I was 30 and, by any measure, deeply unhappy. I’d been pushing down a lot of horrible emotions from a damaging childhood, grief from many losses, and had trapped myself in a life I didn’t fit in to from a desperate need to fit somewhere, anywhere. I had no kind of spiritual practice at all. I was a standard issue atheist, and any encounter I had with religion was edged with inherited and unexamined scorn. Consequentially, I really had no tools to process the pain I was feeling. Today, my argument with the radical atheist rhetoric of people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett – both of whom I had read heavily at university – is that it leaves the bulk of its believers utterly amputated from their own emotional reality. It certainly had me. I was miserable, and in trying to escape from the causes of the misery I’d driven myself, repeatedly, to the borders of emotional collapse where I had, at long last, collapsed.

I am by nature a non-political person. I tend to see both sides of most arguments, and there are merits and faults with any position in any political debate. Extremism is always wrong. Beyond that, who is right is mostly a matter of your tribal, partisan allegiances.

You may think that we exaggerate the craven wretchedness of our enemies. You may think that my boundless contempt for the r/selected, Larry's muscular backhands for his craven adversaries, and John C. Wright's withering scorn for the wormtongues is fueled by either a) a sense of offense at being opposed or b) an oversensitivity to criticism.It is not. It is fueled by our clear-eyed view of what these creatures are. It is our awareness that they are, like the soul-destroyed abhumans roaming the Night Lands, broken and lesser beings who seek to pull others down into the mire that torments them.By way of evidence, consider their own words about themselves. Here, for example, is Damien Walter This is why they preach equality. This is why they preach tolerance. This is why they seek to disqualify and destroy those who stand above them, immune to the manifold terrors that haunt their empty chests. They are damaged people, broken individuals, fallen souls.They live lives of lies and self-deceit. They lie about others; they lie about themselves No doubt that is why he didn't link to Larry's piece he was criticizing and why David Barnett intentionally and admittedly evaded The Guardian guidelines in his hit piece aimed at me, lest I defend my position in a convincing manner.But no matter what lies Damien and his broken kind tell, they will find no comfort whatsoever in confronting the likes of Mr. Corriea and Mr. Wright. They will find no peace through confronting me. They will find nothing but emotional collapse in this lifetime and damnation in the next as a result of their rejection of the Way, the Truth, and the Life that we do our feeble best to serve.At least Damien has taken one step forward in abandoning the intellectually bankrupt world of the radical atheist. He knows there is something else out there. But he is still caught in the soul-sucking mire, he is still lost in lies and desperately lashing out at the likes of Larry and me in a vain attempt to find fulfillment in the approval of those he foolishly seeks to emulate.But he will not, because there is no fulfillment to be found there. There is none to be found in telling lies, in making-believe, because even if he manages to convince others of his falsehoods, he will never be able to convince himself that they are true.What Damien does not realize is that our strength, our being whole, does not come from within, but from without. The Earth-Current flows through us; we are empowered by the Master of the Master-Word. It is not enough for a man to reject the nonsensical teachings of the self-proclaimed wise, it is necessary to repent and to humble himself before God, after which he can stand again, washed in the sacred blood of His Son, unafraid, unbowed, and unbroken.

Labels: anklebiters, atheism, Christianity