Social Icons

Religion and Spirituality

34 Articles

Purity Culture and My Sexuality

Re-upload note July 2018: I originally pissed my family off by coming out as a Christian ally to gays and lesbians, notwithstanding the education I had yet to receive on the fully inclusive LGBTAIQP community. Within a year, I realized that I was bisexual, and had suppressed and minimized any feelings I had toward femme...

Compassion as a Prerequisite to Questioning

I used to really hate emotion. I didn’t think it was logical to trust your feelings. What do your emotions know? They’re just a distraction or an obstacle to doing the reasonable thing. As it turns out, intuition is ridiculously helpful. Our subconscious awareness is way ahead of our conscious awareness a lot...

When Positivity is the Problem

The mask I’m grieving is a forced smile. This makes therapy difficult, because many of the solutions to depression include focusing on the positive. My counselors have said they’re working with a rare case – usually they work depressed people toward seeing the bright side of life, but I worked my way to depression...

Betrayal and Conviction

This post was originally published on December 24th, 2014. It was one of the last things I wrote about my experiences with prayer before I lost my faith in God entirely. Re-uploaded in 2018 as part of the archive restoration project. For more on the God question, I wrote about my experiences with prayer on...

Why Spiritual Highs Scare Me

I’ve been listening to a song lately with a poetic description of something everybody, religious or non-religious, experiences: spiritual highs. It’s called Rudy by Supertramp, from my favorite of their albums, Crime of the Century. Beginning with the words “Rudy’s on a train to nowhere,” it escalates into Rudy realizing he needs...