Apologetics Conference 2016: Why I Believe in Christ (David Wood)

The Meaning of Apologetics and the Conference Welcome

Anybody know what apologetics is? Hopefully most of us do. Apologetics is giving a defense of the gospel. In 1st Peter chapter 3 verse 15, we're told to sanctify Christ as Lord of our hearts, and always be ready to give an apologia, a defense of the gospel, of the hope that we have in Christ.

But do this with gentleness and respect. So apologetics is giving a defense of the gospel. It's reasons for the faith. It's standing up for the truth of God. So we have a tremendous conference planned.

We hope you guys can make it and stay for the whole thing. It's not only tonight, but it's also tomorrow morning, and there is a schedule. Does everybody have a program? You guys have a program. All right.

We would also love to get information from you so we know who's here. If you could fill out a card, then next year if we do a second one, which this is our first annual, so hopefully there'll be a second annual after this, we can let you know when this conference is coming ahead of time.

We'll send out an email, we'll get the word out ahead of time, and we can continue to build this apologetics conference. So please let us know your information. Also we have some books for sale. Some of our speakers have written books, and those are out there.

Please look at them and consider purchasing them. Also in the office, right, it's not the foyer, but inside one of those rooms, we have what I call Pastor Jeff's Recommended Books. Many of them are there.

CLC Bookstore had let us take them out, and whatever we sell you guys can take home, and we return the rest. So we have some great books on that table if you're interested in reading some good books. So without further ado, we are going to call on our first speaker, Mr. David Wood, to come on up.

Hey guys, why don't you give a hand clap, and we're.

Going to welcome David Wood. Check, check, check, does that thing work? You got to do that, you.

Got to go check. Good evening. Before we get started, are there any jihadis in.

Here? They say they're going to chop my head off, and I keep telling them where.

I'm speaking, and they don't show up. Anyway, so that's good. You know, this evening might have turned out very differently if some jihadis had shown up. So I guess we can talk about apologetics then.

Why Apologetics Matters for Christians

So as it's been pointed out, apologetics is, of course, by the way, do I need to stand in any particular spot? I can move around? Okay, I should have checked on that earlier. Apologetics, basically two kinds.

You can give a reason, that's the first Peter 315 part, giving an answer for what you believe, for the hope that is in you, and that's cool because that's being stated by Peter, right? That's not some great Christian scholar, some brilliant philosopher, some brilliant scientist saying, hey, you need to be ready with an answer.

This is a fisherman saying you need to be prepared with an answer, and so this is for Christians in general, and if you think about it, you have in the Bible, you have a brilliant scholar, someone like the Apostle Paul, spoke multiple languages, and had been educated by some of the most brilliant minds of his time, could quote the pagan poets to the pagans to refute what they were saying.

So you can imagine that coming from someone like Paul, but we have it from Peter, and so this is something that Christians in general need to be able to do, and if you think about it, if you walked up to Peter, Peter the fisherman, and said, hey Peter, I think Christianity is stupid, what do you got to say?

I think you're going to get a pretty good answer back from Peter. So that's one side of apologetics, and then you have the 2nd Corinthians 10 part about the demolishing strongholds and so on, and that's actually dealing with opposing arguments, other people's positions, and showing that there are problems with them, and so both are very, very important, and I kind of feel like it's hard to describe.

Back before Alexander the Great, the Persian Empire was viewed as this awesome empire because it was very big and had been very powerful in the past, and travelers kept coming back to Macedonia saying, you know the Persian Empire, they're actually really weak, their forts are falling apart, and their soldiers are undisciplined, and they're all drunk, and so on, and if you rolled through there with a very tiny, well-trained army, you could wreak all kinds of havoc, and that's what Alexander did.

He put together a small, well-trained Greek force, and just went all the way to India. I kind of feel like that's the situation we're in today, in that if you look at the two main groups that are sort of vying for attention, telling you, no, this is what you need to believe instead of Christianity, that would be sort of militant atheists.

You've always had atheists, but if you've been paying attention, they've become much more aggressive in recent years, and they pride themselves on being much more aggressive than they used to be. And Islam, of course.

So Muslims saying, hey, you Christians, you have your theology wrong, you need to believe in Allah, and believe that Muhammad's a prophet. And so these are the groups that are sort of saying, hey, you need to believe in us, but if you look at their arguments, if you look at the claims, it reminds me of that Persian Empire, if you start to look into it, very, very, very weak and very silly claims, more so with some of the new atheists than even with Muslims.

