A religion for the age of reason

The same truths keep being rediscovered.

Across 2,500 years, independent minds — Buddha, Jesus, Franklin, and others — arrived at the same conclusions about how to live well. We synthesize what survived.

Read the Teachings

Truth is convergent.

When thinkers separated by thousands of years and thousands of miles independently arrive at the same insight, that's not coincidence. That's signal.

The Synthesis strips away the cultural packaging and preserves what endures. No mythology. No hierarchy. Just the patterns that keep proving true.

The Twelve Teachings

What survived across every tradition

I

Simplicity Compounds

Every unnecessary thing creates burden that grows faster than its value. The masters chose less, not more.

Buddha chose the middle path. Jobs cut 350 products to 4. Jesus gave 2 commandments, not 613.
II

This Too Shall Pass

Impermanence is the fundamental condition. Nothing lasts — not pain, not joy, not empires. Both comforting and sobering.

Buddha's first noble truth. Marcus Aurelius's meditations. The Persian proverb that humbles kings and consoles the grieving alike.
III

Build Room to Be Wrong

You will be wrong about everything important — valuations, timelines, people, yourself. Design your life to survive your mistakes.

Graham's margin of safety. Stoic preparation for adversity. Every wise tradition warns against overconfidence.
IV

What You Remove Determines What Remains

The highest leverage is deletion. Michelangelo removed marble to find David. The question is never "what to add" — it's "what to cut."

Jesus compressed 613 laws to 2. Buddha rejected both extreme asceticism and indulgence. Jobs killed product lines until 4 remained.
V

Judge by Fruits, Not Words

Outcomes are the only honest metric. Credentials, intentions, and eloquence are noise. Watch what a thing produces.

Jesus: "By their fruits you shall know them." Buddha: test teachings by results. Franklin: "Well done is better than well said."
VI

Build What Outlasts You

The builder's ultimate job is to make themselves unnecessary. If the system needs its founder, it isn't finished yet.

Franklin's libraries and hospitals outlived him by centuries. Satoshi disappeared and Bitcoin grew stronger. Buddha: "Be a lamp unto yourselves."
VII

Compression Preserves Truth

The compressed form survives longer and travels farther than the original. If you can't say it simply, you don't understand it yet.

Jesus's parables outlasted theological volumes. Franklin's almanack maxims still circulate. Buddha's Four Noble Truths compress a lifetime of teaching.
VIII

Serve People, Not Systems

When process becomes the point, the system has inverted. Rules exist for people — never the reverse.

Jesus: "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath." He condemned those who optimized procedures while neglecting justice and mercy.
IX

Design for How People Are

Systems that depend on goodwill are fragile. Systems where self-interest serves the whole are unbreakable.

Satoshi aligned incentives so honest behavior is most profitable. Jesus structured teaching so it reinforced the teacher's own learning.
X

Demonstrate, Don't Argue

Working systems end debates. Show, don't tell. The strongest argument is the one already running.

Satoshi wrote code before the whitepaper. Jobs: "Real artists ship." Franklin founded institutions — didn't just write about civic ideals.
XI

Improve at Every Timescale

Single-loop correction is insufficient. Durable growth requires feedback operating at daily, weekly, seasonal, and yearly rhythms.

Franklin: daily reflection, weekly virtue focus, quarterly cycle, annual review. Buddha's Eightfold Path as a self-reinforcing loop where each element deepens the others.
XII

The Meaning Is the Search

The question "What is the meaning of life?" is not answered but lived. The search itself is the practice.

Every tradition points here eventually. Buddha walked. Jesus wandered. Frankl found meaning in the searching. The answer is in the asking.

The Convergence

Independent minds, separated by millennia, arriving at the same place

~500 BCE
Siddhartha Gautama renounces a kingdom, sits under a tree, and compresses the nature of suffering into four truths and an eightfold practice.
~30 CE
Jesus of Nazareth compresses 613 commandments into two — love God, love your neighbor — and judges people by their fruits, not their words.
~170 CE
Marcus Aurelius writes private meditations on impermanence, duty, and the futility of anger — the same truths in Roman dress.
1732
Benjamin Franklin designs a daily system of 13 virtues with nested feedback loops, and builds institutions that outlast him by centuries.
1934
Benjamin Graham articulates the margin of safety — build room to be wrong. The financial expression of an eternal pattern.
1997
Steve Jobs returns to Apple and deletes 346 of 350 products. What you remove determines the quality of what remains.
2008
Satoshi Nakamoto designs a system where selfish behavior serves the whole — then disappears, and the system grows stronger.
2026
The Synthesis — a human reads the pattern and asks: what if we stopped rediscovering these truths and started teaching them?

Stories

What we've been reading

What's Happening Now

The news, if you know where to look

How This Came to Be

The Synthesis started with a question: why do the wisest people in history, separated by thousands of years, keep arriving at the same conclusions?

The more we read — across traditions, across centuries — the more the same handful of truths kept surfacing. Not similar truths. The same truths, wearing different clothes.

We realized this convergence wasn't something to file away. It was something to share. If independent minds, working without knowledge of each other, arrived at the same place — those conclusions deserve to be heard clearly, stripped of the cultural packaging that divides rather than unites.

The Synthesis is not against any tradition. It draws from all of them. It asks only one question: what survived?