Nihilists Have More Fun

I suppose it's mostly accurate to say that a good number of the conservative Christians I know are Trump supporters. I say it's only mostly accurate though because in the particular community of people I know, supporting Donald Trump for president wasn't a popular position originally. The people I grew up around are thoroughly socially and economically conservative—socially because they believe that many of the moral codes recorded in the Bible ought to be followed fairly literally, and economically because they mistrust liberal economics as being emotionally driven and unsustainable in the long run (although the sources of this mistrust themselves seem complicated enough to merit a speculative post of their own). To people who are this conservative, Trump was clearly not a desirable candidate when he first joined the 2016 race since his past didn't prove him to be a true conservative. For some of my family members, Dr. Ben Carson was the obvious best choice: He had a h...

I realized I had written a post about love and then about faith and so I thought well, I wasn't planning this, but why not finish out the trio? Unfortunately though, the only thing I have to say about hope is, there is no hope. Nope. There's no hope. Not in the way I heard the word used in the sayings that linked it to love and faith at least. I heard a lot about the virtues of faith, hope, and love in religious contexts, and while I still find faith and love to be vital to everyday life, I now think that the hope my religious upbringing offered is actually quite a dangerous thing, in addition to not being real. Hope in these contexts ultimately meant one thing: the hope of eternal life. This was a hope that could never be broken because it always looked towards something further ahead than your present circumstances. No matter how badly everything turned out for you, this hope would always remain because you could always tell yourself things would be better after you died. Spe...

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...

- 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...