My Testimony/Story I: Becoming a Christian

My background was in Christian culture, specifically Southern California Southern Baptist Protestant.

I had 3 competing authority figures in my home:

  1. My father tried to take me to church regularly.
  2. My mother’s covert narcissism prevented key friend-making skills from developing.
  3. I watched a lot of PBS and went to public school. At the time, it was less leftist propaganda and more liberal/secular-biased education.

I was low-functioning autistic enough to not mesh with any particular culture, but high-functioning enough for nobody to notice.

Trust issues

Altogether, there were no clear boundaries, with the rules changing daily amidst Dr. Spock going against conventional Christian values. With nothing to be certain about, I therefore believed everything as much as anything else.

I never learned to trust anyone or anything, at least not fully or at face value. As an autistic child, my mother intentionally stimmed me, then used my reaction to draw attention away from her failings. I’m not the gambling type, but that may have something to do with it.

Somewhere in my early childhood, I concluded emotions were “a chemical response that must be eliminated”. This developed into a working acumen of the Stoic philosophy before I could describe what it was.

Seeking meaning

I became suicidal by age 10. I’ve never really phased out of the preoccupation with death since then. However, God has healed my general feelings of futility since about 2022.

In high school, I obsessed myself with finding inherent meaning in a world that didn’t seem to care. While everyone else sought girls and approval, I was seeking answers to existential questions.

I also had developed two competing value systems that made me one of the most ambitious people on the planet:

  1. My mother’s attempts to love-bomb me gave me the delusion that I was somehow extremely special.
  2. My father’s projected bitterness at their crappy marriage gave me an inferiority complex.
  3. I was not good enough, and simply needed to work endlessly to be good enough.

Finding certainty

Shortly after high school, my life turned southward, mostly because the dysfunction boiled over. Regularly provoking a small child to violence sets a precedent that gets worse as the child becomes a teenager.

I bought into the college lie (i.e., dumb people work physical jobs). So, after I moved out, I went to community college. In the mix of it, I dove into studying religion and philosophy.

I wanted to create a meaningful contribution to the world, but figured its metaphysical framing defines what actually matters. Some examples:

  • If there is no god (e.g., atheism), the only long-term meaning is the legacy that makes humanity better.
  • If any particular religion is correct, then their prescribed actions are how we ought to frame our lives. There are some commonalities, but the details make it clear they contradict each other.
  • If no particular religion is correct, I knew I was talented enough to start a new religion if necessary.

Defining God(s)

In the quest for certainty, the first and best logical split I landed on came from the taxonomy of deities:

  • Atheist = no God(s)
  • Monotheism = one distinct God, separate from humanity
  • Polytheism = more than one distinct god, separate from humanity
  • Pantheism = God(s) are some type of intangible force or cosmic energy
  • Agnosticism = God may or may not exist, but we can be certain we can’t be certain
  • Panentheism = Monotheism or Polytheism + Pantheism

I very quickly discovered via deduction the correct one:

  1. Agnosticism, to me, wasn’t worth visiting. Something obviously happens after we die, even if it’s nonexistence, so it wasn’t a worthwhile risk to stay non-committal. I figured I may as well kill myself if agnosticism is true.
  2. Atheism never seemed to resonate with me because scientism only justifies “what”, but never “why”. At the end of understanding, we smash against the unknown again. Quadrillions of conjectured years via math calculations is another finite explanation. Any finite explanation will fail to explain the infinite.
  3. Pantheism couldn’t work for me because it defied any aspect of logic. Logical reasoning gives meaning, so it must be part of the natural order of things. Every pantheistic doctrine, though, requires killing logic to work. It felt like agnosticism with a vague-sauce God-thing mixed in.
  4. Panentheism seemed insufficient as well, since it was pantheism by another framing.
  5. Polytheism seemed viable, until I read Socrates’ Euthyphro.
    • At the end, either morality comes from the gods (and is therefore moral relativism) or the gods weren’t important.
    • At the time, I was rather fond of Socrates’ mythos, and in one of his last works he gave his life to “the one God above all other gods”.
  6. Monotheism was my only choice then, simply by deduction.

Clarifying Deism

From Monotheism, I had two choices:

  1. Believe in a popular, known God.
  2. Believe in a “hidden” God, a bit like some ancient Greeks, the early Deists in the USA, or ufologists.

After more pondering and researching, I realized that this God, having created us, would want to interact with us. The evidence would show through documented evidence about God that goes far back to the beginning of written history. Further, God can’t be stupid, so it would still exist as an ongoing interaction.

From there, the only ancient society that did believe in one distinct God (and still survives) were the Hebrews.

So, I had landed on Judaism, but found it came in 3 versions:

  1. Judaism 1.0: 613 social and cultural laws that dictated a profoundly unique lifestyle compared to its neighbor cultures. It alluded to a coming Messiah that would run Israel.
  2. Judaism 2.0 (aka Christianity): Eyewitness accounts that the Messiah came as Yeshua of Nazareth and died for everyone’s sins. It manifests as a worldwide sociopolitical revival grounded on individual changes.
  3. Judaism 3.0 (aka Islam): An abrogation of the Hebrew people for their defiance against following God. The prophet Muhammad led the way with a demonstration of strength to bring about worldwide submission to God.

Deciding

I concluded Christianity was the right path.

  1. I examined the many prophecies Jesus fulfilled, which are hard to write off as coincidence. This invalidates Judaism 1.0.
  2. I read the many times God could have rejected the Hebrews earlier on (such as Hosea). God obviously must have changed, or Judaism 3.0 is wrong.

This wasn’t so straightforward, though. In 2006, God broke my stubbornness by showing me the ultimate fate of Stoic philosophy. I completely dislocated my ankle in a skateboarding accident, and saw what happens when pain suppression peaks.

I hadn’t been to church in a while, and needed to find a church I could connect with.