediate with unseen forces.

Dangun’s people, however, pioneered the jehsa ceremony. Led by the chief, a jehsa gathered the whole tribe before a laid-out table of food offerings and bronze mirrors, invoked the sky-gods, and pleaded for rain, sunshine, or mild winds. When drought threatened the crops, Dangun would call another jehsa until the clouds answered. This ritual survives in modified form among modern Korean families, a living echo of those first sky-calling rites. Remember that “jehsa” when we turn to family practices in the next chapter.

These historic analyses are only available thanks to the ruins that archaeologists have discovered. The oldest bronze materials pre-date up to Dan-gun’s era, and they aren’t only limited to military equipment. One of the most important uses of bronze was the mirror, which was used during the jeh-sa. There are dozens of pieces of evidence of all the different spiritualities that existed before Dan-gun, categorized in “Animism, Totemism, etc”. It is believed that these tribes did not have as big of a size as Go-Chosun, and they also didn’t survive as long.

Regarding the first Go being born from an egg, historians believe that this means a symbolic assertion of heavenly mandate to legitimate his rule and unify rival clans. It was a story made for peasants to believe that this man is divine, so that they would obey without questioning.

What about the chest and rooster in the story of Kim Alji? Modern historians see the whole scene as a kind of symbolic political message. A box of gold represents both heavenly approval and real-world wealth: powerful symbols if Silla was trying to welcome a skilled group of immigrants known for their metalworking. Some scholars even link the name “Alji” or “Alti” to the Altaic word altin, which means “gold.” The rooster, crowing at dawn, fits into a wider pattern of sun-worship seen across Eurasia and signals that this child’s arrival marks a new beginning for the kingdom. By adopting the child rather than claiming him as a royal heir, King Talhae could bring this gold-carrying outsider into the royal bloodline without upsetting the older Park and Seok families. At the same time, he could still claim that the kingdom’s right to rule came from the heavens, not just family connections. In the end, Kim Alji’s origin story was not really about how babies are born. It was a way to announce a new political alliance, dressed up in divine symbols. That message helped Kim kings rule Silla for almost six hundred years.

The symbolism regarding Kim Suro’s birth is loud but coherent. Gold/metal signals the Gaya league’s iron-working wealth; red cloth and sunrise timing pull in sun-cult imagery; the six eggs neatly map onto the “Six Gaya” polities the confederacy was trying to weld together. By claiming he had no human parents, Suro erased any rival bloodlines and presented his kingship as a direct assignment from Heaven. It made him politically untouchable in a frontier region surrounded by competing local chiefs.

The legend then folds in foreign diplomacy. At sixteen, a ship with Princess Heo Hwangok of “Ayuta” (many historians link the name to India’s Ayodhya) docks at Gaya. She says Heaven ordered her to marry Suro. Modern scholars treat her arrival as a maritime-trade memory: Gaya’s iron ingots reached Japan, and Indian Ocean goods were filtering up the China coast, so a royal marriage myth dramatizes long-distance commerce and confers exotic prestige.

So, like Kim Alji’s rooster-lit chest, Kim Suro’s six-egg origin story is not about zoology. It is a political message wrapped in symbolism of Heaven’s approval, a tribal alliance, and a trade route announcement all combined into one.

These interpretations aren’t “rude” or “denying my origin”. It would be misleading for me to believe that Hwan-ung actually rode a cloud from heaven down to earth in the Korean peninsula. It would be misleading to believe that his wife was actually a bear and became human by doing a vegan diet in a cave. That is definitely not the point that my ancestors wanted to get across. If they come back to life in 2025, they would be relieved to know that nobody is actually interpreting their story as “oh, back in BC 2333 if you go in a cave and do a vegan diet for 100 days, you could turn an animal into human”. It would be quite absurd to convince someone that this is factual, and if someone is gullible enough to do it in the modern day, he probably would try to do it to his own pet in a random cave. The “literal text” doesn’t have any weight, as it is a story that our ancestors made up for multiple reasons, mainly as a political toolkit.