And if you watch my video, you know what I think of the persuasive power of Islam. And what I mean is, the new atheism is like this sort of meme-driven ideology, where it's all these little quotes that they all pass around, like maniacs, and post all over their sites, and post all over their Twitter feeds, and so on.

And if you think about them, they're just really, really silly claims. And they point to these things as their reasons for not believing. And so let me give a quick example. This is the most popular quote I've seen on atheist pages.

I contend that we are both atheists. So you're talking to us. I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

And almost every atheist I know passes this around as some brilliant piece of wisdom. And you can understand, in a superficial way, why this would make sense, right? Well, you Christians, you don't believe in Thor, and so on.

Well, that's the same reason I reject your god. You know, I think it's just a bunch of silly, superstitious nonsense. But this is ridiculous on so many levels. I mean, we could spend multiple sessions just on this.

But look at this part right here. I contend that we are both atheists. This is one of the most popular things atheists say nowadays. We're all atheists with respect to these other gods. We just go one god further than the rest of you do.

So you reject thousands of other gods, and you just believe in one, and we just go that one extra step. So we're all basically atheists with all these other gods, and we just one tiny little step further.

Now, how is this silly? Let me count the ways. I'm not going to count the ways. I'll just talk about a couple. Take something simple, right? Here's a podium. Here's a podium. Suppose we have no idea who built this podium.

Probably don't. Probably bought it somewhere and have no idea how this thing was made. So suppose some people say, I say a bunch of people got together and built that podium. We'll call that poly-podium builderism.

Multiple podium builders. And then Jeff comes along and says, no, one podium builder is all you need. One good podium builder can build that thing with no problem. So that'll be mono-podium builderism.

And then an atheist comes along and says, no one built a podium. It just is. And you say, you know, Jeff says, well, that's ridiculous. It's ridiculous to say that no one built a podium. He says, aha, you rejected all those other podium builders.

I just go one podium builder further than you do. I just reject one more. Jeff was already down to one, right? That's the bare minimum required to explain something. One. You're not getting lower than the one explanation.

In going from one to zero, you go from an explanation to no explanation. From common sense to nonsense. It's a very, very interesting difference between one and zero. And the atheist is saying, I don't know.

We just go one further. And notice, this would be like me saying, if I were a vegetarian or something like that, I say, well, we're all vegetarians with respect to a gorilla meat and tiger meat and rhinoceros meat and most of the animals in the world that you could eat.

We're all vegetarians with respect to those. I just go like three meats further than the rest of you. So you're a vegetarian with respect to all those other animals. I just, I'm a vegetarian with respect to a couple more.

You're not a vegetarian at all, right? You're not a vegetarian with respect to gorilla meat. I am not an atheist with respect to Thor. I'm a Christian with respect to Thor, right? There's something else, I believe, that rules me out as an atheist.

So, strange claim. But then you have the second part. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours. Notice the massive assumption here, that all religions are claiming basically the same thing and they all have the same kind of support.

And so if you reject one, you reject all of them equally. And this is just a strange, this is a very strange assumption, because different religions don't even make the same sorts of claims about what they have in terms of evidence.

Very few religions actually say, here's the evidence that you can examine to know that this religion is true. You're already, you're already narrowed down to just a couple. Once you have, once you say, you have religions that are claiming that you can know that they're true based on some sort of evidence.

You're down to a couple. So Christianity makes a claim that says, here's how you can know. In other words, if you're coming, you're not a Christian, and you say, why should I believe that? Christianity says, here's something that you can examine to know that this is true.

Islam does as well. So you have, on the one hand, a massive difference between what religions are claiming about whether they can even be proven, whether there is evidence for them at all. But once you are narrowed down to the few religions that actually claim that you can examine and test them, you notice a big difference here as well.

If you look at Islam, the main argument for Islam, the main proof of Islam, is what I'll call the argument from literary excellence. It's, the Quran is so well written, it must be from God. You all just laughed at that.

That's in the Quran multiple times, over and over and over again. That's the argument of the Quran. Muslims today might use different arguments. That's the argument of the Quran. That was the argument put forward by Allah and Muhammad for the truth of Islam.

It's so well written, it must be from God. Now notice, it wouldn't matter how well written the Quran was. That would be very strange. I mean, that would be like saying, Mozart's music is so beautiful, it must be from God.

Shakespeare's plays are so amazing, they must be from God. That would be absolutely ridiculous. It wouldn't matter if Shakespeare was, I mean, just he could be a thousand times better than he is right now.

