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I’ve been there.

At church, closing your eyes, lost in the moment. The piano, the guitars, the perfect ambience, hundreds of people…feeling so beautiful and clean inside that tears are streaming down your face…

And then, the pastor gets up to talk about the Bible. And he says that what you were doing was worshipping God, and that God doesn’t like sin. He dislikes it so much that he died for it.

He died so you could feel love — the same love that you were feeling a few minutes ago, that you were lost in. To do that, he had to get rid of sin.

And sin is listed in a big book that indicates that you have to think the beautiful marriage that a gay couple has is bad.

It’s confusing. You were feeling so beautiful inside…but in order to feel that, you have to believe that things are wrong that don’t necessarily seem all that wrong. Things that hurt other people.

And they’re based on fantastic things in the Bible that seem…a bit unbelievable. But you have to get your spirituality here and only here, somehow, if you don’t want to go to hell forever…

As an atheist, I’m not trying to take away the positive feelings you get. Really, I’m not. When I rant and rave, it’s often because I’m outraged that people joined the beautiful feeling you get in church with a bunch of rules that hurt people and a God who makes you feel so inferior that you have to thank him for every breath you take.

I think it’s a simple point, but one that often gets missed: you can have a connection — even a deeply spiritual one — to the entirety of existence, and get lost in it and inspired by it, without believing in all of the other nonsense. You don’t have to think gay marriage is wrong in order to close your eyes and lose yourself in the beauty of connection that you can experience in the here and now.

And spirituality isn’t a commitment, either. Sometimes I like to be contemplative and connect deeply to nature. Sometimes that’s boring as hell and I want to get involved in the hustle-bustle of life. That’s awesome. Life isn’t the one thing. Religion may try to consume you and say it is, but…I think it’s better to just live, man. You can have deep personal, “spiritual” feelings on your own time.

And what I have to say is…you do you.

If you don’t like spirituality, if it gives you a bad taste in your mouth, if you want to get rid of it — go ahead. Get rid of it in your life.

If you find those feelings you got in church in the mountains, on hikes, in a canoe, etc., like many atheists I know…find it there.

So yeah, I’m an atheist. And I’m very vocal. But those feelings of spirituality are not something I’m trying to take away from people — I’m attacking religion. If anything, I think getting rid of religion increases the ways we can express ourselves through the feelings we label “spirituality,” and without the barrier of God-enforced rules, the intensity of the feelings we express can develop.

I’m against much of religion because I think it takes away or limits happiness, and I’m very interested in ensuring that people are happy after they leave. And once you look past the moneygrubbing preachers who say that that’s impossible…there seem to be a lot of ways it is possible.

Feel free to embrace them. As long as you’re not hurting people, or making rules you’re illogically forcing others outside your group to follow or be held accountable to…you are free to take advantage of all the world of beauty has to offer.

Life is hard enough as it is. Don’t make it harder by letting other people intrusively qualify your sense of euphoric spirituality with arbitrary, cumbersome rules that take away from the beauty in yourself and others.

Hopefully that helps.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to support what I do.

I’ve had it.

People act so entitled these days. It’s unreal.

For some reason, “free speech” has become the right to go onto privately held sites and post whatever you want on them, and to get paid for it. And for the people you bully to simply take you and your followers saying you’d love to rape them or send you death threats or dox you, and for you to simply take it.

I don’t understand this. This is not free speech. Free speech is for the company to decide to pick and choose what they do and do not want on their platform.

The popular alt-right/anti-SJW YouTubers are not in charge of Youtube. They use a service. They don’t own the platform. You know who owns the platform? Advertisers. Advertisers who want people to buy their stuff. And people who are insulted are not going to buy their stuff.

It may rack up YouTube views to make fun of everyone who isn’t white, male, cis, and heterosexual. It certainly is an easy, cheap way to do it. But it makes no sense for advertisers to buy space on a platform that is known for insulting these groups of people. People will be less interested in buying their products. That, and many successful people in these companies belong to the less-dominant groups and don’t enjoy spending their money supporting videomakers who are actively attacking their well-being in the United States. If you want to make a living out of despising everyone who isn’t on the top rung of culture, get your lackeys to support you; don’t expect advertisers to do it. Don’t expect YouTube to do it.

Here is the infuriating thing.

The absolutely infuriating thing. The thoroughly, mind-numbingly, completely enraging hypocrisy of it all:

These same people so often wax eloquent (or yell nearly incomprehensibly, as the case may be) about how other people should just take it. How you can intentionally call people names like you’re a third-grade bully and make fun of people when you find the smallest tear edge from their eyes. How you can laugh at your ability to send your minions to downvote small fledgling channels just barely trying to express themselves into oblivion, and then shrug when they start making rape jokes and sending death threats and trying to make the person suicideally depressed for even daring to show their face on YouTube.

And yet, when YouTube decides to demonetize their content, they’re the first people NOT to take it. They’re the first person to yell “free speech” — when free speech is NOT BEING VIOLATED — YouTube is using ITS free speech when it shuts people down.

These people take pride in the fact that they have minions who will follow them to nearly the ends of the earth, and will not doubt their prejudiced statements, and will do their bidding like the underdogs of a mafia boss.

And yeah, YouTube doesn’t like it, probably. Duh. I mean, it reduces the content people are willing to share. It reduces the ideas that enter into discourse. It reduces the advertisers who feel that their product can be effectively marketed on the platform.

Their decision not to monetize your videos is not, at all, an attack on free speech. It’s about those market forces working. You can still speak. If it’s about talking, you can talk. You can earn money on Patreon or not at all, still. No one is taking away your right to speak. They are just saying they’re uncomfortable with your platform.

Which brings me to another point: blocking.

There are people who love to abuse. And when the person reacts by blocking them — say, someone like Steve Shives — they act as if they are entitled not to be blocked.

But it’s not because they genuinely care about what that person has to say. It’s because they can’t call that person names and shame them.

Because — and here’s the outrageous thing — if you are going to attack a relationship a man has with his wife, make videos about “destroying” him, have your minions make rape jokes and death threats, have to deal with doxxing, have people encourage others to take your livelihood away…if you are going to do all that, the person is not entitled to take it. People are not your playthings. You do not have license to force people to let you ruin their lives. Stop being such a crybaby when someone says, “No, I don’t want to engage with your infantile behavior.”

There.

