Nihilists Have More Fun

I lost my mother to covid-19 in January of 2021. Nothing has felt real since. I can't even remember when the last time was that she had been sick with anything, and then she was gone. We were in the middle of so many things. So many conversations are hanging in the air, mid-sentence.  She should still be out there somewhere, laughing with her friends, or going on a new adventure with my dad, exploring yet another natural wonder or goofy tourist-trap hundreds of miles away or a restaurant just around the corner. She should still be watering her flowers and composing her family Christmas cards. She should be just a phone-call away to answer my questions about how to adjust to life without her--who else do you talk about these things with but your mom? My mom deserved so much better than to die early in a hospital, and maybe I'll come back to write something about how devastating her loss has been, but it's taken over a year to be able to write anything about her at all, and w...

Dear Mom and Dad, I want to tell you more about what I think and why I’ve changed my mind on so many things—I want to tell you because of course, just like anyone, I like to feel understood, and I’d like there to be more of an understanding between us so we can be closer as a family as well. I don’t like that nowadays I avoid talking with you about a lot of the things that are most important to me and do little more than nod and smile when you bring up the things that are most important to you. The reason I haven’t talked to you about any of this more extensively than by sending you that one brief text message, just detailed enough to say that I had changed my mind about religious things and didn’t want you to worry about me, is that I’m afraid that having to think about any of this makes you sad, and it’s been easier to let everyone act like nothing has really changed than to make you think about the specifics of things that make you sad. Most importantly, I don’t want you to think I’...

In many ways I never liked politics. Certain discussions on how nations should be administered could be interesting, but as a whole the field was so ugly, so reminiscent of a poorly-made and outdated website: gray and unaesthetic, broken, inefficient, frustrating. What was worse, it always seemed to be usurping the place of supposedly nobler and more important subjects, like religion. According to the voices that shaped my understanding of life, the love of Jesus was the thing that would change the world. We were to “seek first the kingdom” and “all these things” would fall into place as we did. Politics, I knew, didn’t change hearts; changed hearts added up to cultural movements, which in turn led to political change, and the way to change hearts was to love the people around you, be real with them, listen to them, and be there for them. But despite this understanding, I often saw political allegiances clawing their way up to the level of religious importance and even supplanting what...

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...