The Christian Rationalist

While this blog is still in its infancy, I thought I’d use this page to highlight some of the best posts I’ve written already, as well as the general categories that future posts will probably fall into.

I started this blog with the purpose of describing and living out my Christian rationalist worldview, applying the rationalist techniques I’ve learned from Less Wrong and elsewhere to how I see the world as a Christian. For instance, I carefully analyzed the evidence magnitude of a series of experiences I had in June in Was this a miracle?. For another similarly nerdy discussion of faith and religion, read The Thermodynamics of Religious Conversion.

One of the best platforms for engaging in deep and personally challenging questions in our culture today is through movies. After watching Big Hero 6, I took a broad look at recent Disney movies in How to Predict Recent Disney Movie Plot Twists. The movie Selma led me to write Selma, protest tactics, and the false hope of moderation, the first post since I began blogging regularly.

When appropriate, I will sometimes spell out my views on whatever everyone is talking about. Following the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage nationwide, I concurred from a Christian perspective in Gays Should Be Allowed to Marry.

Occasionally, I simply blog about an experience of mine in the past week and some of the lessons learned. Some of the best lessons relate to taking a long view of what you’re contributing to and dealing with feeling intimidated by math.

Carrying out my life philosophy often leads me to measure myself and experiment with new ways of living. In the somewhat dated Soylent, ~60 meals in, I described my initial experiences with the food replacement. Later, I was wondering where my time went, and decided to audit myself around the clock for a fortnight, describing the results in What I’ve learned from time auditing myself. However, I also probe some of the limits of this perspective in Stop Optimizing Everything.

Finally, on a more personal note, my girlfriend Grace Goon and I co-wrote How Grace and I Met, and it became the most popular post here to date.

Last updated: July 2015