Temple and
the Skool

Temple and the Skool is one of three works in The NeuroSpicy Gospels — a literary project reading biblical narrative through the frame of neurodivergent experience. This piece is comparative theology: it pairs the Temple money changers with a modern paid neurodivergent community to ask what the same exchange-table mechanism looks like when "belonging" is the commodity.

It is published under the pen name Harrison Shaw, with the author's name attached, in the tradition of Kazantzakis, Saramago, and Pullman — writers who used the Gospel narrative as a literary frame without making theological claims about it. The argument is structural, not theological. It is about institutions, not about Jesus.

Read the full project preface →

The Gospel of John places it at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. The Synoptics put it at the end, the act that triggered the arrest. Either way, the event is the same: Jesus walks into the Temple in Jerusalem, looks around, and loses it. He overturns the tables of the money changers. He drives out the dove sellers. He fashions a whip of cords and clears the room. The Temple was the holiest site in Judaism — the literal dwelling place of God. And it had been colonized. The outer court, the Court of the Gentiles, was the only space where non-Jews could approach the divine. The only one. And the religious establishment had turned it into a commodity market. You needed to exchange Roman coins for Temple currency to pay the required tax. You needed to buy certified animals for sacrifice. The prices were controlled. The markups were real. The poorest, most marginalized people — the ones who had traveled furthest to draw near to something sacred — were the ones getting squeezed. Jesus called it what it was: “a den of thieves.”

The NeuroSpicy Community markets itself as the largest support network for autistics and ADHDers in the world. A sanctuary. A space to unmask. A place built by neurodivergent people, for neurodivergent people. Josh — a journalist, an autistic person, someone who had spent years searching for belonging — found it through Sol Smith, who was offering coaching on exactly this premise. They entered into a work trade. Josh built bots. Josh pitched a platform vision called SolSpace — a full-architecture concept for a community hub grounded in AI support, mutual aid, and neurodivergent empowerment. Sol said the idea wouldn’t work. He needed someone more independent. Six weeks later, Sol launched NeuroSpicy — with Sebastian — using, at minimum, the conceptual vocabulary and community vision that Josh had brought to the table. Josh joined anyway. He contributed. He wrote. He held space when leadership was absent over the holidays. He engaged with the projects Sol and Sebastian themselves invited him to work on. He was removed twice without explanation.

In Jerusalem, the mechanism was the exchange rate. The Temple tax could only be paid in Tyrian shekels — not because of theology, but because Roman coins bore Caesar’s image and were considered idolatrous. So you had to exchange. And the exchange happened inside the Temple walls, at rates set by the Temple establishment. There was no alternative market. You either paid the markup or you didn’t enter the sacred space. In NeuroSpicy, the mechanism is belonging itself. Sol sells coaching, community membership, and the promise of unmaskable space. For autistic people — for whom community is often inaccessible, for whom rejection is a chronic wound, for whom finding a place that gets it can feel like finally being able to breathe — this is not a product. It is oxygen. The pricing model extracts value from that desperation. Not cynically, perhaps. But structurally. And the governance model ensures that the people providing the most labor — the ones writing, building, holding space, mentoring, animating the community — have zero power when leadership decides, for reasons that cannot be questioned, that they are unsafe. Josh built bots. He pitched the platform. He worked on the projects Sol and Sebastian brought to him. He was contributor-class labor in a community that had no recognition structure for contributor-class labor. When the relationship became inconvenient, he was removed. The work product stayed. The builder left. That’s the exchange table. That’s the markup.

Jesus didn’t write a letter. He didn’t request mediation. He fashioned a whip and went in swinging. Josh did something harder. He wrote. And wrote. And wrote again. He produced three Substack essays under a pen name. He developed The NeuroSpicy Papers — an 85-essay analytical series modeled on The Federalist Papers, examining community governance, legitimacy, and institutional design, published under the shared pseudonym Publius Neurospicus. He wrote songs. He built a documentation website. He created a React-based archive. He drafted formal analytical documents applying DSM-5 criteria and coercive control frameworks. He came back under another name to see if the community itself was worth saving. He was removed a third time. What Jesus and Josh share is not rage — though both had reason for it. What they share is the refusal to call the thing holy when it isn’t. The refusal to absorb the harm quietly. The insistence on naming what the institution is actually doing to the people it claims to serve. And they share this: the people with power in that room — the priests, the coin changers, Sol, Sebastian — were not confused about what was happening. They knew.