Two Confessions

For those who like me, look up to me, have a high impression of me, or certain mixed impressions, you deserve honesty.

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1. Motivation, and Acting a Fool

My writing on politics and religion either have as a primary motivation or are outright acts of trying to figure things out for myself, which I know—especially in the past, after I more realized the depth of my personal ignorance—that I need to do to make sure my perception of reality is correct for the sake of my own faith, perspective, salvation, the trajectory of the rest of my life, and how I end up influencing others.

This led to me being confronted with how the first two times I publicly grappled with something with significant personal implications, and whose grappling got stressful, it drove me insane.

Such is why—for those who know—I had such tumult with love and sex first, and then Eastern Orthodoxy: I wasn’t trying to change anyone’s mind, but more for me to not have to do something I didn’t want to do because of reservations that are legitimate but hard to communicate and either unheard of for others or cause for indulgent assumption.

For the Orthodox, I can’t prove their arguments aren’t fact. I’m not nearly educated enough, and I retrospectively look like an idiot in trying what would become the best stupid mistake I’ve ever made. Thing is, as I intuitively knew that the only objective goal of theological debates is to prove which church you’re obligated to go to, my encountering Orthodoxy threatened to take me down a path which I know has serious problems of its own and would be nothing more than despair-inducing to have to do. Yes, have to, and as I myself wouldn’t readily be able to sympathize with someone of similar reservations with Catholicism, the same is yet more true for those among the Orthodox who would want to argue it—though of course that’s not even close to all of them, and those who don’t have proven to be wiser than me.

2. Unearned Impressions

Around halfway through my Substack ‘run,’ I realized people assume that I’m much more developed in the Christian faith than I actually am, among the reasons for which being at-the-time honest mistakes of ignorance on my part.

Part in parcel with it came the inference that I couldn’t be honest about this because it would give indulgent would-be critics a chance to make me and the faith look bad; I know of a few different people with bigger profiles than me who would LOVE to do so.

But the faith obviously takes precedence, and I can’t allow myself to be considered more of an authority on it than I deserve.

That cloud has a definite silver lining: I’ve done some good work here, and yet am almost as far from done as is possible.