If you know what I’m talking about, congrats on knowing what I’m talking about. If you don’t, feel free to move on. Just had to vent. I’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming momentarily.

But the entitlement mentality of the anti-SJW right is just…staggering.

Realize that what is happening regarding demonetization of videos is simply the market forces at work on a private platform, and that people have lives off of these platforms to protect, and they aren’t entitled to be your personal toys to mock with non-arguments and dogpile, and get the hell over it.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.

OK. So I’m talking to a bunch of atheists, and as a result I gotta admit, right off the bat, that many of you don’t think Jesus even existed. I’m not gonna argue that.

My personal opinion? I think the Gospels probably came from a kernel of stuff that happened that got exaggerated by passionate followers and changed through several copies. I think some of it probably happened, and a lot of it probably didn’t. The fantastical stuff didn’t, and some of the mundane stuff likely did. I know some of y’all hate me for saying that. Write me your angry notes in the comment section, and then feel free to read the rest of this.

Now, Joseph of Arimathea — unlike a lot of stuff in the four Gospels (including seeing the risen Christ — Mark’s Gospel, famously, ends at 16:8 without anyone having seen Jesus, prompting a horrified scribe to pen down verses 9-16) is in all four Gospels (five, if you count the Gospel of Nicodemus), and in all the Gospels he is doing the same thing.

Burying Jesus.

Full disclosure here. It is possible that Joseph of Arimathea never existed — indeed, some scholars argue that he is a device to show that the disciples went to the right tomb — to show that Jesus wasn’t buried randomly.

I’m not disputing that. But I noticed, as a Christian, that even if you think Joseph of Arimathea is real (as your Christian friends might) there are a bunch of really weird things here in the Bible story.

Let’s go with the first thing. Most Christians say Jesus really was dead before being taken down from the cross. Maybe he was; that’s no skin off my nose. Although, as a brief note, the lore that someone can’t survive a crucifixion is simply false. As Josephus wrote in an account:

I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician’s hands, while the third recovered.

I mean…it happens. Christians insist it’s impossible, but if you have a good enough physician (Luke was a physician, by the way) on your side, and you get them down quickly enough, you can bring them back to health. I don’t know for sure whether Jesus was dead on the cross, and there are arguments that he never existed.

But, even as a Christian, the haste signified in the passage below bothered me:

Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for Jesus’ body. Pilate was surprised to hear that he was already dead. Summoning the centurion, he asked him if Jesus had already died. When he learned from the centurion that it was so, he gave the body to Joseph. (Mark 15:42-45, NIV)

Isn’t that weird? Like, if it was so goddamn important to admit that Jesus was dead, why would Mark — who has the shortest Gospel, and doesn’t even seem to originally include any of the disciples SEEING Jesus — say that Pilate was surprised that he was dead? It must have been a very memorable event. If this happened, Pilate was genuinely shocked.

Which begs the question…was Jesus really dead?

John has a different account:

Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. (John 19:31-34, NIV)

Also weird. Besides untangling the question of who did and didn’t know Jesus was dead and when, between the two accounts, it seems that Pilate and the soldiers and the Jewish leaders all expected him to be alive.

And Joseph of Arimathea, went quickly, as soon as Jesus appeared dead, and asked for the body. And this seemed to happen so publicly and undeniably that extremely biased writers included it in their accounts of the incident.

Here’s the other thing about Joseph of Arimathea:

Now there was a man named Joseph, a member of the Council, a good and upright man, who had not consented to their decision and action. (Luke 23: 50-51, NIV)

What is the Council? The Jewish council, AKA, the Sanhedrin, who supposedly sentenced Jesus to death.

He was an insider. He would have known how much they wanted Jesus dead. I had always heard apologists say that the guards wouldn’t have allowed the body to be stolen, because if it was they knew they would die. But they didn’t. Why?

While the women were on their way, some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money,  telling them, “You are to say, ‘His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.’ If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.”  So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. (Matthew 28: 11-15, NIV)

They didn’t die. They got paid. And who would be able to anticipate that? What follower of Jesus would have enough of an inside track on the thinking of those condemning Jesus to death that he knew that if the guards told a larger-than-life story about Jesus rising from the dead, those people would pay top dollar to shut them up?

Joseph of Arimathea, according to the Gospel accounts.

And Joseph of Arimathea was apparently a wealthy man himself:

 As evening approached, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who had himself become a disciple of Jesus. (Matthew 27:57, NIV)

So Joseph of Arimathea, angry at their decision to kill Jesus, and protesting against his death, could have paid the guards out of his own pocket, as well. I mean, he already paid a lot of money for the burial. So yeah…the guards may have gotten paid from both ends, and known from Joseph of Arimathea that if they told the right story, they’d make more hush money instead of dying.

But how would Joseph get into the tomb?

Here is where things really start getting fishy.

Joseph took the body, wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and placed it in his own new tomb that he had cut out of the rock. He rolled a big stone in front of the entrance to the tomb and went away. (Matthew 27:59-60, NIV)

So Joseph bought some linen cloth, took down the body, wrapped it in the linen, and placed it in a tomb cut out of rock. Then he rolled a stone against the entrance of the tomb. (Mark 15:46, NIV)

Going to Pilate, he asked for Jesus’ body.  Then he took it down, wrapped it in linen cloth and placed it in a tomb cut in the rock, one in which no one had yet been laid. (Luke 23:52-53, NIV)

At the place where Jesus was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had ever been laid. Because it was the Jewish day of Preparation and since the tomb was nearby, they laid Jesus there. (John 19:41-42, NIV)

Wait up. So…in this account….Joseph places Jesus in “his own new tomb”? This tomb…is suspiciously new. Like…it could have a tunnel built in it. It could have a back entrance, possibly. Etc. There’s nothing that says it was ever inspected. It’s almost as if Joseph of Arimathea made this tomb for this purpose. He certainly was awfully eager to get Jesus in there.

And HE wrapped Jesus up — after everyone was shocked that Jesus had died so quickly. A man unhappy with this man being condemned to death. And wrapping the body…did he wrap the whole body? Who was overseeing this process? Couldn’t they have been bandaging Jesus up? I mean, Pilate didn’t even know Jesus was dead — how carefully was he overseeing the burial process.

My point…it was Joseph’s tomb, supposedly. He could have done anything with it, to it, on it, in it that he wanted. And he seemed to care an awful lot that he was.

