A reason I want to get into astrophotography and have been thinking about it a lot lately- 10 years ago this summer was when I left the faith after 28 years, half of that spent doing ministry or service of some sort. (this is just a phone pic in the backyard but there's a star)

Fuck it. I'm going to talk about it for a minute. It's one of those things people tend to roll their eyes at except for the people who also have been through it in a similar fashion, for whom reading about others' stories can be really important. Bearing witness, testimony. lol.

I was a pretty devout guy. Was raised that way, extremely republican southern baptist evangelical whatever. Taught early on to hate myself in like 1000 ways, to diagnose the problems of the world and humanity by age 10. But it was a core thing, the most important thing to me.

I experienced a lot of violence at school. When people say they were picked on they often just mean someone called them a fag or excluded them or shoved them into a locker or whatever. It got to the point of broken bones at the church-run schools I attended from first-grade on.

I was a queer kid and really the only ones to accurately call that out, regularly, were the kids beating me, so hey props to them for the sixth sense. For all of their kid failings they were at least tuned in to that one. I mostly kept to myself and read books or climbed trees.

The stuff at school and elsewhere started really impacting me hard around 3rd grade or so. We'd moved around a lot so I could never make longterm friends. And I'd had some really damaging experiences with an older kid down one of those streets somewhere in there. Shit happens.

I'd started drawing really gruesome pics, lots of blood and murder and monsters and shit. Started reading grisly stuff from the library, or as grisly as you can encounter pre-internet at age 8. Getting familiar with being scared and physical violence let me own it.

I don't overshare much on here anymore aside from like the home renovation thread and the minutiae of kitten ownership but hey, exceptions. I'm letting myself indulge here.

When I was 9 a toddler I used to watch when our parents were having hanging out fell down an embankment into the creek behind his house in the development we lived in when we were in central CA. The cops took me to show them where kids played back there. They found him drowned.

I had a ready made narrative for what happened to him after death. I'd been inundated every day with the whole thing. At the time I got obsessed with the book of revelation as well, the idea of the second coming, a planned end to everything. A way of owning all of this.

I was a bright kid who read constantly but I hated school, never did my work, that wasn't really an option at home obviously, teachers hated me too. In there I started chewing on my lips to the point where they bled, for several years. In hindsight it was just extreme stress.

Through all of the moves, my faith, the bible, christianity, were the only real constant thing. It became super important to me as a way of making sense of everything. I'd make one good friend and then we'd move. Jesus came with, never left.

Things chilled out by high school thankfully. I discovered the punk scene, easily the real thing that saved me in my life. For as silly and bad as it could be it's the one whose lessons and experiences had the longest most positive effects. Still have them. Life takes late turns.

I was in a christian band as a teen. During that time I felt like god was "calling me" to ministry. I didn't go to college in part b/c my parents knew nothing about such things, I had bad grades, and I didn't have money, and following god off wherever seemed like the next step.

So like directly after my 18th birthday I moved 7 hours away to western PA to join another christian band I'd randomly emailed. Over the next years we did pretty heavy ministry. Ran a service for young adults on monday, played shows every weekend, did talks, traveled the country.

The church I was involved with then, Sovereign Grace Ministries, was very welcoming but very controlling. Just go look them up. Have fun with that one. There are support groups just for people from those churches. But it was all very real and meaningful to me.

seriously mute this thread we got a ways to go still. welcome to hell

Eventually through various life and world events I grew out of the conservative upbringing and went all the way over to christian anarchist. Very grace-focused, very humane. I stayed in bands until I was 25, and minstry until I was 28. I was intense about it. But in a nice way.

In the last years I was the main speaker at a ministry that met in the basement of a tattoo shop in the southside of pittsburgh. Every monday night, talking to punk kids, houseless folks, people who'd hit the skids in some way, people going through rehab, in shelters, whatever.

Talking dudes off of bridges, meeting dudes at bars to keep them from drinking, fielding questions from these folks who were really, really, really, really in desperate need for answers. I was in my mid-20s and doing this for people twice+ my age. Crazy to look back on now.

I felt older then than I do now. Back then I was acting as an amateur lifeline for people in really desperate situations, while Bethany and I were broke and desperate ourselves. Nowadays I just make videogames about talking animals. Shit gets hectic but not THAT hectic.

