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the story (before the pill)
This one is kind of long, I’m not known for the length of my posts, but it’s a good story.
Trajectory is such an interesting concept if you think about it. An object, put in motion, will essentially hold to the same trajectory, unless acted upon by another force. Be that force gravitational pulls, “roadblocks,” or other human intervention, the object will remain on whatever it was originally set upon, unless those objects which have potential to act do so. The object itself has no ability whatsoever to influence it’s trajectory.
Trajectory in my life is particularly interesting.
I was born into a family of relapsed Christians. A few years after my mother and birth father divorced, my mother and the man I consider my father began living together. They weren’t particularly religious people, from what I can remember our religious rites consisted of visiting churches occasionally (I think we went mostly to mainstream churches back in the old days). My parents eventually got married, and began attending the church that I basically grew up in.
Here’s where my trajectory began. The church we attended was a southern Baptist church, Bible thumping, sin condemning, angry church. My personal theology formed tightly around the ideas I was taught in my Sunday school classes, in “big church,” and various church “camps” I attended throughout the years. I was fully indoctrinated in the systematic theology of the Southern Baptist convention, full with the idea of such an angry and quite bitter God. Can we see where my trajectory was taking me?
The other acting force upon my life was my family. My dad was (and is for the most part) a staunch republican. I can remember various comments over the years like “The only right vote is a straight republican ticket,” and something along the lines of us needing to kill all the Palestinians. I look up to my dad, he’s the hardest working man I’ve ever met, I’m eternally grateful for all the sacrifices he’s made over the years to enable me to reach where I am today, but my respect for him caused his influence on my worldview to be very great. Can we see where that trajectory was taking me?
The third influence on my life was my friends, Not my church friends, but my other friends. While the first two big influences on my life put me on a similar trajectory, this third group was the first to gently change it. The direction they shifted it into was where I ended up for several years (quite some time in my short life). They were the group who introduced me to the lovely (sarcasm) world of alcohol, drugs, and other such worldly influences that both my (former) church, and family feared greatly. I began to essentially set myself between two opposing forces, which inevitably leads to some major problems.
The problem with my original trajectory is it’s far from sustainable. The various views on God, eschatology, and our (Christian) relationship with the world inevitably lead to such anger and ill will. I embraced it all with such passion, but the problem is that these views can’t possibly continue on without the person who holds them destroying themselves, with the help of the third influence I did just that. I never became a “druggie” or alcoholic, or any of those things that when people are ‘saved’ from become stories of incredible wonder within the “church,” instead I began to lead my life of duality. This duality eventually merged and placed me on the fast track to self-destruction.
Here’s the kicker. I was getting married around the same time that these two forces began to act like the old homemade volcanoes from science class. My poor wife was subjected to such anger (thank god never physically manifested), that I’m somewhat amazed that she stuck with me (though her pluck and resolve have done me great help in this area).
This self destructive trajectory would have lead me down a road that probably would have ended up with an atheistic (at the very least agnostic) world view, without my wife, and in such a miserable state that I’d be the poster child for all the happy pills in the world.
Tommorow: A much lighter post on the Red Pill
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