But why didn’t anyone suspect Joseph? Doesn’t it seem obvious?

Well…

Joseph was a disciple of Jesus, but secretly because he feared the Jewish leaders. (John 19:38, NIV)

Wow.  So if that’s remotely true, that would explain how he was able to get away with it all. How he was able to get the body, put it in his tomb, close it up, etc. He was a prominent council member, simply asking for the body for safekeeping.

It also means he could have gotten away with a lot…and no one would have suspected a thing.

Now, I’m not saying anything did or didn’t happen. But…even if you do read the Bible story for what it’s worth…it seems like something fishy was going on. Especially since they would admit all of that in light of all the bias.

And you never hear about Joseph of Arimathea again. Nowhere in the Bible. That’s it. He didn’t have to “die for a lie.” He doesn’t even seem as if he was remotely challenged. His reaction to the supposed resurrection of Christ isn’t even recorded. He just kinda fades into the shadows…like a puppeteer, out of sight.

Anyways, when I was a Christian, he really bothered me. And increasingly, even though I had been indoctrinated for 28 years to believe the resurrection was FAR more probable than it actually was…even I had to admit that the Joseph of Arimathea variable made it far more likely that something much less supernatural was going on.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to support what I do.

Many of you may not know that my original goal was to be a Christian apologist, in the mold of CS Lewis. That dream got me through a BA, an MA, and half of a PhD program in the humanities before I finally determined that God didn’t exist. The biggest misconception others have had regarding my rejection of God has been that I left Christianity because I didn’t examine it closely enough, or because I gave up on it too soon. The opposite is true. I left Christianity through my belief in God, not in spite of it. I believed in God so intensely and so fervently that I tried hard to get to know him, and it was when I was closest to God that I found he didn’t exist.

Let’s use God’s morality as an example.

I know I sound cynical here, but I honestly think that most Christians don’t really think deeply about the adage that God is the center of morality, or that God is the author of “objective” morality. God is there so that they don’t have to think about the complexity of morality. They want morality to be a solved question, and attaching “God” to the question means they don’t have to think about it anymore. Oh, sure, there may be sacrifice for some people — in some parts of Christianity, the rules can seem very burdensome. But to most people, that’s a relatively small price to pay for a God of the gaps that takes away doubt that your moral standard is one that can be questioned or challenged by the discomfort of other people.

I think it’s necessary to spend a bit more time here to explain what I mean. Christians often demonize non-Christians or “weak Christians” as individuals who don’t want to be held accountable by God, which may or may not be true (and which is fairly irrelevant to the existence of God, anyway). But it is also true that when you aren’t held accountable by God, you are still expected to answer for your choices — to your boss, to your friends, to your colleagues, to your clients, to yourself, to your relationship with all living (and even non-living) things. Those choices, and the way you decide to defend them, have very real consequences for you and other people you may care about. Sometimes one choice will hurt one person over another, and you have to figure out how to prioritize consequences when you care about both entities. Dilemmas like these make it very difficult for us to determine which moral choice will bring about the best outcome and, more than that, how to communicate the reasoning behind the choice we choose in a way that will bring about the most desirable consequences.

TL; DR — morality is hard work, with many gaps and sometimes a lack of clearly “right” answers, so many Christians insert a “god of the gaps” into moral thinking so they don’t have to think about it.

Full disclosure: I hate this aspect of Christianity. It can turn people into nearly psychopathic bullies, even people who really care about you, because they have stubborn, unmoving, and unreasoned “just so” moral codes, and their entire belief in God is largely based on a fear of losing the security of that moral code. So if you need them to look outside that moral code to do what’s best for you, someone they love — whether it be to accept your homosexuality, for example, or your atheism, or some other part of you — then they’ll choose the security of their moral code over caring about you. Because if they truly went the next step and embraced a morality that was better for you, they would have to admit that the “just so” standard that they used the god of the gaps to justify was absolutely baseless, and then they’d be forced to deal with the messiness of morality all over again.

Anyways…to get back to the point, Christians who insist that God is necessary for an objective moral standard to exist aren’t saying this, I think, because it makes sense. They’re using “god” to help them forget about the complex angst inherent in constructing morality.

I don’t think the thinking that God is necessary for “objective” morality is about belief in God. I think it’s about fear. Because if they really based their moral standard on a belief in God, I think they’d try to get to know, in more detail, the connection between God and moral standards. Because he’s God. Wouldn’t you want to get to know him better? Wouldn’t you want to clearly see how he is able to uphold an unquestionable moral standard?

Christians often try to get out of analyzing the supposed link between God and morality with the whole “his ways are higher than our ways” line. But still…that’s begging the question. Even if this being existed, why would his ways so much “higher” than mine?

The common answer I get, when I have asked these questions — when I was a Christian and as an atheist — is that “they just are.” As if there is fear in the Christian having their assumptions threatened. God’s ways have to be supreme “just because,” whether the logic makes sense or not. Why? Because Christians are not motivated by their desire to get to know God, by and large, when they discuss morality. They are motivated to escape from a fear of hard things, like figuring out how to construct a beneficial moral system, not just one that cannot be questioned.

I, and other former Christians, were forced out of our bubbles. As I was getting my education, I increasingly found that the answer, “Well, God determines right and wrong, so x is right and y is wrong” was not enough by itself. When I saw that the choices I made would have real consequences on people, and that some of the Bible’s rules did more harm than good, I couldn’t say “that’s just the way it is” to avoid questions on the utility of my morality. I actually had to justify God as being the necessary center of morality as if it were a real, logical concept, not as an escape from fear.

Many apologists, for all their show and long-winded “arguments,” don’t do that. What they do, basically, is say, “Isn’t morality tough to figure out? Aren’t the consequences of certain ill-advised moral systems atrocious? OK, then just use the word ‘god’ so that you don’t have to figure it out anymore.” So much of apologetics seems to be encapsulated in the process of persuading people to get so afraid of the things they don’t know that they’ll accept a nonexistent, illogical placeholder you label “God” so that gap is filled and they don’t have to think about it anymore. And if this didn’t hurt anyone, it wouldn’t matter. But it does hurt relationships, as I’ve just explained above, especially when it comes to human relations interacting with something as influential as morality.