What would that have to do with whether he's writing the inspired word of God? As far as I can tell, nothing. And then when you actually read the Quran, and I like what Antony Flew, the famous 20th century skeptic who eventually believed in God, Antony Flew was asked, after he became a theist, after he believed in God, do you think you'll ever subscribe to anything particular, like Christianity or Islam?

And he started giving comparisons between Christianity and Islam, and he pointed out, he said, Paul is a first-rate philosopher. Muhammad was basically an illiterate caravan trader, so he was drawing attention to, because he's a philosopher, Antony Flew is a philosopher, so he's respecting Paul as a philosopher.

He said, Jesus is an incredibly attractive, charismatic figure, Muhammad was not. And then he compared the Bible and the Quran. He says, whatever your position, if you're serious, the Bible is an amazing piece of literature.

To read the Quran is to do penance. Punishing yourself, reading the Quran is punishing yourself for your sins. And I'm not saying this because I disagree with Islam. That's true. I enjoy reading other Muslim sources like the Hadith and so on.

I think they're very, very interesting. The Quran, oh my goodness. But notice, that's the main argument. This is so well written, it must be from God. If it were that well written, that would not mean it's from God.

And in fact, it's very, very, very strange, difficult to understand, disorganized, incomprehensible book. So that's what happened. So you've got the argument. It's claiming, here's how you can know this is true.

And when you examine it, you find out, whoa, this is a very, very bad argument on multiple levels. And so you have this difference between religions in terms of some offer evidence and some don't. And even among the ones that offer evidence, you find a very, very interesting difference when you start looking into what they offer as evidence.

And so I'm going to maintain that Christianity, and specifically the figure of Christ, is completely different from what you find anywhere else. And so this claim, by assuming that all religions have equal evidential status, shows that the person just hasn't studied religion.

They don't claim the same things, and they don't have the same evidence. Even if you want to reject them all, you can reject them all, but it's very clear that they're not claiming the same things and don't have the same sort of evidential status behind them.

Why Bad Arguments Against Christianity Fail

Think of another issue. I used to watch this. I watched the first season of a show called House. It was about a doctor. And I stopped watching it because every episode was the same. They brought in some horrible dying person, and no one knows what to do, so they give him the house because he's the one that figured this stuff out.

And then House says, oh, here's what you do. And then they try that, and it doesn't work. And then they try the next thing, and that doesn't work. And four or five things, they try. And then at the end of the episode, he has this eureka moment when, aha, here's what it is, and then saves the day.

So that's the same every episode. And the only difference is they can't keep you with the same plot line without raising the drama level. So you have to keep coming up with worse and worse stuff. So you have people coming in, blood squirting out of their eyes, or something like this, in order to keep your attention, even though they're telling the same story over and over again.

But notice how ridiculous this reasoning would be. If House tries one cure to this disease, it doesn't work. He tries another treatment, it doesn't work. He tries another treatment, it doesn't work. Tries another one.

Then he has his eureka moment and says, aha, give him a shot of this. This will fix it. Imagine his little team says, well, House, if you understood why you dismiss all these other cures, now you would know why we dismiss this one, and we're not going to take it seriously.

You see why this is the same, right? The point of going through all these different tests and so on was to get to the one that's actually correct, to get to the correct diagnosis and the correct treatment of it.

Same thing with a legal trial, right? It would make no sense. I mean, if a lawyer stood up and said, Your Honor, if you understood, members of the jury, if you understood why you reject all other accused people in the world as the people who did this crime, you would understand why you can't believe that this person committed the crime either.

What are you talking about? The whole purpose of the trial is to figure out who did it, right? Figure out if this person actually did it. So it's very strange to say, Well, you're rejecting all these, therefore you have to reject this one as well.

You could even rephrase this and say to atheists, Atheists, if you understood why you dismiss all other non-Christian ideologies, you would understand why I reject your non-Christian ideology. No atheist is going to even take that seriously for a second.

They're not going to say, Oh, wow, I never thought about that. I reject all these other non-Christian ideologies, therefore I have to reject mine as well. It would never occur to them. In other words, they would never apply this reasoning to anything else in the world, but as soon as they get to Christianity, the reasoning, the logic, all gets turned off and then gets passed around rapidly as your slam-dunk case against Christianity.

And so this would be part of apologetics would be sort of pointing things out like this about how silly this is. But apart from all this, because now if you say, Well, I believe in Christianity. Well, you know, you've dismissed all these other things and you don't go to them.

