Nihilists Have More Fun

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...

Some would say that, when I realized I could no longer believe in God, I lost my faith. I even used this phrasing to explain my changed views to others once or twice, but something about it never struck me quite right, and after thinking it over a bit, I realized why these words had seemed ill-fitted to the situation. It was because all my life I had heard the word "faith" used in two different ways without realizing it, and while I had given up on something that is called faith in certain circumstances, I hadn't stopped exercising the thing that is more broadly referred to as faith at all. You see, I had gone a very long time without realizing that people were calling two different, and in fact contradictory, concepts by the same name. Now, I don't want to give the impression here that it's somehow wrong, bad, or incorrect for a word to have contradictory usages. The meanings of words tend to shift over time—that's simply how language works—and sometimes pe...