When you are in the business of having to define and justify a moral system that will work for people, it becomes harder and harder to invalidate the concerns of people with those of a nonexistent God. Not without a strong rationale. And so I had to come up with that rationale. I had to step beyond the fear and actually do the truly Christian thing of thinking that if this was true, it was true in the real world and was a concept that could actually be examined and defended.

I don’t want to give the impression that I came to the conclusion that God’s moral system was nonsense overnight. It was a long, agonizing process that took a good ten years for me. But I could feel myself getting closer and closer to God as I was doing it. Many former Christians have told me the same thing happened to them, which is what you would expect with a false concept. It’s not like we set out to prove God didn’t exist.  No, that was the last thing on our minds. We were trying to prove that he DID. Unlike many Christians, we had to actually justify his status as the center of morality.

And when I did that, I ran into problems.

For example, a lot of Christians say that God made us, so He would have the moral authority to do as he sees fit. Unfortunately, they tend to take this as a truism, but it’s not — as a cursory look clearly shows.

Let’s pretend for a second that you created a person. If you write on a piece of paper, “Thou shalt not scream” and yet give the person the ability to scream, and then start torturing the person you created — say, skinning it alive and rubbing salt an hot oil on his wounds — and the person screams, are they doing something wrong?

According to a lot of Christian logic, I would have to say “yes.” Because you are the creator, you have the authority to do what you like with the person. The Bible says the pot cannot say to the potter, “Why have you made me this way?” right? So, by the same token, the person you made should not scream. Full stop.

But it’s more complicated than that. The person, even though I made him, is a person in his own right. I gave him the ability to scream. I poked and prodded him to scream. So his screaming is my fault. And even if it wasn’t — there’s something fundamentally wrong with thinking that just because I made him, I can judge his actions as wrong. Might doesn’t seem to make right.

The concept of free will stopped making sense, as well. If God gave us free will, that’s something He gave us. Wouldn’t what we do with what God gave us be God’s fault?

And how does free will work, exactly? If it works randomly, like the rolling of a dice, then isn’t God’s practice of blaming human beings for what the free will he made prompts them to do much like the gambler blaming the dice when he used it to roll a six and he actually rolled a five?

And if it works based on the person, or the person’s environments or desires — didn’t God make all of that, too? Everything that free will (which God made) would make “choices” based on was made completely and fully by God.

And if something was not made by God…then God didn’t make everything. In which case…God isn’t really God, if the rationale for him being God is that he is over all he created.

And if it was all made by God…then we’re basically just extensions of God. God isn’t over us or in charge of us — we’re extensions of him, like a hand is an extension of us. Anything that would possibly separate us from God would be made by God, too — so we’re not separated from him by air (which he made) or any barrier (which, ultimately, he also made). We’re as much a part of God as our brain cells are parts of us. But that can’t be, right? Because “God” is above his creation, not synonymous with it.  If everything is “God”…it’s more exact to say that nothing is. Which would make you an atheist.

And yeah, that may seem roundabout and a bit metaphysical for an atheist. But I hope it’s somewhat clear that this arrival at atheism does not come in spite of a belief in God. It comes through it, because one of way to discover a false truth as a lie is to get to know the false truth as closely and sincerely as you can. You’ll start seeing little inconsistencies here and there…until finally, the lie dissipates, and the truth underneath it is discovered.

Some Christians will argue that God, as the creator, knows the best possible way for human beings to work together. So it’s not about might makes right, this group of Christians will claim. It’s about the knowledge of God simply being greater than ours. But in the “real world,” it’s not enough to say that. You have to prove it. And this is very hard to prove. And the more you try to prove it, the more you begin to see that the best way for human beings to work together doesn’t seem to clearly correlate with what God says.

This may seem counterintuitive if you’re a Christian who takes morality for granted, but the truth is that the more you cling to God’s morality as the logically best way for human beings to work together, and the more you try to show this, the more frustrating the process becomes. Proving this hypothesis requires a close look at how well God’s morality works for people, and in many cases God’s morality doesn’t work well. And eventually, you see that if your goal is to promote God as the source of a universal morality that works for all involved — if your goal is to promote a universal morality that works for all involved, God keeps getting in the way of people.

That’s how it was for me. Eventually, my love for the idea that God had a morality that worked best for all human beings eventually forced me to be extremely uncomfortable with the morality in the Bible, which DIDN’T work for all people. God became more and more of a burden to the morality that worked best for all human beings. The two eventually became incompatible. And I saw that if I were interested in identifying and promoting a morality that worked for all people, I couldn’t be bound by the constraints of God — which is something you would expect to find, eventually, if this God was birthed out of fiction and ignorant prejudice and baseless superstition.

But it wasn’t in spite of that idea of God that I left. It was because that idea of a universal morality was such an attractive feature of God that I looked at it…and was actually forced to leave the notion of God’s morality.

Towards the end, I tried to balance the two sides, stating that God is the center of morality because he is the creator AND because he has access to universal morality. Instead of realizing that each side of this viewpoint had a fatal flaw, I tried to claim that there were enough positive merits on each side of the equation for me to add them up and still say God was the center of morality.

But that was intellectually dishonest. Both sides were, as I just explained, fatally flawed, so the more I examined them, the more I began to see that I was combining two improbable theories to create one that was even more improbable than either of them alone.

And so I eventually left the entire thinking that God is the center of morality. Instead, I think that we, as subjective entities, are trying to organize a moral system that each of us are intensely interested in, that has very high stakes — stakes high enough that I prefer to, at least in my perspective, leave a nonexistent God with an outdated and deeply counterproductive moral system out of it.

But.

I wouldn’t have gotten to that point if I hadn’t taken God so seriously at first, as I just explained. If I had taken God less seriously and simply used the concept that God is the center of morality so I wouldn’t have to think about morality, I’d probably still be a Christian. It was only through my stance as a Christian who really thought that morality was God-centered that I became an atheist.

Thank you for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep writing.

Further reading:

Three Answers To Three Common Questions Christians Ask Atheists About Morality

How do you justify 2+2=4 if you don’t believe in Thor?: Theism’s Morality Glitch

Why the Statement that the Christian God Is Necessary for Morality to Exist Is Rubbish

You can take the home from the boy
But not the boy from his home;
These are my streets, the only life I’ve ever known:
Who says you can’t go home?  — Bon Jovi, “Who Says You Can’t Go Home?”

