Ball IS Life! - Monomachia, The Olympics, and Christians Worshiping Zues
I think it’s almost a spiritual experience to understand that BALL IS LIFE!!!
This argument builds on the newest psychosocial philosopher blog post: Monomachia: Why We Should Settle Wars With Sports, Not Soldiers
The Olympics were started by the Ancient Greeks and were originally performed in the nude and were a way to worship the god Zeus.
On a side note, Christians don’t know it, but they are actually worshiping Zeus by participating in the Olympic Games. As stated, participating in the Olympics was a tribute to the god Zeus. Although we have lost that meaning and understanding, that doesn’t change the fact that Christians are being sacrilegious by participating in the Olympics by worshiping another god, especially because one of the Ten Commandments is “Thou shalt not worship other gods.” As a psychologist, I know religion is about conformity and faith, not reason and free thought. As a matter of fact, when Christians want to participate in something, they just adopt the tradition and claim it as their own, like with marriage and saturalia/christmas.
The 2024 Paris Olympics opening ceremony featured a performance with drag queens and a blue-painted singer that many viewers interpreted as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper, sparking global backlash from Christian groups. [1]
So when Christians got mad at the Olympics for Paris portraying Dionysus, which is the same solar deity as Jesus, while Paris was honoring one of the Gods of the original purpose of the Olympics and Christians felt the need to inject, I honestly get a little aggravated. Okay, as someone who studies the ancient Greeks, it makes me steaming mad at the ignorance and audacity of the cultural appropriation by Christians. What they're basically saying is “Why didn’t you consider how we felt about stealing this from you culturally while erasing its significance and meaning?” This is what makes your religion inferior.
Athletes say it all the time… ball is life. And what is Earth, and Jupiter, and Saturn, and the original god, the sun? A ball. You’re god damn right, ball is life! And in honor of the similarities between a ball you play with and a ball as the gods, you should honor the gods by solving disputes through fair games and athleticism, not deadly force and catastrophic explosions or devastating communities through biochemical means.
A Ball Is the Only Shape a God Could Take
Let me show you why that last line isn't just wordplay. Gravity pulls equally in every direction, so anything with enough mass to overcome the strength of its own rock collapses into a sphere. That's why the sun is a ball, why Earth is a ball, why Jupiter and Saturn are balls, and why the potato-shaped asteroids never made the cut. Astronomers literally wrote roundness into the definition of a planet, which means the price of admission to godhood in our solar system is being a ball. You are standing on one right now, orbiting a bigger one, and you had the nerve to think "ball is life" was a bumper sticker.
So when you palm a basketball, you're holding a scale model of the only kind of object big enough to make its own light. When you kick a soccer ball across a field, you're reenacting orbital mechanics with your feet. I don't think that's an accident, and I don't think the ancients thought so either. Every culture that got serious about the sky also got serious about games. Hold that thought, because it's about to do some work.
The Ancient Olympics Were a Church Service With a Scoreboard
Here's the part almost nobody teaching you about the Olympics bothers to say plainly. Olympia was not a stadium with a temple next door; it was a sanctuary of Zeus with a track running through it. The games date to 776 BC by traditional reckoning, and the whole festival was organized around the great ash altar of Zeus, where priests burned the thighs of a hundred oxen in a mass sacrifice called a hecatomb. The Temple of Zeus at Olympia housed Phidias's forty-foot statue of the god in ivory and gold, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world. You didn't go to Olympia to see sports. You went to worship, and the sports were the liturgy.
The details make it undeniable. Athletes swore an oath over slices of sacrificed boar before a statue of Zeus Horkios, Zeus of the Oaths, promising they'd trained and would compete clean. Winners got a wreath cut from a sacred wild olive tree in the god's own grove, not money. Poets like Pindar wrote victory odes that treated champions as brushing up against the divine, and cities put up statues to them like minor saints. And yes, they competed naked, which is where "gymnasium" comes from, because gymnos means naked in Greek.
Ekecheiria: The Time the World Actually Did Stop a War for a Game
Now I want to hand you the single most important fact in this entire argument, and I want you to sit with it. The Greeks declared a sacred truce for the games called the ekecheiria, which means "holding of hands" in the sense of staying your hand. Heralds called spondophoroi traveled out from Elis to announce it, and for a window of roughly one to three months, warring city-states were expected to let athletes and pilgrims cross hostile territory unharmed. Violating it brought fines and religious sanction. This wasn't a poem about peace. It was enforceable policy in a region that fought constantly.
