I was raised in Christian culture, specifically Southern California Southern Baptist Protestant.
My father tried to take me to church regularly, but my mother’s covert narcissism prevented some key social skills that would have allowed me to make friends. I was low-functioning autistic enough to not mesh with the church culture, but high-functioning enough for nobody to notice.
A third authority in my childhood was from PBS, before it was a leftist propaganda machine and more of a liberal/secular-biased education portal.
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. My mother had a pattern of intentionally overstimulating me as an autistic child, then using my reaction to deflect blame for anything she may have to be held accountable to. I’m not the gambling type, but that may have something to do with it.
Somewhere in my childhood development, I concluded that emotions were a chemical response that needed to be eliminated, and developed a working acumen with the Stoic philosophy before I could describe what it was.
I became suicidal by age 10, and since then I’ve never really phased out of the preoccupation with death and, until recently, a general feeling of futility.
Starting in high school, I was obsessed with trying to find 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 the delusion that I was also somehow extremely special (from my mother’s attempts to love-bomb me) mixed with an inferiority complex (from my father’s projected bitterness at their crappy marriage).
Finding Certainty
Shortly after high school, my life turned southward, mostly because the dysfunction boiled over. It turns out that regularly provoking a small child to violence sets a precedent that becomes provoking a large teenager to violence, for some odd reason.
After I was living independently, I bought into the college lie (i.e., dumb people work physical jobs) and went to community college to prove I wasn’t dumb. In the mix of it, I dove into studying religion and philosophy.
By that point, I figured that any meaningful contribution to this life must be driven by whatever frames it. Some examples:
- If there is no god (e.g., atheism), then we have no inherent long-term meaning except whatever legacy we can build for the betterment of humanity.
- 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 legitimately correct, we may have to design something from scratch, and I figured I was talented enough to start something like that, 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:
- 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.
- Atheism never seemed to jive with me because scientism only justifies “what”, but never “why”. At some point, we smash against the unknown again, no matter how many quadrillions of years we conjecture with math calculations. Any finite explanation falls apart to explain the infinite.
- Pantheism couldn’t work for me because it defied any aspect of logic. Logical reasoning is certainly useful and certainly gives some meaning, so it must be part of the natural order of things, but every pantheistic doctrine requires killing logic somewhere in the dialogue. It felt like agnosticism with a vague-sauce God-thing mixed in.
- Panentheism seemed insufficient as well, since it was pantheism by another framing.
- Polytheism seemed viable, until I read Socrates’ Euthyphro in a 100-level Philosophy class. At the end of it, either morality came from the gods (and was 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”.
- Monotheism was my only choice then, simply by deduction.
Clarifying Deism
From Monotheism, I had two choices:
- Believe in a popular, known God.
- 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 implication, then, would lead to documented evidence about God that goes far back to the beginning of written history, and would still represent 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 that it came in 3 versions:
- Judaism 1.0 – a set of 613 social and cultural laws that dictated a profoundly unique lifestyle (compared to its neighbor cultures of the time) that alluded to a coming Messiah that would run Israel.
- Judaism 2.0 – eyewitness accounts that the Messiah came as Yeshua of Nazareth and died for everyone’s sins, with the purpose of bringing a worldwide sociopolitical revival grounded on individual changes (aka Christianity).
- Judaism 3.0 – an abrogation of the Hebrew people for their defiance against following God, with the prophet Muhammad leading the way with a demonstration of strength to bring about worldwide submission to God (aka Islam).
After examining the many prophecies Jesus fulfilled, and reading the many times God could have rejected the Hebrews earlier on (such as Hosea), I concluded Christianity was the right path in early 2006.
I hadn’t been to church in a while, and needed to find a church I could connect with.