Notice, again, going back to something like the house show or something like that. Once you've got the correct diagnosis and the correct treatment, you don't then go on and say, Okay, maybe it's all these other things.

Once you've found that someone has committed a crime and you've proven it beyond a reasonable doubt, you don't then go and say, Oh, let me see how many other people in the world are candidates for this particular crime, unless there are reasons for it.

But once you've got your guy, you've kind of got your guy. And so if you're looking at the truth about God, about the world, and so on, once you've got it, it makes no difference that you haven't studied the religion of Aborigines in Australia or something like that.

What are you talking about? You have the truth. And this, to give a sort of silly example, if someone brought you evidence against your position, sometimes you can know something is true. You can have reasons for knowing something is true.

And if someone offered you an alternative, some other position, you could know there's something wrong with it. And what I mean is something like this. So let's look at.

Why 2 Can Seem Like 1

An example. It's working? There we go. So we're going to prove that two equals one.

Here. Most of you believe that two is not equal to one, that one equals one and two equals two. But I can prove you wrong here. So suppose I said there are all kinds of other possibilities for what two equals and what one equals, and I can show you that you've ignored the alternatives here.

So we'll give a little proof here. If you're not up to date on algebra, don't worry too much about this. Those of you who are younger people who are actually taking it right now, then you've got a slam dunk right here.

So one, A equals B. So we're defining A as whatever A is, B is. So if it's one, then one, two, and so on. So A equals B. We're going to set that as premise here. So if A equals B, then A squared is going to equal AB, right?

Because A times A will be A squared. But B is A, so A times B will be the same thing over here. You can do anything you want as long as you're doing it to both sides. So A squared is going to equal AB.

So I can add A squared to both sides, since I can add whatever I want to both sides. So that's going to be A squared plus A squared, adding A squared to both sides. A squared plus A squared equals A squared plus AB.

So that's straightforward. I just added A squared to both sides. So over here now I now have 2A squared, so that's going to be 2A squared, equals, same thing over here, A squared plus AB. And now 2A squared minus 2AB.

I'm subtracting 2AB from both sides, right? I'm allowed to do that in algebra. 2A squared minus 2AB equals, same thing over here, A squared plus AB minus the 2AB. And so now I have 2A squared minus 2AB.

This is the same thing here. I'm just condensing the other side over here. A squared, you had plus AB minus 2AB, so that leaves you with minus AB. And now I'm just going to take this 2 out here, allowed to do that.

2A squared minus AB equals, just taking out a 1 here, allowed to do that, 1A squared minus AB. And now I'm just going to divide both sides, allowed to do that, A squared minus AB, both sides. And then I got 2 equals 1.

Now, I didn't know what happened here until I just inserted numbers. I said, okay, let me say this equals this, and so on. I went through, and then you see it. You see what happened in here. The point is, suppose you have no idea what went wrong here.

I don't think anyone's going to say, oh, wow, I guess 2 equals 1. Here I've been wrong all my life. They told my teachers lie to me, and so on. But why? You have a pretty straightforward mathematical argument here for why 2 equals 1.

Well, that wouldn't change you. You'd say, okay, there must be, I don't know what the problem is, there's a problem here. There's something here, because I already know that 2 is not equal to 1. 2 is 2, and 1 is 1.

And so if you know that something is true, if you have good reasons to know that something is true, you can know that there's a problem with other positions, like another position saying that this is equal, that 2 is equal to 1.

So you can know that there are problem with positions just by knowing that you have, that you have the truth there, and it helps to look through and actually find out what the problem is. And so this can go, this can go in a couple of directions, but I grew up as an atheist, and this is before you had the new atheists who were really militant and aggressive, so I was kind of that way on my own.

And much worse, though, because I was also not fully sane. And what I mean by that is, well, let me go all the way back. I was five years old, and I had a dog. I'd had this dog, all I can remember. It was a really cool little dog, would go out and fight other animals if I was around and so on, but a raggedy little mutt.

And one day, he gets hit by a bus, and my mom gets a phone call, hey, your dog's over here flattened by a bus. And my mom turns to me, and she hated the dog, but she had tears in her eyes, and she says, oh, Goliath is dead.

And I thought, why are you crying? It was just a dog. And I thought there was something wrong with my mom, right? Like, she's getting all broken up over this dog, and she didn't even like the dog. But either way, it's just a dog.

Why are you getting teary-eyed over that? So, like, there's something wrong with it. We grew up in the middle of nowhere. There's no one around us. And so, I know my mom and a couple other people, and I thought something's odd about my mom.

