Nihilists Have More Fun

If I hadn't been raised creationist, I would probably still be Christian. I'm glad now that I was exposed to this extreme set of ideas framed in a way that could demonstrably be proven false. If that hadn't happened, I might never have realized what it looked like to be surrounded by a network of ideas that wasn't being subjected to proper tests to see if it correlated with the rest of reality. If I had never realized that, I never would have started to test my other views to see if they were being insulated from proper criticism in the same way, so I probably never would have left the beliefs that were originally most important to me. Judging from the way creationism was taught to me though, I can only assume that many people who find it to be an important belief would misunderstand the role it played in my leaving Christianity. This is because creationist rhetoric teaches the expectation that questioning the literal historicity of Genesis 1 will lead people to reject ...

There's a place in the first chapter of Our Fatal Sincerity  where I mention that I noticed people pointing out trails of bad citations in pro-creationism pieces of writing and that at the time this contributed to my rejection of creationism. My purpose in mentioning this is to show what information I was encountering at a specific point in my life and how I responded to it at the time, so even if I had later found out that my impression of the prevalence of bad citations was incorrect, I would still have talked about why I had that impression at the time and how I responded to it at the time. Nothing since that point in my life has led me to think that that impression was incorrect however, and since it relates to the topic of bad citations, I thought I should cite an example of what I'm talking about somewhere just to show that, yep, if I check this out nowadays, I still feel justified in making the same accusation. This citation issue is not just a passing impression I had ...

My book is out! It’s called Our Fatal Sincerity , and you can find it HERE .  I can’t believe I actually finished a book! I finished something! I’ve never been more proud of anything else I’ve done in my life! What is this book actually about? Our Fatal Sincerity is the result of my wrestling to come to terms with my own loss of belief in Christianity. Up until the end of 2018, my faith in Jesus had been the most important part of my life; as the book gets into, that year a lot of long-standing problems and new realizations suddenly came together and went critical—I was left unable to convince myself that the person I had been trying to talk to all my life was really there.  The book primarily grew out of the journals I was keeping during this time. Although my loss of beliefs was devastating at first, it also marked the point at which life began to make sense for the first time, and I couldn’t stop writing about all the problematic ideas I had been trying to force into my co...

It feels so strange having posted something about losing my mom finally and then going back to posting unrelated things. I always think too much about how things look from the outside, how hard it might be to make sense of them without context. I wonder if it seems too sudden to have such unrelated things together. For over a year, I felt like I couldn't speak publicly because I was too sad. I was thinking about missing my mom constantly and couldn't put anything out there for anyone to see. I still miss her every day, but I'm starting to recover enough that I can do and say other things too, and I have a lot to catch up on. My mom raised me to always look on the bright side of things, and I know from every word and action of hers that she would want her family to enjoy our lives fully, even while missing her. Every day I'm so sad not to have her with me, but at the same time I'm able to enjoy the people around me and the things I get to do. Healing is an uncomforta...

SPOILER ALERT - PLOT POINTS DISCUSSED  It's that special season that only comes one time each year: Tax Season! And what better way to celebrate the bureaucracy this April 15th than by hitting the theaters for a movie? Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most fun I've had to date watching a bickering couple get audited. In fact, despite the majority of the story taking place in a laundromat and an IRS building, it's more fun than some flicks set in more alluring locations. The Daniels do not disappoint when it comes to wackiness, and that's saying something when you're talking about using a story concept that's become overdone as quickly as the multiverse concept has. The way they poke fun at this sci-fi trope while simultaneously telling a powerful story about having to live in many worlds at once is beautiful! They combine the side-splittingly ridiculous with the deeply relatable in a fashion that leaves you thinkin...