...also, your name is hysterical. I had so many pogs. Even a big fat slammer that had OJ on it with his orange jumpsuit behind bars that said “OJ in THE SLAMMER”.

Sure you can ask. I’m gonna be 100% honest. I was a teenage agnostic anarcho-punk McCarthyist.

I was raised by a Greek Orthodox (very close to Roman Catholic with pretty much the same saints and approach to religion) father, and a reformed Jewish mother who wasn’t too religious. She believed in god, but did not believe it was necessary to practice religion to be included in god’s plan. We celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah, and I lucked out by taking in all those gifts. Being a child through the 80s was fun. I was born in August of 80, and am now a 40 year old “old fart”.

For years, probably from 1995-2001 or so I was led down a very fun, but dangerous path by what was the very early version of what is modern day Antifa. It was the “cool” thing for a teenage punk rocker to do in the 90s.

I naturally grew out of it once I developed my brain enough to think for myself and I wasn’t afraid to admit I had followed blindly and made a mistake. As I got older and entered the real world, after and during college years, working hard and earning my keep sort of woke me up naturally. I was surrounded by smelly freeloaders with zero respect for authority or even each other to be honest. These are the same lowlifes that try to steal each other’s girlfriends. Zero honor, and if called out would gaslight others to make it seem like they were overreacting. Many self medicated all that pent up anger with drugs.

It just got old and extremely embarrassing.

I still love a lot of that music to this day. Propagandhi, NOFX, Bad Religion, etc.. but I can appreciate the different views, take it with a grain of salt, and enjoy the music regardless. I have definitely learned to appreciate non-political music more by far though.

As far as converting from agnostic thought to Gnosticism, it also happened naturally. My mother, god bless her soul, passed in early 2017. I had already been interested in Metaphysics and differing religious beliefs from a young age. I believe my first reading of Hermès was as a 12 or 13 year old while reading about ancient Egypt with my neighbor and becoming obsessed with it’s secrets. I also took a liking to Terrence McKenna and psychedelics. However I never used them. I was more interested in how different groups of people envisioned our existence and approached religion or defined god. As a Greek, I especially tuned into Ancient Greek philosophy and Hermès, along with a strange pull toward Eastern Indian belief and texts. I read the Bhagavad Gita and Upanishads. Felt most closely connected to those readings and the Enerald Tablets or Corpus Hermeticum of Hermès Trismegistus.

Back to the loss of my mother. This caused quite the existential crisis for my. A mix of heartbreak and strange anger and emotions I honestly never had to those magnitudes. I decided I was going to trust the universe. I have mixed feelings on supernatural, as I don’t really believe in ghosts (at least as they’re defined by modern society) or spirits. So it’s a hard internal discussion that happens from time to to time where I try to accept that we exist outside of our physical body in some form, yet I also don’t feel Grandma Ceille can just come pay me a visit. If that makes sense.

Ultimately, I have settled on a strange version of god that scientifically fits pretty much all religions in essence, but may not match the description in all holy scriptures. I suppose it’s closest to the Judeo-Christian interpretation of god. Give it take Jesus. I don’t not believe in the New Testament, nor do I believe in it. I follow more closely to the Old Testament and its teachings, morals, stories.. and admittedly haven’t read the New Testament enough to really let it sink in. I appreciate the stories regardless. But the reason why my personal thought on god and metaphysics fits so many religions, is because I consider god to be our hive mind. Or at least that’s the easiest short term way to describe it. If you follow Hermès and his “As above, so below” philosophy, and the extension of consciousness outside of the human body, that is indeed what I subscribe to most closely. It aligns well with the teachings of Jesus/Krishna, so that’s why I don’t disregard that part of the New Testament.

I find that regardless of personal thought, a good observation about society is that Christians seem to follow these teachings more closely as a community, and I really appreciate living in a Christian society. I appreciate the USA being a nation built on the principals of a Christian god, and it makes me sick to my stomach when people want those ideals and morals stripped from American society.

Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were very smart, but very dangerous men. I feel that their writings and the popularity they gained really was the strike of the match against American greatness. They got otherwise smart young minds to become dazzled with their rhetoric due to the pseudo-intellectual nature of their teachings. They got happy, healthy, privileged people to second guess our heritage and history in the US. Zinn has been widely debunked, and while I feel Chomsky is truly smart, and has some good thoughts, nothing he proposes could work in modern society. His ideas fail the same way socialism and communism do. They cannot scale larger than a small community of like minded people. Human nature cancels socialism. This is why it leads to famine. Greed still exists whether we want to pretend it does or not.

So I have a really long winded and strange outlook on society. I’ve always known right from wrong. I was always a well behaved and respectful child, as I am as an adult. But my relationship with god and my thoughts on religions and how America should be as a society has drastically changed over the years.

That all said, I always go back to siding with Ronald Reagan. As much as that very same punk subculture or counterculture I was impressions by as a teen hated Reagan, I always felt that he connected with ALL Americans and said things in a Presidental manor that led our country forward while being resourceful of other nations, yet also somhowing that we hold the torch’s bd lead the world. There is nothing wrong with American greatness. I was born in the Bronx. I’m proud to be an American. No amount of indoctrination was able to sway me. Even when in the thick of it, I never bought the arguments hook line and sinker. I always knew it was wrong, and was mostly surrounded by those folks because I really loved punk rock and that was just the scene. But I never fit in in that sense.

The key takeaway here is that I’m basically a space cadet when it comes to religion, and have concocted a strange hybrid of how the universe works in my own mind. But I strongly feel that living in a society based on Judeo-Christian beliefs is the best option we’ve seen so far, and I proudly choose to live in America and one nation under the Christian god it was founded on. That formula worked amazingly until woke cultured began pecking away at it.

So how about you?