Nihilists Have More Fun

Shoutout to KXOL Mega 96.3 Los Angeles, the perpetual soundtrack of my car!  I grew up on radio, a very different type of radio than this station: primarily conservative talkshows and Evangelical sermons, although I do remember a time when I was younger and K-Earth 101 occupied a larger amount of my parents' listening time. I've never really gotten into TV or podcasts, but good old zero-effort, zero-decision-making radio stations are my thing. Mega 96.3 has a wonderful group of people hosting and deejaying their station who are full of positive and inspiring things to say, and there have been several times on my way to work in the morning when I've found myself thinking how refreshing it is to hear people who don't agree on everything still having a good time together. Disagreements on religious perspectives come up for instance, and nobody sounds angry! This morning, the hosts started talking about why fewer people are going to church these days and then patched in the...

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 ...

There are a couple people in my life who constantly remind me that the internet exists, and thanks to one of those people I watched a video interview of a guy who wrote a book called Is Atheism Dead? The interview was hosted by Sean McDowell, a friendly dad-like spirit who one of my internet mediums frequently feels the need to channel for me. I think Sean McDowell is a nice guy, and I really appreciate the effort he makes to bridge divides between people of differing beliefs. Simply because I’m familiar with his content, I think I will have to come back at some point to write some constructive criticism of things he could do better, but I do support his endeavors to make the world a more communication-friendly place. When it comes to certain of his views, and to some of the people he interviews though, my opinion may be noticeably less positive. Returning to the title of this particular guest’s book, the point I want to make about it is that it fits in perfectly to a pattern of choic...

I took these photos (really badly) a few years ago when my sister was getting rid of some of their old textbooks and found this book we both used for our science class in... I think it was 4th grade. This blog could be a lot more interesting I bet if I gave it a more specific theme like, "Surviving (name of my school)" and then all the posts would be about the weird quirks of having all your education up until age 18 take place within the same conservative Christian bubble. I could get a lot of posts just out of the textbooks we had. And then there would be all the material on the weird incorporation of politics into our classes and the swapping of stories about having seen demons and the awkward uncertainty about whether most holidays were really okay given their pagan elements and the banning of Harry Potter  and Pokemon  and the mixed messages about how you should try to go to a really good college but at the same time maybe you should just go to the college of worship our...

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...

If I hadn't been raised creationist, I would probably still be Christian. I'm glad now that I was exposed to this extreme set of ideas framed in a way that could demonstrably be proven false. If that hadn't happened, I might never have realized what it looked like to be surrounded by a network of ideas that wasn't being subjected to proper tests to see if it correlated with the rest of reality. If I had never realized that, I never would have started to test my other views to see if they were being insulated from proper criticism in the same way, so I probably never would have left the beliefs that were originally most important to me. Judging from the way creationism was taught to me though, I can only assume that many people who find it to be an important belief would misunderstand the role it played in my leaving Christianity. This is because creationist rhetoric teaches the expectation that questioning the literal historicity of Genesis 1 will lead people to reject ...

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 ...