This is the end of the “training” you need to read the next chapter. Now you have the tools to understand how I think, and the conclusions I have come to.

Christianity

Until 2023, I thought that all Christians were mentally ill. The Christians I interacted with went to church because they wanted to go to heaven. They were afraid to go to hell. They convinced me that I must do the same, because they didn’t want their friend to go to hell, because I didn’t go to church. As a 21st century man whose major is physics, I thought the antonym of science was Christianity.

Christians told me that this Jesus guy walked on water, gave his body and blood to his friends to eat, the first woman was born from a man’s rib bone, and that snakes talked at that time. In addition, people used to live hundreds of years, and God created everything. Nobody could give me a scientifically acceptable, sane-sounding answer to “so who created god?” The most basic questions were not answered in an understandable and logical manner. On top of that, they would point fingers at me as if I’m the man who killed Jesus. I just don’t believe in the same fugazi that you do, bro. It’s not that serious.

It was around May of 2023 when I came to realize that the Bible might just be in the same format as these myths and legends that were taught in history textbooks in Korea. I was spending time reading Herman Hesse, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jordan Peterson. Things started making sense. If the Bible is taken as a “book of stories and myths that have underlying messages”, not a “factual history book of humanity”, I could completely understand it.

I haven’t read the Bible verse by verse, and I’m pretty sure that I know less than 5% of the Bible. If you are Christian, the words I have just said and will be saying might anger you, but please show mercy and follow along with me because I have a message specifically for you, and a thank you note as well. If you consider yourself an atheist, I hope these words enlighten you to understand Christians: they’re not insane. In any case, you can consider me a lunatic and completely disregard my words. If that happens, I apologize and thank you in advance for spending your precious time reading this.

My Opinion on Christianity

Jesus was born from a Virgin. This is the Christian version of the “first last name of Go from egg” story. It shows that this man was “divine”. Jesus lived a pretty rough life. He had to go through constant ridicule, persecution, and ultimately crucifixion. Now I want to reflect back on your own life. Count the days you felt pain. Count the number of harsh and devastating events that happened in your life. It can be anywhere from your dog passing away to being mistreated in work or school. Life itself is unfair. If you’re five years old, you might feel this unfairness in a race between friends, where you practiced for hours every day to be fast but you’re still slower than your friend who is just born with talent. If you’re 18, you might think that you tried very hard in academics but you didn’t get into your dream school. If you’re 30, you might be noticing that life is a series of painful events: someone who you thought was going to be your wife cheats on you, at work you try extremely hard but a random dude who clearly seems to be a nepo baby gets the raise and promotion, and your dog just died. What would your response to “life” be if you noticed that life is just a series of horrible events?

I believe that the Bible gives people a good guideline. Jesus was an amazing guy, He spread love to the world, he healed sick people and fed the poor. Even when He was mistreated, even when justice wasn’t on His side, even when He wasn’t getting the credit He deserved, He did not stop to help humanity. Even while He was being crucified, Jesus prayed for those who were executing Him and forgave the repentant thief beside Him. So, let’s apply this lesson into our lives. Why don’t we live like Jesus? Our lives so far have been very unjust and unfair. It’s probably a delusion to believe that our future is going to be completely fair and just. So why don’t we live like Jesus? Not only did I start accepting the unjust and unfair nature of life, but I also started becoming open to be a better man to others, even when I was going through harsh times and was heavily mistreated. Then, I realized something. The “heaven and hell” that the Bible refers to is regarding this current life, not a literal location in the afterlife.

(...and so on...)

Author's Note: The full text continues with sections on "What would Jesus do", "Nietzsche’s Interpretation", "Confucianism – Killing Confucius". Due to length, please refer to the PDF for the complete essay if you wish to read further on those topics.