That's the proof of concept for everything I argued in the Monomachia post about settling wars with sports instead of soldiers. We're not inventing something utopian and new. We're trying to remember something that already ran for roughly a thousand years in the most war-addicted neighborhood in the ancient Mediterranean. The United Nations even revived the idea by resolution in the 1990s, calling on member states to observe an Olympic truce, and the IOC set up a truce foundation around 2000. It's toothless now, but the fact that modern diplomats reached for that specific ancient tool tells you they recognized it as a tool.
Ball Is Life Wasn't a Metaphor in Mesoamerica Either
If you think I'm reading too much into a sphere, go look at what the Maya did. The Mesoamerican ballgame was played with a solid rubber ball on masonry courts placed at the ceremonial center of cities, right next to the temples. In the Popol Vuh, the Hero Twins play ball against the lords of Xibalba, the underworld, and the match is a cosmic contest with life and death on the line. Scholars have long read the ball's motion across the court as a model of celestial motion, the sun and other bodies moving through sky and underworld. The stakes were real; the game was tied to sacrifice.
So two civilizations on two continents, with no contact, independently arrived at the same idea: a ball in motion is how you dramatize the movement of the heavens, and the outcome of that drama decides serious things. That's not a coincidence you can wave off. That's two peoples looking up, noticing everything sacred is round, and building a ritual around the roundest thing they could hold. Athletes today say "ball is life" without knowing they're quoting priests. I find that beautiful and a little haunting.
What Actually Happened in Paris, and Why It Proves My Point
Now let's go back to 2024, because the facts here are better for us than most people realize. The segment everyone lost their minds over was titled "Festivity," and creative director Thomas Jolly told BFMTV that Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper was not his inspiration, explaining that Dionysus arrives at the table because he's the Greek god of celebration. Jolly said Dionysus is the god of feasting and wine and the father of Sequana, goddess of the River Seine, and that the idea was a large pagan party connected to the gods of Olympus. The blue figure was played by French singer Philippe Katerine. Art historian Walther Schoonenberg identified the tableau as Jan van Bijlert's The Feast of the Gods from 1635, a painting of the Greek gods banqueting on Olympus. That painting hangs in the Magnin Museum in Dijon and shows the gods gathered for the wedding feast of Thetis and Peleus, with a halo of light behind the central figure.
I'll be straight with you about the messy part, because I'd rather you get it from me than from someone using it as a gotcha. An Olympics spokesperson later told the New York Post that Jolly did take inspiration from da Vinci's painting to create the setting, noting that many artists from Warhol to The Simpsons have referenced it. Both things can be true at once, and in performance art they usually are; a tableau can echo a famous composition while its actual subject is a pagan banquet. But notice what nobody disputes. The figure on the table was Dionysus, the sequence was about the gods of Olympus, and the ceremony's own account of it framed the god as a reminder of how absurd human violence is.
Read that again. The Olympics staged a scene about the Olympian gods, at the Olympics, and Christians called it blasphemy. The French bishops' conference condemned it as mockery of Christianity, and Russia's foreign ministry spokesperson piled on. You took the festival, stripped the god out of it, kept the name "Olympic" which literally means "of Olympus," and then got offended when the original tenant showed up in his own house. That's the whole argument in one incident, and I didn't have to stretch a single fact to make it.
Dionysus, the Sun, and Why I Say They're the Same Story
Let me be precise about the Dionysus and Jesus connection, because precision is what makes this hit instead of sounding like a message board. If you ask a modern classicist, Dionysus is a god of wine, vegetation, madness, theater, and ecstasy, not a sun god in the way Helios is. But the ancients themselves collapsed them. Macrobius, writing in the Saturnalia, argues at length that Liber, meaning Bacchus and Dionysus, is the sun, and the Orphic tradition made the same identification. So when I say Dionysus is a solar deity, I'm not freelancing; I'm following a syncretic reading that ancient authors put in writing, and I'll own that mainstream classics treats it as one strand rather than the standard view.
