About Me

I got my Bachelor of Arts in Theology at Briar Cliff, a Franciscan Catholic University. I also minored in Computer Science.

I love reading, writing, studying Judaism and other religions, and listening to a wide variety of music (pop, rock, classical, new age, etc.).

I grew up non-denominational Protestant, but I am not a Christian any longer. However, I still have a deep respect for Christianity as a whole. My religious beliefs gravitate more towards Judaism, although I am not Jewish. As a gay religious person, I value an approach to religion that is not Fundamentalist and that considers Science, Experience, and Historical Context as part of the sources for Theology. However, I also value traditions that give concrete expressions to abstract religious concepts (i.e., rituals, sacramentals, and Sacraments).

My Religious Journey

Throughout my life, I have experimented with quite a lot of different religious traditions. My siblings and I used to go to church (the Salvation Army) when we were very young - that's where I got my first Bible (KJV, of course). But we eventually stopped going early on in elementary school, although I was the last one to stop going.

During elementary and middle school, due to my introduction to the Internet, I experimented with lots of different religious ideas. There was a period where I experimented with Wicca. This was mainly during the resurgence in teenage Wicca experimentation that was happening in that time period (around 2010). I was also introduced to some ideas from Gnosticism, although I mainly took away from it the idea that Jesus might just be a prophet rather than actually God.

I remember in Middle School telling a friend of mine, who was Jewish, about this idea (I believe her name was Alison), and she asked me why I don't just become Jewish and that I can convert. Since then, I've learned about many other religious ideas throughout Middle and High School, like Astral Projection, Lucid Dreaming, Auras, Chakras, Meditation, and Yoga. New Age Spirituality was starting to catch on then.

I did have a period of time during high school when I tried a more mainline denomination of Christianity (I do not remember which one), but then I moved to Seventh-Day Adventist because I had seen some (emotionally manipulative) videos online. After that I was introduced to Hebrew Roots - a denomination that gets closer to Judaism but without being anti-semitic, a tendency of other Jewish-like Christian denominations, and without giving up Jesus as God. It is often criticized for Judaizing because of their adherence to more of the commandments of the Old Testament (like Kashrut - the dietary commandments).

I had a period of Atheism and Agnosticism, particularly during the time I was realizing my homosexuality. I went to a Catholic university in 2017, and so become exposed to Catholicism (particularly liberal Catholicism), which drastically changed my understanding of that denomination. However, around 2019, just before the pandemic, I found Judaism, at the same time as when I was struggling with my sexuality, at the same time as becoming more exposed to Catholicism, and at the same time as taking Theology classes. I remember being interested in the fact that Reform Judaism fully accepts and welcomes LGBTQ+ people and that it has women Rabbis.

I also remember being very drawn to the scholarly side of Judaism - the debates and endless commentaries of Rabbinic literature all in conversation with one another (as exemplified in the Talmud), the turning and turning of scriptures for many meanings, the different levels of interpretation, the yearly Torah reading schedule (parshiyot), etc. Eventually, I learned more of the philosophy and Theology behind the religion: Torah as a way to show your love for God and other humans (through mitzvot, the commandments), tikkun olam (repairing the world), how prayer can be both structured and unstructured and uses words passed down through the generations, reconciling faith with modernity and reason. Judaism wrestled with how one can connect to ancestors and tradition while reconciling that with reason, science, and modernity. Not only was I learning that from Judaism, but also in Theology classes.

Just prior to learning more about Judaism, late 2018 and early 2019, I was going through a very dark time when I believed in hard/strong determinism, that life had no purpose or worth, and that I didn't want to live in an evil world, a world that makes people do bad things. I was clearly in a depressive state. Reason seemed to be telling me that all of these things had to be true. However, Judaism offered me a completely opposite picture - humans are good even if they do bad things, there's no original sin, we all have some level of free will, God is emotional (anthropopathic) and cares even if it seems like he doesn't, and the world is complicated by human's freedom, but this free will allows us to choose to love each other and God. All of creation is good - pleasure (food, drink, art, sex) is meant to be enjoyed within bounds. It was a cohesive system in stark contrast to my deterministic and Gnostic-like thinking at the time, and a stark contrast to the previous forms of Christianity that I've come across (not including Catholicism). I like to think that this is where I started forming my ideas on how religions are personal, and each affect an individual in different ways that inspire growth. If this is true, then each religion has a purpose for different individuals.

Near the beginning of this story, during middle school, I said I had a friend that suggested I could convert to Judaism. It took me ~8 years for God to guide me towards this. With each step, I was gaining more understanding of diverse religious traditions, which I like to think had led to me being more understanding of other religions now. I believe I got something different from each. Wicca taught me appreciation for nature and my proclivities toward mysticism, for example. Going from Seventh Day Adventist to Hebrew Roots to Judaism seems to make a lot of sense - to me this seemed like a clear direction towards Judaism.

