Nihilists Have More Fun

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 ...

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...

It feels so strange having posted something about losing my mom finally and then going back to posting unrelated things. I always think too much about how things look from the outside, how hard it might be to make sense of them without context. I wonder if it seems too sudden to have such unrelated things together. For over a year, I felt like I couldn't speak publicly because I was too sad. I was thinking about missing my mom constantly and couldn't put anything out there for anyone to see. I still miss her every day, but I'm starting to recover enough that I can do and say other things too, and I have a lot to catch up on. My mom raised me to always look on the bright side of things, and I know from every word and action of hers that she would want her family to enjoy our lives fully, even while missing her. Every day I'm so sad not to have her with me, but at the same time I'm able to enjoy the people around me and the things I get to do. Healing is an uncomforta...

SPOILER ALERT - PLOT POINTS DISCUSSED  It's that special season that only comes one time each year: Tax Season! And what better way to celebrate the bureaucracy this April 15th than by hitting the theaters for a movie? Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert's Everything Everywhere All at Once is the most fun I've had to date watching a bickering couple get audited. In fact, despite the majority of the story taking place in a laundromat and an IRS building, it's more fun than some flicks set in more alluring locations. The Daniels do not disappoint when it comes to wackiness, and that's saying something when you're talking about using a story concept that's become overdone as quickly as the multiverse concept has. The way they poke fun at this sci-fi trope while simultaneously telling a powerful story about having to live in many worlds at once is beautiful! They combine the side-splittingly ridiculous with the deeply relatable in a fashion that leaves you thinkin...

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...