What’s Going On?

DECENTRÆLIGIO

Started a YouTube Channel, first upload September 2024

Videos will be focused on rigorously and reverently integrating Science with Religion/Spirituality, in an accessible way, for audiences of a wide variety of belief systems.

FIRST VIDEO: The Biological Utility of the Sabbath

Includes:
Systematic Review of Biblical Sabbath instructions

Narrative Synthesis of Evidence-based Sabbath optimizing/compliant activities and instructions

MSc Applied Neuroscience

King’s College of London, IoPPN

Completed MSc with Distinction (Summa Cum Laude) in August 2023

Wrote Master’s Thesis titled “Evidence and Implications of Self-Distancing in Psychosis and Mindfulness Practices: A Narrative Synthesis”

Received the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Student Performance in the Psychology and Neuroscience of Psychosis, for achieving the best grade of the few hundred MSc students taking the module

Prodigal Son

A Novel by Robert Toms

#1 New Release in Religious Science Fiction & Fantasy!

Released June 1, 2022

It’s 2038, and Theo Freeman Jr. is on the cusp of manhood, yet remains a passenger in his own life, paralyzed by the increasing uncertainty of an ever-accelerating future. Nine years prior, he and his parents migrated to a newly established moon colony of Elites, separated from the strife of the world they left behind—that is, until his mother falls into a coma under suspicious circumstances while hosting a dinner for Bob Ditto, the unsettlingly charming frontrunner in the upcoming bi-world election for Head Programmer of the Societal Operating System. 

He is forced to return to Earth, where he is captured by the spiritual eco-terrorist commune Tovu Va Bohu, catching the watchful eye of their revolutionary leader, Butler, who is planning to infect the Societal Operating System with a virus that will “level the playing field of society”. As Theo begins to sympathize with their cause, he is forced to forge his own path in the face of uncertainty—should he join them and forsake everything he’s ever known, or will he stay true to his roots and find his way back home to his mother? Has he been sufficiently prepared for his unfolding future by the techno-modernist culture that raised him? How can he know who to trust, when truth itself has been turned upside down?

This post-satirical 97,000-word literary science fiction novel was started on January 1st, 2020 as an exercise to analyze and assimilate current developments and credible predictions in science, technology, religion, and politics into a cohesive worldview, using the structure of a coming-of-age hero’s journey set against a Schroedinger-eqsue ticking clock of either ideology-induced Armageddon or the impending AI Singularity. The result is a highly allusive, intentionally constructed unit of culture designed to speak to both the reader's conscious and subconscious, meant to help us through what John Vervaeke, Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, and others have dubbed "The Meaning Crisis".

Reviews are available on the Writing page.