Nihilists Have More Fun

When I first decided to write the book that became Our Fatal Sincerity  I envisioned it ending with an appendix of journal entries that showed my changing thoughts about Christianity over the years. I started to transcribe my old journals into a word processor soon after and continued to work on that project simultaneously to writing the rest of the book. It quickly became clear that there was far too much material to publish together with the main text of the book, so once the transcriptions were finished, I let them sit while I finished and published the other material, and then for several more months after that.  In the end, I decided to publish them on their own and only as an ebook, which you can now find here . While I had originally imagined that the journals would be a primary point of attraction to Our Fatal Sincerity , when I proofread the transcriptions, I was so bored I had to give up that illusion. There are just a few interesting points throughout, but I didn't ...

 "Don't say gay" laws--Do they matter?  When I was in early elementary school, we didn't have a curriculum that mentioned sexual orientation, but I still learned about gay people in school. From jokes and insults, I learned that they were no good. If teachers aren't allowed to make simple statements about everyone being valuable and beautiful, that informal education is still going to be there, making sure children who are different from the majority know they are inferior. If a child has some inkling at an early age that they might like someone they're "not supposed" to like or want to dress a way they're "not supposed" to dress, barring teachers from saying a few positive words about LGBT people isn't going to make those feelings disappear. It only ensures that the voices telling these kids to hate themselves meet less opposition. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2013/06/13/chapter-3-the-coming-out-experience/ (See also ...

Actually, as you can probably tell, I don't hate nihilists. That just seemed like a good click-bait title for a post about internalized prejudice. You've surely heard of the topic of internalized prejudices before, probably in the context of racism or sexism. As you've heard, just because you belong to a certain group of people is no guarantee that you will see that group positively. If you grow up in a society that portrays people with your skin color or your chromosomes (etc.) in a negative light, to some extent you're going to think that your group and you yourself are no good, just as you were taught. You might for instance feel with great certainty that, while it's acceptable and barely noticeable for other people to express their culture, their attractions, their beliefs, their gender, if you were to express yours, it would be too political, confrontational, or abrasive.  I know I have this sort of internalized disdain for my own beliefs, but it's so stron...

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...