We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Sitting around the table on a rainy Taitokerau afternoon, the Northland Edition Monopoly board spread out, and the tension rising as one person starts hoarding the hotels on Semenoff Stadium while the rest of the whānau slowly goes broke. We were taught that this is just "how the game works"—that for one person to win, everyone else has to lose. But what if I told you that the game we were given is a stolen explanation? What if I told you the original version had a second set of rules—one designed to prove that we can all prosper together?

Kia ora e te whānau. Pull up a chair and let’s have a real talk for a moment. 🌿 We often think of our faith or our deepest beliefs as a direct, unedited download from the heavens—a fixed rock that has never changed. But if we look at the whakapapa of history, we start to see the fingerprints of men where we expected the hand of the Divine.

The truth is, much of what we call "standard doctrine" in Te Tai Tokerau was forged in the fires of political survival. In the language of physicist David Deutsch, many of these "rules" are "Bad Explanations"—ideas that are easy to vary because they served a specific person’s power rather than the universal truth of the Woven Universe.