There’s a reflex I keep running into in secular and humanist spaces: the assumption that the properly humanistic response to AI is suspicion, distance, and maybe outright refusal to use it. Humanism is framed as the philosophy of human dignity, human meaning, and human connection — so surely the humanist
There’s a version of this blog that would have been easier to write. It’s the version where I pick a pseudonym, keep my face off the page, and let “Good but Godless” exist as a kind of anonymous outpost — safe, deniable, separate from the rest of my life.
Nobody warns you that losing your faith is a kind of death. Not a metaphorical one — an actual one, with an actual body involved in it. That body was just invisible the whole time. I didn’t expect to grieve God. I expected relief. I expected the clean, weightless feeling
I was sixteen the first time I stopped believing in God. It didn’t stay that way — not for long— but that was the first time. I told my parents. It went badly. Badly enough that I learned, very rapidly, what it costs to say the true thing out loud