Hello dear reader, it’s been some time. I was not sure what would come of this place, but I’m very glad to find it still here.

I want to share something with you if you’ll humor me. I’m told it is not that uncommon of a story, but it is now mine to tell.

It’s about a tree that cut itself down to be free of its roots, only to find itself a seed, laying them elsewhere.

At some point during this post, I will need to do some of what you may remember this place for, but I must begin by saying up front that I was wrong. I say this as an admission, an apology, and a warning. For all those who are going through what I have, or will, this is not how you integrate Christianity. Or any other religious tradition for that matter. And I hope to make clear why.

As I expect you know, I had a religious experience of Jesus some 9 months ago. Instead of tilling it for nourishment, I preserved it on ice and used it to relieve the pressures I’d been succumbing to at the head of too many beginnings and endings converging at once.

I consciously and vocally opposed trying to understand the experience, I just wanted to springboard from it. It was unexpected but opportune. I had just gotten out of the military, sold and bought a house, moved across the country, and found myself beneath the waves of loneliness and purposelessness. I felt even the weight of having to make sense of things.

The escape tunnel was in buying wholesale and as is a pre-packaged ideology. It’s already figured out, there’s no need to worry anymore. It’s all taken care of, just enjoy. Just be.

And so I did. I found what was psychological, as I would say, not epistemic; a conversion, not a persuasion.

Whatever it cost in suspension of disbelief, I willingly paid.

At first, this was the unified picture of the Christ figure, of Scriptural canon, and of doctrinal continuity that we’ve inherited in 21st-century America, with severe and acute historical amnesia. But as I wandered from denomination to denomination, I found the cost of suspension unaffordable. And so I left Orthodoxy behind, seeing that not even the Patriarchates could stop history from moving, and Catholicism because the changes in church history were less than organic. But even in Protestantism, there lurked an unwieldy burden to take sides on matters about which we know nothing.

Entire Biblical translations (like the ESV) take for granted nuanced and technical religious, historical, and cultural narratives that most of us cannot even opine on.

The simplicity of fideism suffocated under the weight of details. And as each narrative and, frankly, irresponsible epistemic burden crumpled underfoot, I began to stir as if from a daze.

It was like coming to after having driven miles on autopilot. But it was because of that distance, I think, that I can now look on that experience and see the circumstance in which it occurred. I was too close to it then.

I’m not very good at this, and I don’t want to give any sort of long-winded, tacky plea or defense. But neither do I want to try to move on like nothing happened. I think the truth is far more interesting.

9 months ago I was dwarfed in the shadow of a God. His perspective engulfed my own and forcibly showed me my place from another cosmic vantage. It was like having my past rewritten, my memories edited. I was made to know at that moment what I had never known until then but had always known thereafter.

I needed to be crushed under the weight of a God, at my lowest, to shed the illusions and vices composing my defeated state. It happened when it did for a personal and soteriological purpose.

But I also think I needed to see Christianity and Paganism from the first-person perspective for the sake of future polytheists. And that is something I am still tasked with unraveling.

I could go on at great length about the mistakes I’ve made, and the pitfalls I want others to avoid. But perhaps now enough has been said to justify postponing a detailed look at all that.

For now, allow me to do two last things. First, I want to say that announcing that one has become Christian should be of no more noteworthiness than announcing that one has become Kemetic or Druidic. I know why things are not like that but, they should be. That should be the goal. Second, let me clear some of the most important, or urgent parts of the record in a sort of… Augustinian Retractions way by saying the following.

I. The idea that one God can exclusively pantheonize all the other Gods is either trivially compatible with polytheism or it is materially equivalent to atheism. That is to say, if one God is to all others as Zeus is to the Greek pantheon, then none among the Gods is ontologically supreme and polytheism is trivially true. On the other hand, if one God is to all others as monotheism dictates, then it is not truly transcendent, and nothing is beyond Being so atheism is true.

II. The Pagan Gods never went anywhere, and certainly, no such departure was ever signified by a cessation of cultus in proportion to the spread of Christianity: (i) Paganism thrived for centuries upon centuries across the globe before contact with proselytization, and (ii) Christianity was no more successful at this with pagans than Islam or Secularism.

Much, much is left to be said, particularly on the historicity of Jesus, and such. And man, do I have some exciting ideas to share. But… for another time. For now, I want to say that I’m sorry, I was wrong, and that I’m back.

Sometimes Christian, sometimes Pagan.

Always Polytheist.