Well, I can't find my original intro. So I'll rewrite it. It hasn't changed much.
(Re-reading this, it's mainly about religion. I can't help that: it's my story.)
I grew up christian. Pentecostal, speaking-in-toungues , raising-the-hands and worshipping Jesus christian. One of those. For me, the Red Pill was more about leaving the faith than anything else.
Oh, I had a nice christian girlfriend at one point. I was her fifth boyfriend and knowing what I know now, she was definitely not a virgin, peoples. Didn't know it at the time.
Thing is, I enjoyed the sexy parts of the relationship (no actual sex, you understand - one of the regrets of my life, I totally should have fucked her, athough with my luck I would have knocked her up and ruined my life), but the rest of it was kinda a drag. Mostly the demands on my time.
She was nuts, of course. Her daddy loved her older brother more than her etc etc. You know the drill. Other things. Hanging out the washing. There's a right way and a wrong way to do it, and we – “we” you understand – do things the right way.
Oh yeah, and there was easter when I bought her an egg and she bought me a bigger one and I felt like shit. I fucking hate buying gifts. Always get it wrong.
About, say, 18 months into it, we attended a wedding of one of her rellos. The bride threw the bouquet directly at my g/f, and that moment crystallised the thought in these words: “I do not want to marry this person”.
Why? As I recall, as best I could verbalise it, I did not want to spend the rest of my life being wrong about every little thing.
She did have sweet tits, though, and I do regret never slipping her the bone.
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So, I spent the rest of the 90's watching all the other people in church getting married to one another. Oh, and I lived at a mixed christian group house for six months and me and Sophie were totally fucking. So was everyone else. It was the happiest six months of my life. Three months into it, I kinda told her that there was no real future in this, and she called me a snake – which really means something coming from an Australian country girl. We stepped around one another in that group house for like four days or so, and then I think I made the move and we were back at it like knives. But it was never really the same.
So mainly I watched people getting married. People who really shouldn't have gotten married to one another, in a few instances. I watched the church finances blow up and the church fail. Couple of people lost their houses.
But first:
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I lived for a year or so with a married couple with kids who took me in when I was unemployed. I saw the wife scream at the kids every morning. And I saw what she did all day: straight back to bed at 9:30, emerge at 2, drinkies and smokes with her friends on the deck, kids home at 4 – in front of the TV. Then hubby gets home at six or seven and it's what's for dinner – let's order pizza. Don't tell me it's the hardest job in the world, I saw it with my own eyes.
And you know, I think that was the most serious Red Pill. I lived with a couple. As an adult, I saw the dynamic. I saw what housewives actually do, what life is like for them. It's a fucking non-stop vacation.
Don't get me wrong – this couple saved my life. They helped me when I needed help. Unsurprisingly to me now, they were new christians. Out of all the pastors, all the been-christans-for-generations people, there was one pair of people who were actually good people. Thirty years later, I'd do anything in my power for either of 'em.
But I can't help seeing what I saw.
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So people paired up. I was a christian incel, heading into my 30s. The internet was becoming a thing, and I encountered – don't laugh – Ross Jeffries and Speed Seduction. So I thought I'd look into NLP. I bought the Bandler and Grinder books: Reframing, Trance Formations, The Structure of Magig and the Hypnotic Techniques of milton Erickson. They are still sitting on my bookshelf over there.
And after reading them, damn if I couldn't help noticing what was really going on during praise and worship time. Now of course I understood that when people stood up to prophesy, sometimes it was just the person speaking, sometimes it was God. But then you have to inquire: “ok, how much of this is just the person? How often?” After reading the NLP stuff, I had to ask the same things about the whole praise-and-worship thing in general. I couldn't help noticing how so many of the songs painted Jesus in terms of an ideal lover. I remembered once commenting to the pastor that the intercessory prayer group was full of single and divorced women, and he replied “and women with weak husbands”. Didn't understand then what I understand now, what that meant.