But I'd found community and even as a pretty nerdy dude who walked a very straight and narrow path I felt like I'd found my crew of fellow weirdos and fuckups. Healed a lot of those cuts from childhood. To a degree. As much as those things go away. At least for awhile.

During my years going from church to church I saw all kinds. Upper class mainline churches, tiny country southern baptist ones, full out demons everywhere hey look an exorcism is happening charismatic places, brethren camps, extremely questionable backwoods holiness camps.

Anointings given, blessings received, miracles, endless reading. People begging god for their children to come back home as the pastor interpreted their dreams for them. People academically explaining every human joy or pain in an eternal cosmic law sense. The power of omens.

I think one of the reasons I instinctively bristle at like astrology and stuff is because I have seen what compulsively looking for omens and forecasts and cosmic equations does to some people. Oh no I had this dream. What does it mean? I read this verse last night. Why? Why?

I had these questions coming at me from people on the edge so often, and had for my entire adult life, that I felt like I owed them answers. So I read all the time, read the arguments against god existing, had been trained in school and church for ~*~apologetics~*~.

But over the years through all of this, the cracks started forming. Arguments stopped making sense, every nice evidence for why this was a positive thing in people's lives was eventually met with the awful results from the same. I fought it for several years while doing all this.

My monday night talks started being a lot less about like the gospel and a lot more about me meandering through like idk existentialist grapplings with the world and the idea of god and whatever. Funny, looking back. People sat through that for a whiiiiiiile.

I remember at one point in July 2010 Bethany and I went to Carson Street Deli. We weren't part of a regular sunday church at that point and we were like we should find one. What do we believe right now? What kind of church should we find?

A couple hours later we both realized that we no longer actually believed. Somewhere in the past few years of intense ministry and grappling with it all, god just... left. I'm pretty sure he was never there. And I had to mourn that, really mourn it, and did for a while.

After my last monday night talk I told the other folks in the ministry what had happened. I remember one guy saying "yeah you read and overthink a lot so I figured this might eventually happen". Which really annoyed me at the time, and is now very funny.

I talked about leaving the faith on Facebook (2010 baby) and even did a mercifully short-lived blog (2010 baby) where I explained my reasoning for leaving christianity and no longer believing there even was a god. That blog is very very long gone. It's probably awful.

I lost most of my friends (aside from a few good ones I still love even though I rarely see them), our support structure, and I remember my aunt I never talk to like drunkely(?) called me to talk me out of it. A college prof mom of an old friend wrote me a scathing letter.

It was tumultuous for a while. And I had to rebuild an entire worldview. I went through a regrettable liberal phase as my radical politics were so tied in with my faith and liberalism does offer lots of charts and graphs and the illusion of rationality. That lasted a few years.

But after a while I was able to get things back together, find myself again. I was hired to do a music video in 2011 and I used it to work out the idea that there wasn't an ordained end to the world and survival, while in no way guaranteed, was possible https://vimeo.com/25584378 

I look back on the shit I went through as a kid and I have context for it now. I was raised in a really shitty culture within a really shitty culture. It happens. I'm glad I got out eventually. Some people don't. Some people do but it ruins them. Some people got it a lot worse.

The night we accepted that god had evaporated I remember walking out of our apartment and looking at the evening sky and it really hitting me for the first time that we were on a forever-falling rock and the stars were real things across an ocean of nothing and I almost fell over

Since then among other things I've found that peace and wonder and connection in space. Stars. Planets. Taking pics of the sky. As a kid I'd been really into constellation lore. It made sense to me in a new way now- writing meaning and care on the universe. It's what we do.

I feel like if god did exist we'd prob be duty-bound to destroy him. But that's just me. In the meantime I'm in the market for a telescope so I can take better sky pics than this one I just took on my phone. It's not great but hey- it's all out there and it's real and we are too.

If you came up in this kind of thing and went through this, you're in very good company. If you're still in and this resonates, I can confirm that life and joy still exist on the other side of this season you're in.

Ok back to the shitposts that's enough of that for the next 10 years

I will note that any time I write about anything personal like this I'm not trying to convince anyone and don't much care if anyone buys it, I'm just saying it for me others who are going/have gone through it, because it can be very important to see eachother.

legit sorry for the length of this thread but whatever it'll scroll past in no time