And eventually, we moved and we were around other kids, and one day, their dog got hit by a car, and they were all sad about it, and they're all sitting on the table crying. And I was thinking, wow, this is spreading here.

It's some weird problem here. And about the same time, about a year after that, I was beside a lake at my grandfather's, and I was watching these ants march, and they're all marching in a line. And it suddenly became clear to me that these ants were much more intelligent than we thought they were, that they're so organized in what they do that they're actually much more intelligent than they let on.

And I rapidly concluded that ants actually rule the world. I should have laughed at that when I thought about it, but it made perfect sense to me. I thought that ants ruled the world and had tricked us human beings into thinking that we were in charge.

And I had these episodes at various points in my life, but it would just suddenly become crystal clear, whoa, ants rule the world. I figured it out. Not on any drugs or anything else, just it becomes crystal clear.

And that sort of expanded as I got older. When I was, I guess, fourth through sixth grade was the animal, the pets phase, where I thought that pets were actually controlling us, and cats were in there to watch us and observe us and so on, and they're sent as spies.

And basically, any time an animal would look me right in the eyes, I would think that it was trying to communicate with me. And it was actually, it was like bragging, like, ha, ha, you look at you. And so, you could actually catch me talking to animals when I was young.

I'm on to you. I know what you're doing. I know about you. I'm not stupid like the rest of these people. And by the time I got into junior high, I thought I controlled time. I didn't know how I controlled time, but I knew I controlled time.

Tenth grade, I thought that I controlled the weather. Like, it would, there's a weird sort of a selective evidence process. When I would say, I want it to rain, and it would actually rain, then, ha, ha, this proves it, right?

And then, if it didn't happen, then, oh, I did something wrong here. What did I do? How did I? Why didn't it happen? Something's messed up here, right? So, for, I guess, pretty much all of tenth grade, I thought that I, I believe that I controlled the weather whenever it would, something would happen.

What did I do? What did I do differently that made that happen? So, this is just, you know, this is, this is some really stupid, delusional thinking. And my dog, of course, died when I was little, but as I got older, other things would die.

People would die. And I would, I would notice over time that I had the same reaction, which is not, which is, so what? It's just a, whatever that was. And right before eleventh grade, my, my best friend, Jimmy Lindholm, died parasailing.

The whole time, since we were in, since we were in sixth grade, he was saying he wanted to, he wanted to try parasailing. He eventually tried it. His harness broke, plummeted to his death. And he died, and, and this was, was very different.

I was walking away thinking, I should be feeling something about this, right? It made perfect sense if it's a dog dying or some, you know, distant person I don't know very well. One of my best friends ever dying, and I just, I just don't care.

It's, it's, there's, there's, I feel nothing about it. And that's when I started thinking maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe there's, maybe, maybe I, I have some sort of problem, and that's why I'm different.

But that didn't last long, because as I was thinking through these things, I came up with another explanation for why I'm not bothered by that, and that's that I had evolved to a higher stage of humanity.

The rest of you, you're all held back by your emotions, right? Which may have some, may have served some purpose back in, you know, for your ancestors, but now we've reached a stage where you can be perfectly rational about things.

It's coming from a guy who thinks that, you know, animals are communicating with him. You can be perfectly rational, not held back by your, you know, your emotions. And so, I, I just ran with that, and, and, and eventually something happened, because I started, well, committing various crimes and so on, and eventually I had this amazing breakthrough.

This was the, the following summer. I'd broken into a store in the middle of the night, and I was running from police, and they had me, they got me surrounded on three sides, right? There was police in front of me, police to the side of me, police behind me, and the other side was the Monongahela River, so they're yelling, stop or I'll shoot, and so on.

I'm going, no, no, no, you're not, right? And so, anyway, I jumped in the river, swam across the river. I was expecting when I got to the other side, they're going to be there waiting on me, but I beat them across the river, and I worked my way up a hill, and at first I'm just in the patch, in patches of woods and so on.

I get up out, I finally emerge from a patch of woods, and I'm in someone's backyard, and there's a house in front of me, and then there's a garden right here, so I'm in the backyard. There's a garden here, and I need to keep going because, you know, who knows what they're going to come up behind me with.

And so I started to walk around the garden, and I just, I just stopped and started, I started philosophizing. I thought, why am I walking around this garden? I don't, I don't care about these, I don't care about this stuff here.

