[Crossposted from my blog, BlueprintingHeaven.]
Today, September the first, in the Year of our Lord twenty twenty-six, is my apostasy anniversary. To mark the occasion, I decided to read some of my journal entries and other writing of mine from the time, as well as some relevant posts about the particular feelings I had after my deconversion—a deep sadness, fear, feelings of tragedy feeling my heart, a burning desire and yearning wish to fix all that is wrong with the world, compassion for all sapient beings, desperation...
Here are some snippets of things I wrote around that time, plus some commentary of my own. Some of these I typed up from my journal—feel free to picture me sobbing my heart out as I wrote in a brown hardcover notebook with a fancy black ink pen in cursive handwriting if that provides more aesthetic engagement or what have you. Generally, things in italics were underlined in my journal, apart from e.g. book titles. I didn’t include things from my Crisis of Faith sandbox because I already put any I want to share in my Deconversion Has Been a Real Productivity-Booster post.
> I no longer want to be an astronaut because it is not the most effective way for me to help humanity. Many other people could be fantastic astronauts. There are far fewer people who could play the sort of role you're going to play to save humanity.
>
> I've wasted so much time. FUCK RELIGION.
A bullet point from notes I took about one of my dreams:
> * People dressed up as scary or apocalyptic things. Not really Halloween, more intellectual than that—existential risk and societal decline
I would often dream about people screaming for help, dying of starvation, being tortured... I would wake up after becoming an atheist and the first images to pop into my head would be of a mother and child in a third world country, bones clearly visible, sunken eyes, praying for help to a God that doesn't exist, overlapped with images of people screaming and crying over their dead relat