“When I was a young boy-” both descriptors no longer apply, my father didn’t tell me shit on this part or about the expected stuff, so what’s to say, really? But anyway. Much like the other kids at the time, I had a little rebellious period by going Creationist. Well, it was a religious environment, so everyone was Creationists anyway. Just, like, soft ones.
The sort of US-style Creationism? That was new, and brought by Harun Yahya, as far as I knew.
Of course the more I watched Harun Yahya, the more I read his articles, the more I realize these are just repetition. Just a lot of same shit over and over and over again. There’s nothing new about. Nothing at all.
Much later on, I’ll watch Foldable Ideas video about conspiracy theory and why it happens and yeah, I recognized it. But that’s story for another day. For now, suffice to say: it lead me to atheism. Specifically new atheist.
The sheer appeal was not about feeling smug against everyone. Not to say these aren’t the appeal, of course. But no, the appeal is you finally get to meet someone with same idea about you. And that’s great, isn’t it?
Of course, as time went on we figured out we’ll need something a bit bigger than just ’not believing in god’ to kept going. It was kept, because it was the most basic things everyone agree on and a starter (non-)belief new atheist can get on. But there were a lot of talk about what it meant to be atheist, how to reconcile more humanist values in religion with atheism, how we probably don’t need to metaphorically set fire to every believers we met, and so on.
And then elevatorgate happened.
It cleave the community in two. One lead to progressives, the other lead to alt-right. For once, I’m happy to have picked a side.
Regardless, when I picked being new atheist, I also internalized one thing:
There’s no salvation.
Your only hopes are the people next to you, no matter how annoying they might be. Because they’ll also try to set you on fire. You’ll nonetheless have to persist.
Much later on, someone pointed several signs to me that make a lightbulb goes off in my head and made me say, ‘oh yeah, I guess I’m trans. Darn shame.’ because the above statement? Yeah, that rings true. It’s worse, even. At least you can hide being atheist. Can’t do shit about trans.
Not for long, at least. I can feel the siren call for HRT calling to me, even now. I know I’ll eventually succumb and get out of closet - but not today.
This makes me a bad person for comforting despaired people. What can I say? Things will be bad and stay bad, and you’ll need to lift your fists and start punching back to have a chance to be less bad. Oh, you’ll do this as long as you breathe. There’s no salvation and no alternative, except each-others, so you can rest while someone else do the punching for you.
Because the world is really out there to get you.