Thoughts and Plans Concerning Politely Rejecting the Bible

I published my first book, Politely Rejecting the Bible, back in December of 2021. I had thrown myself into the project as hard as I could starting in 2020. First, I spent almost a year building a small personal library for biblical studies (it was during the COVID-19 quarantine so libraries were not accessible for most of that time) and outlining my material in a way that made sense to me at the time. I experimented with different tones—should I try to make it funny? should I go crazy with footnotes? and so forth—and agonized over word counts and other self-imposed parameters.

Then, when the book was finally done, I made a few bold choices with trying to market it, including through sponsored ads on Facebook. The end result felt surreal: I ended up with a very positive review from Publishers Weekly, a number of scathing personal attacks from random Christians on social media, and critical reviews from two Christian authors whose work I quoted in the book. Personally, I was having a great time, though some of the comments I received were so harsh that a few of my friends periodically checked in with me to see if I was doing okay (I was).

Theism and Deism

Ever since leaving the Christian world (which was thirteen years ago!), I've struggled with finding the best way to characterize my current beliefs. Almost overnight, I went from having a full, prepackaged framework for my belief system to now just having a bunch of beliefs about a bunch of different (often related) topics, without any sort of overarching framework for them. Christians disagree with each other about lots of different issues, like free will and divine simplicity, but those who hold to a traditional theology typically have a shared set of core beliefs about ultimate reality (e.g., that God is perfectly just and good, that Jesus is God, that humans need redemption, and so on). That's not to say that there aren't strikingly different systems within that framework of core beliefs, just that the framework itself helps to make everything feel more cohesive.

Goodness and Rationality

I grew up a conservative Baptist setting, where fundamentalist thinking was the norm. Certain beliefs were deeply ingrained in me that took a very long time to critically deconstruct. Some of these beliefs were:

• Every person is intrinsically evil
• Every person is evil from birth
• Every person is either saved or damned
• Damnation is the default
• Damnation means going to hell after you die
• Going to hell means eternal, conscious pain and torment
• Most people are damned
• I am one of the lucky ones who is saved
• But I still deserve to be damned

Reflections on America's Political Climate

I've always been deeply interested in topics related to philosophy of religion and philosophy of mind. By nature I'm a curious person so I've always been drawn to the "big questions" of philosophy: Why does something exist rather than nothing? What is the good life? Do we have free will? And so on. I think about these kinds of topics constantly, and I enjoy writing about them and working out my thoughts on them.

Inevitably, however, some new crisis in my country will happen, and I will find myself dealing with a sense of disconnect between the stuff I like thinking about and writing about, and the harsh realities of everyday existence in the world. This morning I woke up to the news about how an ICE agent shot and killed an American citizen in Michigan, a mother whom the president has now falsely accused of being a professional agitator. It's yet another case where video evidence blatantly contradicts the official narrative. It's so typical of what's been happening in the country. And then of course there is the troubling recent event of the Trump administration's illegal kidnapping of a foreign leader all for the admitted purpose of bringing Venezuela's natural resources under American control.

Losing a Worldview and Building a New One

I went through the process of losing my Christian faith in my mid-twenties. It's hard to say exactly when the process started, since it is a normal part of growing up to reevaluate the beliefs and values you were taught as a child, and this doesn't necessarily mean that you end up rejecting everything you were taught. I was still a teenager when I started critically evaluating the beliefs and values I had been taught, and I expected that I would probably not continue to fit in well with the extreme fundamentalist sort of Christianity that I'd grown up with, but I also did not expect to lose my Christian faith altogether. I think I was about twenty-five years old when I finally began to understand how significantly my views were changing, and then it was not until I was twenty-seven that I finally admitted that I no longer accepted Christianity in any meaningful sense.

Why a New Blog?

A few years ago I deleted my website where I had videos, a blog, and other links. I deleted it for a couple of reasons.

First, I'd mainly started the website to promote my comedy, back when I was working hard at trying to become a professional stand-up. But for personal reasons mostly related to emotional burnout and increasing horror at how much the stand-up world tends to protect abusers, I eventually decided to take a break from performing. Then the pandemic started, and then I gradually lost my enthusiasm for doing stand-up altogether. I only perform stand-up on very rare occasions now, and generally I am only comfortable doing it in queer spaces. All of that is to say, at a certain point my website was no longer serving the purpose that I created it for.