The Jesus overlap doesn't need the sun to work, though. Dionysus is born of a mortal woman, Semele, and the king of the gods. He is torn apart and returns, twice-born. His central sacrament is wine, drunk in communion with the god. In Euripides's Bacchae, he arrives in a hostile city, is arrested by a king who doesn't recognize his divinity, escapes his bonds supernaturally, and destroys the ruler who denied him. If that plot feels familiar, that's my point.
And the appropriation pattern is documented, not alleged. December 25 was already the birthday of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, in the Roman calendar before it was Christmas. Saturnalia's gift-giving, feasting, and role reversals fed straight into the holiday you celebrate now. Marriage rites, the halo behind a holy figure's head, the winter birth of a light-bringing savior; these are inheritances. Taking is normal in religion. Taking and then denouncing the people you took from is what I have a problem with.
The Psychology of Why the Outrage Was Never About Theology
Here's where the psychosocial part earns its keep. Solomon Asch showed decades ago that people will state an obvious falsehood about the length of a line if enough people around them state it first. Pluralistic ignorance does the rest; most people in a group privately doubt the loudest position but assume everyone else believes it, so nobody breaks ranks. Moral outrage in a crowd isn't primarily a reasoning process, it's a membership process. Getting mad at the right thing, at the right volume, at the right time, is how you signal you're still inside the tent.
That's why almost none of the outrage engaged the actual content. Nobody was arguing about van Bijlert's composition or the Orphic identification of Dionysus with the sun. The signal was the point, and the facts were incidental. I'm not saying that to insult anyone's faith; I'm saying it because it's the mechanism, and once you see it you can't unsee it in yourself either. Ask yourself the last time you were furious about something you'd never researched.
The Honest Objection, Because You Deserve One
I'd be running a con if I didn't tell you the strongest case against me. In 1969 El Salvador and Honduras fought a brief war whose flashpoint involved World Cup qualifiers, remembered as the Football War, though the real causes were land and migration. The 1936 Berlin games were a propaganda triumph for the Nazi state. Hooliganism is real, and nationalism at international tournaments can run hot enough to hurt people. Even the sacred truce got violated; the Spartans were fined for it, and in 364 BC there was actual fighting inside the sanctuary at Olympia.
The worst outcome of a rivalry channeled into sport is a riot, a fine, and a canceled fixture. The worst outcome of a rivalry channeled into war is Dresden, Hiroshima, Aleppo, and a generation of children breathing burnt plastic. Sports also has the better ledger than people admit: ping-pong diplomacy cracked open US-China relations in 1971, and soldiers climbed out of the trenches to kick a ball around in the Christmas truce of 1914. A tool doesn't have to be perfect to be better than the alternative. It just has to fail smaller.
So Here's What I'm Actually Asking For
I'm not claiming a penalty shootout should redraw a national border tomorrow. What I'm arguing is that we already have a ritual technology for converting the urge to dominate into something survivable, and we've let it rot into a corporate broadcast. Put teeth back in the truce, with real exclusion and real sanctions for states that break it during the games. Build a rung into the escalation ladder where champions compete before armies mobilize, the way monomachia and single combat traditions once let two men decide what two thousand would otherwise settle with steel. Make the games binding on something small first, and let the precedent grow.
And do it in your own life, because that's where you actually have jurisdiction. The next time you and somebody have real friction, take it to the court, the field, the track, the board, the mic. Somebody wins, somebody loses, everybody eats afterward, nobody buries a cousin. That's not naive, that's the oldest working peace treaty humans ever wrote, and we're the ones who forgot it.
The sun is a ball. The earth is a ball. The gods, every last one worth the name, are balls of fire hanging in the dark. You live on one, you play with a small one, and the ancient world figured out that rolling one around a field is how you argue with a neighbor without ending him. Ball is life. Act like it.
Want the whole story of the ball we all worship?
Everything I just walked you through — Dionysus and the sun, the borrowed birthday in December, the halo behind the holy man's head — is one chapter of a much bigger inheritance. My book The Myth of the Sun traces how solar worship became the blueprint for the religions people now swear were original, and what it means that we forgot the source. If this post made you look at the sky differently, that book is where the receipts live.
Get The Myth of the Sun here.
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