I’m tired of looking around rooms
Wondering what I’ve got to do
Or who I’m supposed to be.
I don’t want to be anything other than me.  — Gavin DeGraw, “I Don’t Wanna Be”

I thot: Whyd we come here? Whynt we stay hoalt up? Whynt we go somers far away?
Becaws you cant stay hoalt up.
Becaws there aint no far away.
Becaws where you happen is where you happen. — Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

I thought it was normal.

I guess that’s what happens when you’re homeschooled in a conservative Christian home. You don’t know anything else, so you assume, early on, that the way you are living is the way it is supposed to be.

I thought it was normal to grow up in a large family, to be homeschooled, to memorize 100 verses a year, to “kiss dating goodbye,” to study theology and apologetics, to sing songs on Sunday in which I devoted my life to Christ, to pray, to be closely connected to a church group, and so on.  Pure normalcy. Oh, sure, I knew on a factual level that most people didn’t do those things. But those people were strange and abnormal, to me.

I thought that being a normal man (especially a black man) meant being dedicated to God, a leader in the household and in relationships, and a person who asserted his own superiority over the women in his life.

I thought these things because I was told them and read them over and over again for 17 years, sometimes very painfully, sometimes with the fear of eternal damnation, sometimes with tears streaming down my face and begging God for forgiveness and mercy when my errant tendencies fell out of the realm of the “normal.”

When I left Christianity, I felt that I was becoming abnormal. That I was starting to step out of the regular life that seemed so safe normal into a foreign world that, for 25 years, I had thought was weird and strange. Uncomfortable.

The most exhilaratingly frightening and gratifying thing about it was the reality of reconciling myself to what seemed a clear Truth.

There is no God.

There is no great, omniscient judge saying what is and isn’t normal. It’s just us. So all that stuff about the importance of controlling my natural desires in order to fit into the “safe” realm of God’s normal suddenly became deeply challenged. And this caused no small source of angst for me.

Part of the angst came from the fact that, even though I’m an atheist, I live in a country that is mostly Christian. The fact that I’m an atheist doesn’t keep the Christian world I’m living from affecting me and affecting people’s view of me, because in the real world of friends, family, and coworkers Christian “norms” get reinforced in society.

And a lot of the angst came from that status of being in a world where these standards were perpetuated as “normal,” and realizing, the longer I have been an atheist, that my original version of Christianity was not just wrong — it wasn’t exactly normal either. And Christianity isn’t normal. Christian norms aren’t normal. I’m not normal, and the world I’m living in isn’t normal.

That’s hard to deal with, because being normal is what I tried so hard to be. And it’s not like I can simply shift from one normal to another normal. I mean, people say that you can, but the truth is that no one is God, and we’re all just agreeing among ourselves as to what we’re going to label “normal” and why. There is no inherent standard of “normal.” It doesn’t exist.

And yet…I still feel a pressure to fulfill a morality of normal “purity.” The Plato’s ideal of “normal.” The rest often feels like a dangerous venture, an experiment. And because I’m not a Christian, I feel some obligation to go on this dangerous venture, to experiment with the life I couldn’t have when I was a conservative Christian.

But even the pressure to go out and experiment — is that something I feel I have to do because I’m not a Christian anymore, and I was always taught that non-Christians were the polar opposites of Christians, so that even the obligation I feel to defy Christian norms is based on some Christian idea of what rejecting Christ ought to look like?

It’s complicated. And confusing, especially when I find that each and every group I check out, regardless of how it labels itself and how “free” it may look in the beginning, has its own set of norms that are baked into the attitudes and judgments of people in the group, and often completely foreign to my own; it’s not exactly easy to switch scripts.

To these groups, I’m weird. Not because I don’t “let loose” necessarily and still have conservative hangups, but because they have a whole different set of norms that I’m uncomfortable with. I’m not uncomfortable with those norms, necessarily, because I think they’re wrong — I’m uncomfortable in the sense of being forced to act in a play that’s different than the one you’ve been practicing for weeks.

But in the midst of this, I’ve discovered a truth. I’m not a formerly “normal” person who is now engaging in experimentation and exploration of a strange world that was always closed off to me.

I never was just “normal.” I was always weird. I was always strange. At least, from the perspective of who I am now, which retrospectively applies to the person I was then…

I think there’s a general truth here. If you see a group that looks strange on the outside and you spend enough time on the inside of the group, it will become normal to you, and its rules and customs will get into your blood. And the rest of the world will seem strange, when from another angle it’s just the rest of the world, with its own “normals.” Just how things seem to work.

Long story short…this is confusing. My normal — as far as the ideals hardwired into me from 28 years of hardcore Christian Fundie conservatism — is becoming increasingly odd, and it’s caused me to distrust the concept of the “normal.” So I feel a need to look for the strange…which also, once you tear the layers off, has a definition of “normal.”

The problem, in a nutshell, is that I’ve discovered that the entire world is normal and strange at the same time.

Which feels awkward to me. It makes me existentially anxious at times. And it’s not that I’m lost; I have a better map — I am just realizing that there’s no place I have an overwhelming desire to be on it. I don’t really want a new normal, and I’m uncomfortable with the strange, and the strange has within it a definition of a new normal anyway…so I feel a bit stuck. I know it sounds like a cheap conceptual paradox to you, maybe, but existentially speaking, living it can be a vexing contradiction, in context.

I’m working on the dilemma. But I’m not sure I have an answer, or that I really want one. I feel pressure to be normal, and pressure to be strange, but I’m afraid of both, and I can’t escape it because normalcy and strangeness are basically mirages of each other, and so I feel like solving the problem — if it even is one — is like dividing by zero.

And that’s why, when I look at my eyes in the mirror, I don’t know what I want or who I am so often these days, and I’m not sure I want anyone else, including me, to tell me, and at the same time (like someone close to you who may be harboring a deep secret) I want to know.

At any rate, dealing with the paradox feels better when I write it out. So…yeah. There it is.

Thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, if you want to support the blog.

Everyone in the world is Christ, and they are all crucified. — Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

I’ve been thinking a lot about why people are attracted to Christianity, and I think I have a few answers.

I’d like to break this down, so I’ll start at the beginning.

First, I think people are basically decent, and then life happens and gets them to act in a bunch of ways that hurt other people. We call those ways “evil.” Fair enough. But the people themselves are innocent.

