I’ve decided if I’m going to bother with this blog thing I should try to get as many people to read it as possible, which means playing the big tech game. So I’m trying experimenting with some different social media options. Starting with Substack:

https://skeptasmic.substack.com/subscribe

I will still be posting everything here as well, and I’m going to try to prioritize this site because it is important to me to maintain an area where I have control and am independent of the whims of millionaires. But big picture I think I want to turn this site into less of a blog and more of an organized reference where people can look things up. Anyway, here’s my first substack post:

On Conversion Stories

I feel like I should start with a post about who I am and how I came to be here. I mean how I came to be on Substack writing about Eucharistic Miracles, not how I came to be on a bus in a thunderstorm in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest thumbing a blog post on my phone. That probably sounds like the more interesting story but it’s really not, I just wanted to see the Amazon and didn’t have the budget for a tour that didn’t involve bus rides. 

I care about the truth. That’s ultimately why I’m here, I found that people were claiming something was true that made no sense and justifying it with science, and I dug until I found some answers. And I want to share what I found, because I don’t think you should have to spend 5 years and hundreds of dollars reading dozens of books and experimenting with mouldy crackers in your living room to find the truth.

But that’s also why I’m having trouble writing my origin story for you. I want to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, as they say. But the whole truth of how I came to be here is 40 years long, which isn’t going to fit into a blog post. And it wouldn’t be interesting if I could. To communicate effectively, I have to select bits of my past and fit them into a narrative that will be interesting to read. But these narratives that simplify down complex lives always come at the expense of the whole truth.

And I’m struggling with this, because one of the things I’m planning to talk about in a future post is the people involved in creating these Eucharistic Miracle stories. And, as others have pointed out, there are a lot of discrepancies in the stories they tell about themselves in their books, particularly in the stories of their dramatic conversions to Catholicism as a result of investigating miracles. And a lot of people are very upset by this, and take it as evidence that these people are lying.

But I don’t think it’s that simple. And it’s certainly not uncommon. I couldn’t name a bestselling apologist that doesn’t have one conversion story in their first book and a completely different, contradictory one in the sequel. For that matter, the same is true of every tech bro in every cursed self-help book I get assigned for professional development at work. The narrative requires a troubled past when things weren’t going so well for the author, a sudden epiphany that changed everything, which will be the topic of the rest of the book, and a wonderful time afterward when the author lives happily ever after.

But in reality, there is no one moment when a person becomes or ceases to be Christian1. People do have these moments of realization when it feel like our lives completely change, but upon close examination you’ll generally discover that the reality was more complex. People’s beliefs are complicated. Unexamined beliefs are even more complicated, they’re even more likely to be vague and contradictory, and less likely to have a strong influence on our actions. So looking back at the time before the epiphany, you’re likely to find behaviour that doesn’t fit nicely with the narrative.

So yes, if you really dig into the pasts of these apologists, you generally find that in fact the time when they described themselves as nonbelievers, they were in fact attending church every Sunday, tithing, praying regulars and would have responded “Christian” if someone asked them about their religion. Which is certainly misleading when every talk they give they are introduced as “the man who used to be an atheist but then was convinced by the story you’re about to hear.” Because the impression you get when you hear those words is that these men were people like me. I’ve marched in parades as an atheist, I have selfies with Dawkins, I’ve been on the board of an atheist group. You don’t think of someone who quietly doubted the faith they were raised in for a couple years, while remaining an active participant.

But it may not feel like a lie to the author, who really did experience what felt like a profound shift. These narratives are powerful, and they colour even our perceptions of ourselves. Will it be a lie in 10 years when I tell the story of my exciting adventure into the Amazon and leave out paying the tour company, the overwhelming stench of diesel, the sound of the woman in front of me learning English on Duolingo, and the endless rows of Pringles at the gas station? You can’t expect the whole truth from a book introduction or a blog post. The author has to choose what to include and what to leave out. And they’re naturally going to chose the bits that make a good story.

I want to point out some of those bits that don’t really fit the narrative when I tell my own story. Which I will, but you’re going to have to wait. Because the real reason I’m joining Substack is that the only way to successfully share the truth in 2025 is to impress our computer overlords. And algorithms can’t tell the difference between something I spent 5 years researching and something I pulled out of my head on a bus ride, they just want regular posts. So I’m going to slowly drip out content to please the bots. I think I’m also going to intersperse these introductory posts with some actual content, because it seems silly to try to win subscribers with cheesy autobiographical posts when I’m not actually here to talk about me. Anyway, see you next week, or perhaps sooner, I’m trying to establish what frequency is going to be sustainable. Bye for now.

1 Some people would argue that there is, and it’s baptism, but I bet you can’t find a single bestseller that begins with “when I was an infant, some guy poured water on my head.”