Last summer, on one of my last nights living with Tim & Ania in New York, I read a book that inspired me to be an anarchist. I think I was an anarchist for about a week, which is a pretty impressive length of time for one of my little passions.

The author was a guy named J. Neil Schulman, and the book was called “Alongside Night.” You can read the whole thing online.
Anyway, here’s an interview in which Schulman describes his conversion to Christianity. It’s sickening, I know. But he actually believes that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are the same religions, so he’s only partly insane.

Here’s a great quote about his thoughts on Ayn Rand (pardon the French, but this is funny): “All in all, if I’d met her when she was younger, I would have wanted us to fuck our brains out.”

Another good Q&A:

GARY YORK: Perhaps you can both believe in a God and remain a rationalist because you had personal experience of a nature that was convincing to you; but what about someone who adopted a belief in God because of reports of your unverifiable personal experience? Wouldn’t that be irrational? In other words, wouldn’t it be irrational to believe in God because of what you say?

J. NEIL SCHULMAN: Sure. Nobody should take anything I say on faith. But I think an ungrounded belief in God is a self-correcting problem. If you don’t have some personal experience that has convinced you of the reality of God — if you only accept the existence of God based on other people’s assertions — then you don’t really believe in God anyway. You only believe in whatever propaganda you’ve been fed, and that’s not really making good use of the independent soul God gave you. I think God has use for people who question his existence, so long as they’re willing to be open to however the personal evidence plays out.