Reading, talking to people, thinking, observations, etc.

A great deal of my negative experiences in life have been “for the Glory of Christ”

Fuck your imaginary sky men.

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• Raised Catholic - was pretty religious when young.
• In adolescence, started questioning things that didn’t make sense to me (e.g., why would God not want people to use birth control if they couldn’t afford kids? Why would he make people have a strong urge for sex but not want them to have it except for babies, and all the more typical things).
• Struggled more and more with things that didn’t make sense to me as I i got older (if God created everything, knows what’s going to happen, etc., how does it make sense to pray for something? Should he changed his plan because I asked really nicely? Etc.).
• Finally realized that all the myriad things that didn’t make sense to me disappeared if it turns out there is no god.
• Free from that notion, everything has clicked into place for me and the world makes more sense. It’s been 40ish years since then.

Punk rock made me who I am. Was lucky to grow up in the 90’s with a decent local scene. Taught me to pick people up when the fall (both literally and figuratively) look out for those less fortunate and to never tolerate the intolerant. Get out there and punch a fucking nazi.

Developing a bullshit detector and having basic empathy. Atheist; friendly to friendly people, hostile to hostile people; believe government should serve the people, never the other way around.

Religion: I was raised Christian but my parents weren’t very observant. I started to see cracks when at my primary school we were taught about god creating the world and the big bang.

When I was 13 my girlfriend died. I turned to the bible for support and after reading it realised it was just fairy tales.

Social and political: I was a punk as a teenager. More due to my love for skateboarding and depression/anger about my girlfriend. But in that culture I started to realise how fucked everything was.

Serveral homeless people would wonder by the skatepark and we’d talk to them. Many of them we’re lovely people who had some sort of awful tragedy happen. I realised how heartless society could be. If you can’t work and function then you have no value. This was reinforced by how people talked about like they were the scum of the earth.

This was the early 00s in a rural county so racism and homophobia were rampant as well. There were probably single digit people if colour I saw in my town but again some used to stop by and chat with us / cheer us on when skating.

Again this showed how horrible the majority of people were.

So my politics became pretty simple. Everyone deserves to live a good life. That view is not very well reflected in the right.

So I grew up as a conservative, and vaguely Christian, but not really (meaning I went to church, but just sat there drawing in the bulletin). Later I was still conservative, but became an sincere Christian for well over a decade. Then finally I developed a chronic illness and experienced first hand how awful conservative policies were if you’re not part of a the majority. This was before 2013’s healthcare bill and I couldn’t get insurance and almost died.

Also during the pandemic, seeing Christians and conservatives go out of their way to NOT help the most vulnerable, by wearing masks and getting vaccinated, I was done with all of it. I’m now no longer Christian or conservative. I’m now liberal in virtually all respects and I’m not terribly concerned about religion. In terms of philosophy, I find taoism interesting. It’s a major influence on me, though I’m not sure I’d call myself a taoist.

Through 40 years of details that are impossible to sum up here.

Religious views: I grew up going to church occasionally (maybe every month or two.) It always seemed fucking weird to me. Like, even my first memories of church I remember thinking along the lines of “wow the adults are all going along with this?” We stopped attending church by the time I was 9-10, and my dislike of religion has only increased since. On the one hand, for those that find it helpful to have a spiritual connection or believe in a higher power, all good. On the other, my social and political worldviews are colored heavily by two main ideas that don’t really mesh with religion, and especially not religion as practiced in the West.

The first view is simply live and let live. Meaning, no one should be legislating or giving a shit about something that in no way affects them. This can get difficult in a larger aspect because there are aspects of the law that affect me, but not directly. For example, even were I to have no kids, I would still argue heavily for strong educational programs because without them things that do affect me, like rates of poverty, crime, etc, go up.

Which brings me to my second point of view, which is “common sense” is probably just about the biggest misnomer in the English language, and few people actually possess it. We legislate and make decisions for fully irrational reasons that are often against our interest, see also, the entire Republican Party for the last 40-50 years. When it comes to these types of decisions, we should focus on rational, evidence based reasoning which often clashes heavily with the way religion works.