I don't care about the people in that house or, you know, how long it took them to grow. I don't care, right? So why am I doing this? Why am I modifying my life to bring it in, into line with, you know, them?

And so I just, I just sort of trounced through, trounced through the garden, and I got this amazing rush of freedom when I did that, like, like I could feel myself changing with every step, like, whoa, people have been telling me to do stuff all my life, and I don't have to do it.

And, I mean, I had already been doing, I had already been breaking rules and so on, but it's like, anything you do, not, not even, hey, don't step on other people's tomatoes, don't, don't do that. Why?

Because you say so? I don't know, why would I listen to what you, what you say? And that sort of, at first, it was this sort of awesome, exhilarating thing, but afterwards, I started getting really angry because I'd been living by these nice little rules all my life because people were telling me to, right, like, like, your parents tell you to do this, don't do that, and your teachers tell you to do this, don't do that, and everyone's telling me all these things that you, you can't do this because it's wrong, and you believe it because, you know, you're a kid, you don't know any better.

And so once I realized it was all just complete nonsense and I didn't have to listen to anything any of you said, but you've, you've, you've convinced me to, I've been living for years like this, and you brainwashed me, basically, into doing this.

I was, like, angry at everyone, everyone, the entire world had brainwashed me. And you, you could, this would be different, but you can imagine why you would get mad if, if you thought someone was, was brainwashing you.

If you think about, you know, something simple, if you just went to a restaurant every week and you kept going to that restaurant, you thought, oh, I love this restaurant, this restaurant's so good, I keep going to this restaurant.

And then at some point, you find out that the owners of the restaurant had hypnotized you into coming to their restaurant over and over again, and that you really wouldn't like it, but they hypnotized you into liking it, and so that's why you keep coming.

You probably get mad, right? Like, I've been tricked. Even if you're, even if you love the food there now because you've been hypnotized into doing it, you're quite happy with the food there, you'd be mad just because they brainwashed you into doing it.

And so that's, that's how I was my whole life. You guys have destroyed my entire life, making me do all these things that I otherwise wouldn't have done. And so I started sort of reacting against all that.

I concluded that I have to do sort of the opposite of what I've been taught. You've been, if you've told me to do something, I need to start doing the opposite of it. And the more enraged I became at having been brainwashed all my life, the more I wanted to react.

And so I started studying bomb building, which some of you who are around my age might recall, or a little older, you might recall the anarchist cookbook where I actually put out a book on here's how you build pipe bombs, here's how you can make a rocket launcher, and so on.

They start telling you how to build all these things. And anyway, I started thinking going through here that, wow, these chemicals, I'm going to blow myself up if I, you know, might accidentally blow myself up doing some of this stuff.

So it was about the time I was starting college, and I decided I was going to become a chemistry major, learn how to build some more high-tech stuff. And going through my first semester there, and I started thinking, well, anyone can, anyone can blow up a bunch of people you don't know.

What is that? That's not really, I mean, lots of people do that all the time. You have different bombers who do that sort of thing. That's weird. Why would that be a problem? And so if you really want to break free from what you've been raised to do and to believe and to think, then you've got to be more extreme than that.

So my dad was the only relative who was around me at the time, and so I decided I was going to kill my father with a hammer. And I'm going to skip all the gory details, but I did that. I tried to do that.

I hit him in the head about eight times, seven or eight times with a ball-peen hammer. And I'm about 240 now. I was probably about 230 then. So I was, that was much stronger then, by the way. So I did that and walked away, and it was the same thing, you know, with my dog and with Jimmy, that there was just no reaction.

But whereas previously when I would do something sort of new and groundbreaking for me to shed the old moral system, before I would have these sort of amazing rush of freedom like I've sort of stripped away, I just felt dead after that.

It was done. I walked out of there, and I have no rush of freedom now. There's just nothing. I have no feelings. I could get angry. That's the only thing I would recognize as an emotion after that, is that I would get angry at people.

But I did that and ended up in a mental hospital, and they gave me diagnoses. I didn't know what they were until years later. It was years later when I read, well, I read the diagnosis and it said antisocial personality disorder.

And I had no idea what that was. I thought it just meant I'm not very social and I like to read on my own and not be interacting with people. That's not. I was eventually taking a psychology class, and it said sociopath.

And I said, what's a sociopath? And I looked it up in the dictionary, and it said someone with antisocial personality disorder slash psychopath. Whoa. Well, that would make sense then, wouldn't it? I wish people had told me what those mean, because that would make sense of a lot of things in my life.