Nihilists Have More Fun

I took these photos (really badly) a few years ago when my sister was getting rid of some of their old textbooks and found this book we both used for our science class in... I think it was 4th grade. This blog could be a lot more interesting I bet if I gave it a more specific theme like, "Surviving (name of my school)" and then all the posts would be about the weird quirks of having all your education up until age 18 take place within the same conservative Christian bubble. I could get a lot of posts just out of the textbooks we had. And then there would be all the material on the weird incorporation of politics into our classes and the swapping of stories about having seen demons and the awkward uncertainty about whether most holidays were really okay given their pagan elements and the banning of Harry Potter  and Pokemon  and the mixed messages about how you should try to go to a really good college but at the same time maybe you should just go to the college of worship our...

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 ...

- originally October 27, 2019 I've been gone for quite a while already. I took a break to fall in love. And also to write a book. The book is probably three quarters of the way done with a good outline to go off of for the rest, and I'm more in love everyday with the man who's certainly better than my dreams. I've been spending my free time on writing that is not this, so it's been a bit longer than I hoped before I've managed to get a second post out, but at least it's still the same year, and that's not too bad given my record! I could say a lot of things about love. That shouldn't be surprising given that out of the pie of things people say, a wide slice has to do with love. But it is a little surprising to me to find myself having things to say on the subject. I was never one to think ahead much to what it would be like to fall in love. Never the kind of girl who daydreamed about the perfect wedding. (And believe me, I am feeling that n...