If you look at someone, examining their thoughts, actions, etc. from the cradle to the grave, I think you’ll find a clean line from the obviously innocent newborn to the last breath. You’ll see the innocent baby, and then see life happen to them, tearing them apart in all kinds of ways, and the ways life tears them apart and builds them up will all contribute to how they are in the world. At no point will they have behaved illogically or irrationally evil, given the circumstances and their history. It would all make sense.

This is why people think they’re good people. It’s because they are. They know what it took to get them from their origins to the present moment, and they had their innocence all the way through, even when some of the ways they have learned to act to cope with life hurt people.

So, in that sense, we’re all innocent. But we are also all ostracized by society when we don’t do what society wants us to do, or when some of our actions hurt other people. And that image of us as “evil” people that other people create clashes with our conviction that, if you really understood us, you’d see our innocence, and we experience that clash and its aftereffects as guilt.

Christianity resolves the contradiction by going back to the innocent beginning, the origin, and it labels that “God.” And through recognizing God — this “innocent” origin — you can be made clean and innocent.  Here’s the thing: this God doesn’t even have to be real. It can be a philosophical function created by “worshippers” who see “God” or “Christ” in a wider range of people, long story short.

I know that sounds abstract, but I think this is part of why billions of people are Christians. The bigger reason, one may argue, is that Christianity enabled Christians to have a good excuse for invading lands, and then getting the people there to forgive them. So I’m not saying this is a good thing. I often rail against conditions on this “innocence” that really hurt people who buy into it and those around them.

At the same time, it seems needed in some lives, desperately, because the rest of the world or their own circumstances condemn them and this is their only real source of salvation.

In atheism, I haven’t really seen a mechanism to such “salvation.” I mean, there is the relief of being out from an often stricter Christian morality, but nothing like an epic story of redemption; it’s drastically scaled down. This has a lot of benefits. We are more vigilant against people getting hurt. We don’t license bad things as much. We rebel against would-be leaders who try to control us on strings.

That said, there’s also a lot of ugliness in atheism. That’s why Milo Yiannopoulos was able to do what he did. Milo believed, if you look into his theology, in the Christian concept of total depravity, and that’s why he resonated with atheists who were insistent on protecting the majority population from offense (even at the pain of the minority), who ostracized people for anything short of conventionally acceptable norms and beauty standards, who rebelled against the “establishment.” It’s condemnation of humankind through judgment. Basically, total depravity without salvation.

And this leads me to thinking that it might be a good idea to look into this concept of salvation. I’m curious to see how it would work. I mean, sure, it works partly because it licenses injustice by the ruling class and then absolves them of guilt in the eyes of the masses, like a charm. But also, it works among the masses because it is their redemption, as well.

Christianity “works” because it recognizes the innocence in people that they see in themselves and that we so often refuse to grant them, basically. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, necessarily. But I think that’s probably why its message is so effective.

It’s also why in conversion stories, you usually will see that conversion happens when someone goes through a traumatic or depressing event in their lives. When they were “at the end of their rope.”

We know, as psychologist Dan Ariely has noted, that if you want someone to be good, telling them they are bad, constantly, is the wrong way to do it. They will simply see themselves as bad and keep acting bad, in many cases — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The thing to do is give them a clean slate. And giving them a clean slate can actually help them improve their behavior to match up to the identity.

Now, this can be a very manipulative psychological tool. But it is a psychological effect either way — whether you are condemning or giving them a clean slate, you’re affecting someone else’s psychology. Which is why, when some Christians say, “I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I wasn’t a Christian” they may be telling the gospel truth.

Just stuff I’ve been thinking about…

Thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to support the blog.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about God and Christianity lately. Most of the reason why is that I recently stated that I wasn’t an anti-theist anymore. That amounted to no small reaction around the blogosphere I’m part of, and so I took some time out to rethink and review things. Was I wrong?

Do I have the definition of “anti-theist” wrong?

Am I the product of a too-Christian past that I need to get away from?

Am I too concerned about “politeness”?

Isn’t what matters is the truth? Shouldn’t I be anti-lie?

And so on. It’s all very complicated, to be sure, but I keep having trouble embracing the title “anti-theist.” It just doesn’t resonate with me. Truly and honestly, it doesn’t.

I don’t want to preach something that I don’t think is true.

I still have a lot of problems with Christianity. When I switch over to the “Catholic” or “Evangelical” channel on here, a lot of the stuff still makes me angry.

But…I’ve also seen people in deep, profound suffering find hope in some concept of God. And I think there’s something to that. I’ve seen too much of it to think that there’s not.

And yeah, I’ve been disillusioned. I’ve been made cynical by atheism I’ve been involved in. A lot of the stuff that has happened and that I know involves specific people (no, this has very little to do with The Amazing Atheist, for those of you who kept up with that drama), and I don’t want to name names. Suffice it to say, a lot of it has to do with people fairly close to me in proximity and a lot of people on the interwebs.

I know, it’s not about people; it’s about truth. Or at least that’s the line.

But here’s the deal: I get 75 years on an insignificant speck, and no God is out there. It’s just me and other people. This is the only place we can make our lives better. And maybe that’s the truest thing there is out there. Maybe the best thing to do is to focus on making people’s lives better.

This hints at something that makes a lot of people very mad. Stories pile up to the hilt of atheists who have been hurt by religious people. My story is one of them. And I think a lot of people need out of church for those reasons. I certainly did.

I’m not going to sacrifice those people, though. I mean…if you could hear my sister sing, if you could see my nephew laugh, if you could hear my Mom talk about God…and you grew up in it…you’d get it. I really think you would.

With all due respect, you don’t know my life or the people that I know. And I think there are people in my life who are probably happier with a belief in God. And yeah, I know that’s fucked up and it hurts people, and I work to get them to see that, but the world is complicated.

I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. The world is complicated. And now that I’m seeing it up close, I’m getting out a scalpel instead of a mallet. And some of the beautiful parts of people I know are so interwoven with a God-concept that gives them hope and strength for tomorrow that it’s hard for me to condemn them.

And plus…I indulge in prayer now and again. And I don’t believe in God, but I sometimes indulge in the idea of a universal consciousness. It makes me feel very connected to everything, in a beautiful way. A lot of people don’t like this, encouraging me to grimly face the future with a sober acceptance, regardless of how tough things get. But it’s my life. As long as I don’t hurt people, why can’t I seek out ways to enjoy my time here on earth? It’s not much. It’s not like God’s going to send me to hell for it, and the people who hate me for it don’t have to live my life and will eventually be dead anyway.