For example, combining these two things I believe that nearly all drugs should be decriminalized, regulated, and that as part of a comprehensive overhaul in our healthcare system, addiction prevention/treatment programs and even just safe spaces to do drugs should exist. If I want to do quite a lot of different types of drugs, that doesn’t affect you. Like up until the last 20 years or so, it’s an absurdity that marijuana was illegal everywhere, and still ridiculous there are places that it still is. That said, people who get deep into meth often turn into a societal drag because the addiction takes over, they start stealing, etc. In countries that have stronger focus around healthcare and treatment/prevention rather than policing and incarceration, they generally have more positive outcomes (lower rates of addiction, violent crime, etc.) and thus a better societal outcome for the rest of us. These sorts of policies however almost never get traction in this country though, because as stated above we often don’t react rationally and religion, which is based in virtually direct opposition to these principles, drives far, far too much (eg: > 0) of the conversation.

As for how I got this way, I have no idea. My family background is probably a feature-length Jerry Springer episode so it wasn’t really taught to me. My mind has just kind of always worked this way, and though I’m veering deep into copy-pasta territory, it’s all a lot like feeling really weird in church back when I was like 5.

Once I hit my early 20s I had a goal for myself: to find out what the truth is, whatever it may be, even if it shatters my most cherished beliefs. I went through so many different belief systems. I explored every kind of mindset I could regarding everything I could. I would get very involved with some belief system or ideology for a time and absorb what I could from it and then move on to something else.

Over time, I saw a ton of patterns emerge and I saw that ideologies of any kind place a limited filter on how one views reality. I decided that what makes the most sense to me is to simply seek to do the most good while doing the least harm. Whether or not one believes in a god is irrelevant as life does as it will anyway. Adhering to a political party is just team sports. Social norms are basically attempts to not be uncomfortable and only pretend to be about safety and order (neither of which exist regardless of what social norms exist).

Got raised in an openly leftist country, with socialist ideals permeating the culture everywhere and a pretty strong hard on on communism. No need to say that ideas never worked in real life.

I Experienced how it slowly drive the country from better to worse without any external output and meeting these public officials face to face always pointed to them using the position of power and claims of popular sovereignty slogans to pocket their own bags.

Nevertheless my family worked hard to raise us, a task becoming increasingly difficult by each and every socialist policy put in place.

Price controls? Everything became scarce. Of course the higher ups always had food to eat while we spent 3 weeks eating loafs of bread. The last week we didn’t eat at all.

Currency controls? Great, now whatever was remaining from price controls now was 100 times more expensive. Not for the socialist party members tho. They had access to the privilege of the American devil’s money

Defundind the police? Great, now the little safety there was while going out on the streets went kaput and crime soared even more. Oh but not too the government members, no. They had private security.

Food sovereignty projects designed to feed the population? Hijacked by the same leftists claiming to love the people to pocket their bags even more, with tons of food going to waste directly and never reaching people in need. Of course, you had to be a member of the socialist party to receive the little that did arrive, mind you. Nevermind it only lasted for a week, your human dignity was well worth the price, as the socialists had effectively lowered it.

Medical centers built all over the country? Sure, that couldn’t backfire could it? No if you count the exploitation of others brought to our country, and which salary got Pocketed by the higher ups, not only from our socialist government, but also from the party members outside the country of a not so far island. Nevermind also the usage of these centers as propaganda machines, only half built at times and being re inaugurated over and over for years in a wasteful showcase of public funding.

And much more

After experiencing that, I promptly proceeded to tell my history and my country story with socialism, leftists and communism in general, only to be harassed constantly by wannabe champagne socialists on the internet. Mind you, English is not my first language so my interactions are less than ideal, with much of my wording getting confusing to anyone not inclined to understanding and more so, empathy.

After all that, is it a wonder I despise leftists, socialists, communists and authoritarians to my core?

I’d say it’s not.