The Truth is All We Have

I became an atheist around the age of 14, and ever since I have always been a fervent seeker of the truth. Not because I am noble or brave, but because living in a lie is persistently uncomfortable. It’s difficult to describe for someone who has never made the transition. But for me, trying to live as a Christian meant living in a house of shifting sands. I would turn a corner and be met with logic that didn’t make sense. The house would shift around me, because it wasn’t solid. I’d struggle to find something in my brain that would keep the house stable. When I asked someone about something like this - a teacher, or a pastor, they’d often use a set of easy platitudes to try to cover up the lack of dimension in the house. “God works in mysterious ways.” “God has a plan for everyone.” “Trust in God.” Some people were more elaborate in their cover-ups, had great knowledge of the bible and used it to their advantage. But even then, I was living in a house that every day my cognizant functions were struggling to hold upright.

When I became an atheist, my “house” became real. I no longer had to hold it up with sand. Every question I had was met with solid answers. I never experienced the same kind of cognizant dissonance ever again. And not to say that I didn’t occasionally go back and question it: because I did. I even practiced magic for a bit because I was curious. But I stopped, because the sands came back. But with atheism, no matter how much I questioned, the house maintained its structure.

I find that we always ask: how can we know a thing is real?

In that way - that is how you know a thing is real. Reality is what doesn’t need to be propped up in a house of sand. When its boundaries remain solid with questioning.

You can have that structure now because of the work humans did. Humans are innately curious. They want answers. Hundreds of years ago, we didn’t have all these same answers. God was at the boundary of what could be explained - which was not even a fraction of what we understand now.

We have repeated the process of discovering more about these boundaries over and over again, lessening the power of the God of the Gaps, that we understand how it works now.

Your responsibility as a human being should be to never stop looking for truth, to never become complacent. If something doesn’t feel right - it probably isn’t. Recognize that your subconscious is an extremely powerful processor and it can pick up hypocrisy and falsehood that you can’t always.

I know that not everyone is like me. I know that not everyone else wants to do the research, understanding, weighing, searching, that I do. I do recognize now that I am intelligent and not everyone can do what I do. That’s not me trying to boost my ego. I hated even writing that sentence. That’s me trying to come to reality. But I do think that everyone can do work to try to seek truth.

I’m collaborating on writing a book with someone that’s somewhat about gender relations. That is, the relationship between men and women. So I set out to try to discover truths about the relationship between men and women and found things that I never expected. Since 2016, I have been extremely left. I thought all my liberal friends were on the right side of history. I was an anarchist for a while, before I realized how much anarchy has been doomed to failure throughout history. I had been operating on false assumptions about what equality would look like and what the differences between men and women really were. I saw the left and the right in new light and realized that many of the things the left were saying were extremely dangerous, because they were trying to defy biology in the name of equality of outcome. Not only that, but denying reality. And that the right actually had solid points because many of them were rooted in reality.

The more I watched and read and explored, the less I saw conservatives as “other.” and “evil.” I saw that in general we both wanted the same things, equality amongst the sexes, but disagreed about what that meant and how far we had come.

I saw that many of our assumptions about women and the patriarchy as it exists today came from mental models about humanity that everything was a social construct. They explicitly denied biology as irrelevant.That we had the capacity to become free from our biology. The more I’ve explored my own psychology and did basically mental surgery on myself, the more I’ve realized just how untrue that is.

I will repeat this quote until I die now, but like Francis Bacon said, “reality to be commanded, must be obeyed.”

I realize now that working with our biology and the truth around us is the only way to change our circumstance, to evolve, to become better. Since the 80s women studies have asserted that women and men are exactly the same and that all differences are because of social constructs. The more I study, the more I see how untrue that is. (Yes, bias still exists. Yes, social constructs do exist. I recognize that. There are studies that show people still see women as more incompetent than men.)

I think the real way to equality is to leverage our weaknesses and strengths in both genders and to recognize them. We aren’t two divided groups in opposition. We are two halves of a whole.

So I want you to search for the truth. I want us all to. As many of us have been for thousands of years.

We search for the truth because the truth isn’t just whatever we’ve decided it is.

The truth is a very real tangible thing, that can be measured and quantified. It is the house with a solid structure. It is the end point, the finality. It is truth that allows you to perform the physics and calculations necessary to put your socks on in the morning. It is the truth that will allow us to achieve true freedom for all individuals. It is the truth that frees us from the house of shifting sands, and living in lies that our subconscious acknowledges but we don’t, causing us to be unhappy without ever quite understanding why.

It is the truth that you need and should strive for. Because without it, we are all damned.

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