u/KaiserMeyers

During a work break, some colleagues started talking about religion and similar stuff people speak about when they have time, to my surprise half of them were agnostic. I myself may be too, if you consider the broader term of “unconvinced by belief”. Nevertheless, I was only listening rather than joining the discussion. An old friend of mine said something of the likes of “If God is real, why is there cancer?”, as if God wouldn’t have created suffering. For me, as long as there is antithesis in the human mind there is life as we know it, not to mention suffering’s subjective view and grading, demise or strengthening. How could there be a notion of hell without existing, disabling suffering? There are also many stories and winding reasons of divine punishment, especially in the Old Testament; hardly one believer would deny that. I guess a better argument for my friend would be “If God is real, what is reserved in the afterlife for those of other beliefs, or better, those who never were in contact with religion as we are accustomed to”.

At the same time, their talk started to heat up, so I said to a female friend next to me “Well, I think it’s best to leave now rather than getting incited and plunging into the ring”, but she pushed me and said she wanted to hear what I had to say. First, I would like to clear her stance, probably shared by tens of millions. A girl who believed, prayed, followed the community and acted accordingly as best as she could, but one day (not so long ago), had her belief weakened by coming of age. In this case particularly, the day she saw the pastor of her church acting out cure miracles. My mind didn’t get this as the most valid argument for cornering your religion, because it is quite ingenious to have your pillars of belief on a church, especially one “word sayer”, even though the social aspect of it is crucial. There might be more underneath her reasoning, as she also commented on pending more towards spiritualism now, but didn’t elaborate further. For now, my thoughts had been more in the believer side of the argument, despite not really being a religious person.

I was fighting how hard it is to portray one’s hypothesis well when you don’t even know what branch to reach, the absolutely nothingness or the mysteriousness of higher one or spirituality. I acknowledged that I myself am at fault in that. In more recent times I’m having dissociative thoughts on reality, so I was tending more to the “nothingness”, but my hesitation gave enough time to a colleague to disrupt her question and start talking about his belief first.

He is part of a little-known religion, of which I hadn’t heard before. I’m not going into details in his long explanation, but by the end of it I said to him, “It reminds me of karma”, and he replied, “Basically”. At least he had made a straight point of his belief. Another colleague shouted from afar “Nature couldn’t care less”. I said I didn’t quite believe in karma, though I sure wanted to.

In the meantime, thinking of karma, I changed my mind and started to elaborate from the believer’s branch, saying “The matter of fact is that fear and desire seem to be the two forces of religion, with that followers feel it as life’s meaning and due course while some atheists may say alienation. I myself just feel tempted to think and face those two not by resorting to a divine hope. Where does this come from? From experience, lots of people gravitate towards a form of realism, some seem like that from birth, bound realists. I would even say some of us are realist relativists, that reality has its semantic layers and unprovable truths” (for those Wittgenstein and Gödel enthusiasts). I was probably going to enter into the topic of how many are unconvinced of their deaths or deal with daily anxiety because of it, but the break was over. So I just went on with my day accompanied by this incomplete series of thoughts, as always with these discussions, I will revisit this later.

I created my own history-niche Substack a year ago, with no previous audience or experience in newslettering. Still, I’ve managed to amass 2,000+ subscribers, which is far more than I expected.

Articles: Last year, I averaged one article every three weeks, usually with reading times ranging from 3–15 minutes. Unfortunately, this year I’ve been too occupied with work, so I’ve only posted one short article in the past three months (1.8k views and 140 likes), though I’m planning to publish a longer one within the next two weeks.

Notes: I’ve also been posting 2–3 Notes a week since the beginning. They vary, but generally consist of an image with a caption or something related to research I’ve done. I’ve never had a truly viral one, but they now tend to consistently get a few dozen likes, which feels healthier community wise.

Payment: I enabled paid subscriptions last year, minimal price, and got 3 paid subscribers, along with a bit of a headache dealing with an unfair Stripe dispute from an older lady. Since I’ve been mostly inactive article-wise this year, I disabled paid subscriptions for now, though I plan to bring them back in the future.

Traffic: At the moment, I’m quite surprised by the onboarding traffic. It says I got around 400 from onboarding last month, compared to roughly 100 from Notes.

Closing thought: I sometimes fear I’m getting more attention than I deserve and that this train will eventually pass. I have close to 100 drafted article ideas, but at the moment my mind and time are focused on my “real life,” so I simply lack the time to turn them into finished pieces, especially since I have certain standards and tend to put serious research into them. At the same time it was always meant to be a side project, never really something I intended to make money from.