But the faith has two sides: the word and the spirit. They each agree together. If I had come to be a little – lets say – sophisticated in my understanding of the more spiritual aspects of the faith, there was still The Bible.
Which, come to think of it, I didn't actually read that much of.
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So they asked me to give a talk on the doctrine of The Bible. I thought, “well, where am I going to find out about that?” So I went to the Anglican theological library, and found the confession of faith. Twelve volumes of it. I read the stuff on why we believe The Bible to be the word of God and what it means to believe that. And as I read, my heart just rang like a bell with affirmation. “Yes!”, I thought, “Yes! This is what I believe!”.
You see, the happy-clappy churches are just a shade light on the more intellectual aspects of christianity, which kinda matters to the INTP types. Reading this serious treatment of something so important to me was water in the desert.
But finding out about the bible had an interesting side-effect.
First, I gained an understanding that the books of the bible – that particular compilation of books that you buy when you go into the christian bookshop and buy a bible – didn't exactly arrive on earth via a fax from heaven. There are controversies about what's inspired canon and what's not. Ultimately, we trust that the Bible is inspired because the christians before us decided that those were the books to trust, and because we feel that God speaks to us when we read it.
Second, there at the Anglican theological library, reading about my own faith, I asked a fateful question: what must the Anglicans think of us?
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What must the Anglicans think of our happy-clappy spirit filled church? Well, probably what they do think, that we are theological idiots and only stay out of heresy and worse because God is inexplicably patient with idiots.
And you know, they have a point.
But then I had to ask: what must the catholics think of the protestants? Catholics been around thoudsand of years the true church. Protestants are just splitters. What must the eastern orthodox churches think of the catholics? The eastern orthodox churches come from asia-minor, the place where the actual books of the bible (Galatia, Thessalonica) were written. The roman church are just heretics, who stole half the faith by worldly political power.
But what about buddhism and hinduism? They have been around way longer. What must they think our philosophies and theologies? They must think they are just kid's stuff. And what about the atheists? How do they see all this?
How would I see all this if I were an atheist? What if I just plain didn't believe it?
So for – months? Years? – I went to church and sang the happy-clappy songs and watched the ladies getting all overcome with holy devotion over Jesus. And I could flip my vision like owning two sets of goggles. I could see the Holy Spirit and the power of God. I could see that they were al just fooling themselves. We talk about the Blue Pill and Red Pill. This was pre “The Matrix”, but I had that experience. Weighing the two world-views up. Coming to a decision.
One day, I decided “Look – I am having serious doubts about the faith. The plan of salvation is laid out in Romans 7-8, I should just sit down and read it”.
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Oh. My. God.
You see, a christian already knows what the bible says before he opens the cover. So what he reads is only what he knows is already there. I made the mistake of reading what actually is there. I discovered two things.
First, that what St Paul actually believed was batshit insane.
Second, that it was nothing like what I had always been taught. Key words like 'carnal'.
I had serious problems with the whole spiritual aspect of my religion. The nonexistent healings, the void-of-content prophecies, the “spiritual” experiences that were plainly just repressed sex and self-hypnosis. How much was just people fooling themselves? Pretty much all of it? Could be. I only believed my religion because I thought it was in line with the bible.
Why did I trust the bible? Why, because my religion told me it was true and trustworthy! The Word of God, doncha know.
But if the two deeply contradict one another, which do I go with? The utterly unsupported-by-scripture silliness of my church; or the lunatic dystopian world-view of St Paul that my church had spent a lifetime protecting me from seeing?
I looked out the window, and out loud said “I just don't believe it at all anymore, do I? Not any of it.”
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Since then – whores, getting older. People and rellos dying. Other red pills, in dribs and drabs. You collect stories over the years, of course. But for me, Going My Own Way was primarily about leaving Jesus behind. The whole “true nature of women”, hypergamy, sluttery and so on was really just a byproduct of seeing religion for what it is.
Apologies to the christians here. But it's only a fake “I'm sorry this offends you” apology, because you are all wrong about God and this is just not my fault. Is what it is.
Cheers guys.