I find myself here, staring at a website with minuscule traffic and me as “the talent.”
I’ve worked with the web since its inception—literally. In recent years, I’ve read countless manuals on how to build a successful content site: pick a niche, optimize for monetization, follow the SEO checklist. I understood why the experts said those things, and then I mostly ignored them. I did what I wanted instead.
I’ve always been drawn to the power of words. There is a specific beauty in seeing language strung together with purpose. This attraction extended to communication at large; I got my FCC license in my teens and volunteered at a radio station. When the World Wide Web arrived, it felt like a miracle—the ability for one person to reach the entire world. Then, as always happens under unregulated capitalism, corporations threw so much money at the platform that it became nearly impossible for the rest of us to be heard.
I spent most of my career in I.T., making other people’s web presence fast and secure. I enjoyed the work, but there was always a nagging desire to return to a space that was mine. For years, I posted sporadically across different domains—the kind of consistency that makes me the annoying acquaintance who resurfaces every two weeks just as you’d forgotten they existed.
But recently, something changed. I began treating this site seriously. And yet, in a moment of characteristic self-doubt, I asked myself: Wait, why am I actually doing this?
The answer came from the dark recesses of my grey matter, and it’s a thought I need to share—because if it helps one other person do what they truly want (even if it makes no financial sense), then it’s worth writing.
The Wrong “Right Thing”
If you’ve read my previous posts, you know I was raised in evangelical Christianity.
I grew up on a steady diet of hellfire and brimstone. I attended churches where the congregants were certain that Southern Baptists were going to hell because they were “too liberal.” I spent my childhood terrified of a God who supposedly loved me, but who was also listening to my every thought, waiting for me to slip up. Because the adults in my life echoed this as absolute truth, I accepted it.
In that world, there was a popular plaque that read: “Only one life; ’twill soon be past: only what’s done for Christ will last.”
From the perspective of a child, the logic is undeniable. If you have a century of life followed by an eternity of either heavenly glory or infinite fire, the only rational choice is to devote every waking second to the church.
So, I did. I enrolled in a seminary—not a traditional academic institution, but a factory designed to churn out clones of a specific ideology. I taught Sunday School. I preached. I spent years vacillating between self-loathing and “sucking it up” to ensure I was doing the “right thing.”
Eventually, it collapsed. It couldn’t last.
The Question of Qualification
In those circles, formal education didn’t matter. All you needed was a “calling from the Lord”—which is conveniently unverifiable—and a dramatic “testimony.” In the world of evangelical preaching, the worse your past, the better your platform. If you were a “hell-raising sonofabitch” who had been saved by grace, you could pack the house.
At the time, I didn’t have a dramatic past, but my occasional lapses into “sin” (or “backsliding,” as we called it) gave me enough fodder to seem authentic in the pulpit.
This brings me to today. It is easy to wonder why anyone would care what I have to say on this blog. I don’t have a degree in critical thinking, nor has a board of suit-clad experts proclaimed me an authority. But when I was a young evangelical, I didn’t have credentials either. I had confidence because I believed I was saving souls and that God was on my side.
Today, we live in a deluge of misinformation. Millions of people have been conditioned to submit to authority figures and conform to group norms, a combination that is actively jeopardizing the stability of our society.
I no longer believe in that version of God, so who is on my side now?
Maybe you are. Maybe there are millions of others who feel the same. I know that I am on the side of truth—not “my truth” or “your truth,” but objective, verifiable reality. I am on the side of the people willing to take the hard road of seeking truth for themselves rather than taking the easy path of following the crowd.
Truth and people: those are things that matter. This mission feels far more important than any “calling” I imagined forty years ago.
One might even say I’m on the side of the angels.
One Step Back, Two Steps Forward
To recap: Once upon a time, I believed fervently in something I now find objectionable, but because I thought it was true, I felt a moral imperative to spread it.
I have changed, but that imperative remains. Just as I once felt called to “spread the Gospel,” I now feel an equal—if not greater—urgency to spread the truth.
My new “testimony” is this: I escaped a hardcore cult (and trust me, if you weren’t in one, you can’t imagine how deep it goes). I saw the light. It wasn’t a divine revelation on the road to Damascus; it was more like a voice from the heavens saying, “Dude. WTF.”
Right now, children are being fed horror stories as facts. Tax-free churches pump propaganda into minds that have never been taught to question authority. Politicians and “prosperity gospel” grifters profit from people who are desperate for hope.
I am here because I’ve been called by the Holy Trinity of Logic, Reason, and Rationality. My goal is to help “save” people—not from hell, but from nightmares, deception, and robbery.
If one person finds their way through the process of deconstruction because of my words, it’s worth it. If one person learns to recognize when they are being fooled by an external source or their own biases, it’s worth it.
I am not omniscient and my writings are not inerrant; I’m just a guy who climbed over the fence and got out. I have zero fear of hell and 100% certainty that what I was told was wrong. In exchange, I have found a deep-seated, whole-being peace that I never knew when the “hell-gun” was pointed at my head.
The Bottom Line
I revived this site because I wanted to. I ignored the “right way” to build a business and instead did what felt right for my soul.
If something feels like the “right thing”—not the money-making thing or the fame-seeking thing, but the thing that resonates in your subconscious—listen to it. That is usually where the real work lives.
As for me? I’m going to keep writing.