But the final thing God led me through was my struggle with my homosexuality. During that depressive time, I hated myself and I hated God. I was taught that the Bible said homosexuality is a Sin, and that the Bible was infallible. But now I see that God led me to Theology classes and to Judaism in order to see the world, religion, and the Bible differently, and to see myself differently. Only then was I able to have the personal religious experiences that I had been searching, the ones that confirmed to me where I belong.

My Programming Journey

I've been programming software since I was about 9-11 years old. I started with HTML and JavaScript first, and then quickly moved over to Visual Basic. I believe I was using Visual Studio 2008 Express Edition at the time. I had also experimented with GameMaker, quick basic, and Small Basic. After that, I learned Java for quite a long time. Eventually, I had written several games in Java during my time in Middle School. In High School I continued to program in Java, but I also learned C (and binary, etc.) with the help of the free lecture videos of Harvard's CS50 class, as well as other resources like "Build Your Own Lisp". I was also introduced to the linux and unix world, as well as Minecraft, where I learned about logic gates (via redstone). I took a programming class my senior year in High School where we also learned Scratch, Python, basic networking, and a few other things.

Around 2016, when I graduated from High School, I joined a community called Handmade Network. I liked its overall message and focus on the performance, reliability, and handmade quality of software. It was inspired by Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, which was a video series where you would write a game from scratch in C. I followed along to some of that, but I never finished it.

During my time within the Handmade Network community, I created several programs, including Paled (a linux shell), a text adventure game, a line editor, a terminal markdown reader, and several other programs. However, I never got along with most of the community, for various reasons discussed below. But it is where I found my favorite programming language, called Odin. More on this below.

My time in the Handmade Network community overlapped somewhat with my time in the ZeroNet community. ZeroNet was a distributed web protocol - it basically turned websites into torrents, but it did it in a unique way that allowed for dynamic websites and database storage. I made various websites within the ZeroNet community, including a video sharing website, a p2p streaming project I worked on with someone else, a messaging website that I worked on with a group of people, a p2p 2d top-down open-world game, and a blogging platform, among various other websites.

Both of the above also overlaps with my time at university. I went to university starting in 2017, when I was 19 years old. I had already been programming for about a decade before I joined. From the moment I was there, I knew I wanted a Computer Science major. I started programming classes my second semester of my freshman year, skipping the "intro to computers" class. About 3 years into my time there, I become disinterested in Computer Science because programming communities had turned vile, political, and conspiratorial. I was still continuing Computer Science classes, however.

I was also still programming different projects, this time in Odin, a programming language created by someone in the Handmade Network community. Many of them I did not continue, but I still have two projects I'm still working on: Orpheus, and Tempus Calendar. I was also involved in the very small Gopher protocol community, and later, the Gemini protocol community. I created a Gemini server (written in Golang) that hosted various things, including a search engine for Gemini that I created, religious texts, and music file storage.

However, I eventually ended up switching much of my focus over to Theology. I no longer felt like I belonged in the programming world. I felt like I was in the middle of right-wing conspiracies and tech fads. I disagreed with the OOP paradigm, but a lot of those who disagreed with OOP ended up being people who were right wing or bigoted. This was also during the time when programmers were being increasingly political, either by over-simplifying rules to "don't be a jerk", freaking out over criticism of Linus Torvalds or Richard Stallman, or hating on tech organizations, like the Linux Foundation, for not wanting harassment or discrimination. I was also increasingly irritated by IT classes talking about SaaS, KMS, Object Oriented Database Systems, and other ridiculously overcomplicated terms for simple concepts. I had already taken all of the programming classes, so the IT classes were the ones left. It was all too much. This is when I left Handmade Network and related communities around 2021. I also left ZeroNet in around 2019.

So, I chose Theology. I stayed an extra 2 years at university, making my total number of years 6. I stopped taking my very few remaining computer classes for about a year (I believe my fourth year). But, in my last two years, I decided I might as well try to complete a B.S. in Computer Science because I had about 3-4 classes left. I completed those classes. But the degree got demoted to a minor in my final year because I had missed a requirement that I was not aware of. I went back and looked, and it turns out I almost met all of the requirements, I just had too low of a grade in one class. I had used up all of my time at the university, and I wanted to be done, so I just accepted the B.A. in Theology with a Computer Science minor.

This brings me to here, where I have recently decided to create a new website called Scholastic Diversity. I am also still working on Tempus Calendar, and Orpheus. My focus here on Substack will primarily be about Theology, however.