I think the most controversial thing I’ll say here is that I don’t think the truth always matters. Sometimes, what matters more is beauty. And there are going to be a lot of different ways that people are beautiful, and not all of them are going to correspond to the factual truth.

Besides, I’ve been realizing, lately, that I care about the truth only because I want a beautiful world. I don’t care about the truth for its own sake. I see the truth as a tool, not a principle in itself.

So it’s not about politeness, first and foremost. It’s about me being honest about my doubts as to what will make the most beautiful world we could possibly believe in, and making peace with the fact that I don’t necessarily think the world would all be better if everyone thought just like me.

Anyways…I know this was a ramble. I’ve been mulling things over, and I haven’t really been ranting a lot on here. I’m tired of what Trump is doing to this country, and that’s depressing to write about — but really it’s all what’s worth writing about as far as politics. I’m tired of writing about YouTubers who fight against “SJWs” — I just have a hard time figuring out how people can be so mean, and seeing the cruel comments on the videos of people attacked by popular anti-SJWs is frankly really depressing, and what I do here is a grain of sand on a beach. I’m tired of writing about religion, lately, because I’ve been disillusioned regarding atheist groups, organizations, etc. So I just haven’t been interested in writing much; there has been a bit less incentive/drive to write lately.

So, yeah…I thought, “I’ll just write what I’m thinking,” and this is it.

I’m getting back in the groove of things. But sometimes, the groove is exhausting.

Anyways, thanks for reading.

PS: I have a Patreon, in case you’re interested.

 

“One year could be a fluke, perhaps done just for show.” — Mitt Romney on why he released 12 years of tax returns

Rachel Maddow got a hold of Trump’s tax returns.

Well, not all of them. Just the ones from 2005.

And, frankly, they aren’t all that exciting. He paid $38 million on taxes out of about $150 million in income. He wrote off losses that we already knew about — deductions, etc. But he paid, effectively, 25% in taxes. Which isn’t surprising and didn’t tell us anything that we don’t already know.

Here’s the weird part: We don’t know where that return came from. It could have come from anywhere — out of the very, very narrow circle of people who had his tax returns. If I were to bet, I’d say that it came from Trump himself. David Cay Johnston, the New York Times reporter who got the forms, brought up this possibility.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eB-xjDMGdQ[/youtube]

I think that this possibility is probably true, for a few reasons.

First, there’s the fact that before Maddow’s show even aired, the Trump administration came out and basically stated that the return was authentic and Trump did, indeed, pay $38 million in taxes on $150 million in 2005, a fact they seemed comfortable with. They focused, primarily, on the fact that he paid taxes in that year, almost as if they were prepared for it, and they hit on some pretty well-thought-out talking points (discussed below). When Trump is truly surprised, such statements often come from outraged Tweetstorms. This seems much more thought out and deliberate.

Second, this news (which the media really had to report) perfectly continues the picture of the media that Trump has been pushing so hard. He’s wanted eyes off the wiretapping allegation he made against Obama for a while. This does it like a charm. The media has to report on this news — has to, because it’s news — and it makes Trump look awesome, because he actually paid taxes, while making the media look petty, because…well, he actually paid taxes. And 2005 seems like such an irrelevant, random year anyway.

Which brings us to point three. Why 2005, of all years? Why THAT YEAR? There are so many years to choose from. Why not choose a year that is, possibly, more incriminating? Because, by all appearances, it seems like the least incriminating year. Maybe he did it himself — chose the year himself. Which would make sense because…

Fourth, by making the media look petty regarding the reporting of a seemingly random, irrelevant tax return, Trump may be looking to make the entire discussion of his tax returns look random and irrelevant. If it works, every discussion of tax returns henceforth will be silenced with “fake news” and eventually disappear — and, if it doesn’t, the “obsession” with tax returns can actually become a win for Trump after this story. The labeling of this story with the words “illegal” and “dishonest” by the Trump administration seem to confirm that this is how they will use the story.

So yeah, I think he did it. I mean, he has been suspected of releasing evidence to change the conversation other times, as well. For example, he was suspected of releasing the tapes to Fox News of himself posing as publicist “John Miller”complimenting himself on a radio show in order to control the conversation, in a discussion that blew Megyn Kelly away. To see what I mean, check out the clip below.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnMsUaT6e8k[/youtube]

So it seems he has a precedent of doing this kind of thing.

How should we respond? Well, I like what Democrats are doing so far — pressuring him to release ALL his returns. But we also have to keep up the heat on the other items that are so important to the American people that Trump is threatening with his actions. Oh, and get him to talk about the wiretapping, because he hates it.

But let’s not waste time punishing Rachel Maddow for reporting on the returns. That’s the ENTIRE PURPOSE of what Trump seems to want us to do in the first place.

She had to do it. It was news, and it is her job. We have to defend the press, because if Trump can use this story to co-opt liberals, along with conservatives, into condemning the media, we are done as a country, Trump controls our opinion of every Trump news story, and we will soon be living in a Putin-like state (which, I suspect, is exactly what Putin would want in the first place, but that’s another story).

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I have a Patreon, in case you want to support what I do.

“Progressives will sometimes demand all manner of complex and weird acknowledgments themselves. They want to be a gender-queer bleh, bleh, bleh. Whatever. But what they can’t understand is other people asking for the same acknowledgement that life is messy and complicated, and that some things aren’t fully recognized or realized or put together in your own mind.” — Milo Yiannopoulos

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? [Emphasis added] There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

“You either have a God who sends child rapists to rape children or you have a God who simply watches it and says, ‘When you’re done, I’m going to punish you.’ If I could stop a person from raping a child, I would. That’s the difference between me and your God.” — Tracie Harris

“I don’t want to be indiscreet about specific people because I think it’s going to be dangerous. But I can tell you the truth without dropping anyone in it. I mean, some of the boys [at Hollywood parties I attended] were very young. Very young. There was a lot of drugs, and a lot of twinks taking drugs, and having unsafe sex with younger men, and some of these boys were very young.” — Milo Yiannopoulos

I’m an atheist, and I don’t believe in total depravity.

When I was a Christian, it was the hell/total depravity thing that bothered me most. People weren’t as ugly as the religions was saying they were. They were complex. They were beautiful. They deserved love. If anything, I became atheist because my hope and empathy with humankind required me to cast God aside. “Grace” became an abominable concept to me; treating people decently wasn’t undeserved favor. It was justice.

But I’ve talked a bit lately about how there’s a significant contingent of atheism that shares a kind of affinity with religious thought. For a long time, for example, I was confused as to why a significant number of atheists seemed to be such ardent Milo fans, when he is such a Catholic. These are the same atheists who are very cynical about humanity — especially marginalized groups. They have a tendency to call people “cucks” for being nice, “virtue signalers” for stating something decent, and “snowflakes” for insisting on other people’s rights. They frequently tell people like me that we are too optimistic about existence, and that we have to be willing to face grim realities.

Now, I don’t have much good to say about this side of atheism. Previously, I’ve made my position clear. But I think that if my position is a result of taking the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” beyond the bounds of Christendom, their position is a result of taking the doctrine of the total depravity of man in Christendom beyond the bounds of Christendom.

A common argument among atheists is that God is not good. I make that argument frequently, but when I do it I usually do in the context of the Bible. For me, the most offensive aspect of a “good” God is the way that he treats and supposedly condemns his own creation (which is his fault, so essentially, logically speaking, he’d be condemning himself).

Many atheists, however, argue that God is terrible for a different reason. It’s not that he’s too bad for his creation, but that he’s too good for it. They’ll say God is nonexistent not because of the deeds claimed in the Bible, but because we’re in such a bad position here on earth. There’s this idea that because there is so much death and destruction on earth, and people are so often fickle and evil, that God must not exist. My theory is that people who leave religion due primarily to this latter stance seems to scold Christianity — not for being unloving towards people, but for being naive in their love. Christians believe in depravity — as in a destructive, death-filled, evil world — too. This type of atheist just takes that doctrine of depravity one step forward by removing God from it and thus making it total and complete. There is no salvation, we’re alone in the universe, and utopias are naive.

Two different views, then, populate the same overall group of atheists. One group of atheists, who call themselves “humanists”,  is trying to exalt the “salvation” concept of human dignity and worth. They are tinkering towards Utopia, fighting for respect for the people in the shadows, and arguing stridently for a humanity that grants greater love and beauty to the most marginalized people in our world. We are willing to challenge the status quo as much as needed — in religion and elsewhere — in order for this vision of humanity to come closer to being a reality. We are our own salvation, and the concept that we are depraved, that we are hopeless, that a life is meaningless, becomes our enemy. We are less concerned about building security and opening up to compromise in a harsh world, and more focused on throwing open the floodgates of love and firmly insisting on the dignity and worth of every human being on earth.

The other side thinks this first side is naive. For them, the death of the God-concept meant there are no utopias.  They have given up on preserving human dignity and worth, largely. The focus is not on promoting love, care, and consideration for other individuals. For them, this is a hopeless pursuit in a world that is completely depraved, anyway. The encouragements to be considerate and promote a better world seem to them like polite, meaningless banter over fragile teacups and warm tea while Rome is burning. The thing to do is look out for yourself, relax about trying to save the world, and try to get by on the depraved, grim reality of the status quo. And to do this realizing that there is no consequence for your actions, no God judging you — you are in a depraved world that is free, if dangerous, and the world is your playground if you but accept it and look out for yourself and those closest to you.

It seems true, perhaps, that in a predominantly Christian society, both sides would find their Christian counterparts. Those of us who believe that humankind can create its own salvation are right there with the liberal Christians, at times — fighting against the conservative right for marginalized groups, fighting for better distribution of wealth with Obama-like Christians who believe in “hope” and “change”, and fighting for justice for the marginalized and those who are kept back from their full potential.

And on the other side…the part of atheism that agrees with the doctrine of Total Depravity is, it makes sense, more on the side of Christianity that insists such projects are hopeless in a condemned world, that picks away at and mocks all attempts to create a better, more humanistic world, that laughs and their naivety, and that even attempts, through the laughter, to reinforce the norms that perpetuate the injustices in the structural hierarchy. This side of atheism is analogous to the side of Christianity that condemns humanity as hopelessly depraved — except in this side of atheism, there is truly no hope in the depravity. There is no God or human being to save us. We are the way they are, and annoying descriptions of Utopia are punch lines to the joke of our lives.

For the marginalized in society, by and large, the loss of hope in a Utopia is an intolerable proposition. As civil rights leader James Baldwin once said when asked if he were a pessimist regarding the question of whether segregation would end: “I can’t be a pessimist…because I am alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I’m forced to be an optimist. I’m forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive.” And this is the situation that faces so many who cannot tolerate the status quo. We cannot afford to be pessimists. We cannot afford to give up hope. We cannot afford to give up our dreams of utopia, however naive they may be. And so we fight. Not only for ourselves, but for others who also understand, due to the experiences of their own lives, that the status quo is intolerable.

I have admitted, several times, that there may be a dose of naivety in this fight for Utopia. We may go through all our striving for a better world and in the end disappear in a nuclear holocaust. We may live on for thousands of years — as we already have — and see that the cold, hard truth is that this stubborn world cannot change. But one thing you cannot convince us of is that the change would be meaningless. That is why we fight. The change is needed. Desperately, by many of us. We believe we can grant our own salvation because we have to.

And we’ve made progress, as even the Totally Depraved side of atheism often admits. Nobody thinks slavery is cool anymore, people rarely defend segregation, and homosexuality isn’t an abomination, to cite a few examples of thousands.

So, the way I see it, there is a choice. You can join the people trying to change the world and make it a better one, or you can sit on the sidelines, point, and laugh.

Even if you join us, I cannot guarantee that everything will change. But one thing I can promise:

A trillion years from now, when we are all gone in what seems as if it will be a vast, silent universe, in which all of us are forgotten, nothing will change the fact that you and I — for a short blip on the face of eternity, but yet still there — decided to give a shit and be someone else’s salvation.

Seems worth a life.

Thanks for reading.

P.S. I have a Patreon, in case you want to support what I do here.

Last week I sat down with Philip Rose, who goes by the YouTube moniker “The Liberal Ogre.” We talked about free speech and Milo Yiannopolous. I enjoyed the conversation, which included discussion on Milo’s game plan, the behavior of his followers, and the behavior of protesters. Yes, we agreed on much of what we discussed, but there was a bit of a tussle when we started talking about the nature of free speech.

Check out the conversation below.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcPH7u_vgm0[/youtube]