Portrait of the blogger as a young man

Some five years ago almost to the day, a 15-year-old version of myself launched a serial weblog about politics and philosophy. As I attended a neoconservative Catholic high school growing up, the site became outlet to all my opinions and ideas as I developed my own over those years. Between my obsessive authorship of more than 300 posts—adding up to some 700,000+ words over three years—and my dutiful researching into all concerned subject areas, this long-term project helped me to become more knowledgable, well-informed, and opinionated as I matured into adulthood. Thanks not only to the convenience of modern word processing software but also to the highly public forum of debate that the internet offered, I both developed as a persuasive writer and grew unique opinions on a host of issues I had been relatively unexposed to in my provincial teenage life.

I adopted the persona “Masoni” and set out to write on just about everything: news, politics, technology were common categorizations during the first six months. I learned over time the most effective ways to generate interest and viewership for my teenage opinions, and measured my progress by studying the number of visits each post commanded. It was an infantile marketing campaign I ran, optimizing content for Google search queries and posting the most popular submissions to additional sites to increase traffic. I was completely new to the publishing game, but was able to research online the best practices to get one’s blog noticed and, most importantly to me, to get readers to engage with my content. After a few short months I’d reined in a few dozen regular readers who left comments and questions on posts, and before long my readership spread to a few hundred new visitors every day. I was finally writing for an audience, and it felt as though what I had to say meant something. Significantly, none of these visitors suspected I was a teenager.

At the blog’s outset, I was still a nominal Catholic with a handful of pointed misgivings about the institution of religion I had for years taken for granted. In an April 2007 post “Religion and Morality, Part 1,” I defaulted to Aquinas’s cosmological argument for the existence of god but alleged that organized theologies represented a danger to independent thought. The post garnered a few supportive comments from anonymous readers, and I moved on to other topics. But the seed of doubt reflected in that early treatise came to define a large proportion of my future content and, indeed, a large proportion of my future self. I began researching theology, researching the Bible itself to root out any weak links or sour logic. I downloaded manuscripts of famous philosophers’ takes on the subject, using scholarly articles hunted out of academic journals (which, ironically, my school granted me access to) as springboard for my burgeoning ideas. Coupled with the message of hate being dictated by my high school’s radical theology department, it wasn’t long before I recognized the absurd elements of religion and worked to reject them entirely. But the cosmological argument for god remained, and I remained at least deist.

Meanwhile, I wrote. I aimed for a vast and diverse pool of subject matter to populate my blog, everything from reviews of new blockbusters to speculative pieces on future Apple electronics, political articles on current events or gay marriage. The impetus for the breadth of topics was selfish in nature—I would record search result analytics for each article and determine which flavor of content was most popular with new readers, with return readers, et cetera. Each of these posts, for the most part, was researched and edited to ensure factual accuracy and idealogical clarity—I felt the public nature of my writing demanded perfection, and my readers got something close to it. I became familiar with a variety of topics simply through this mode of casual research, delving into complicated topics and reading up on others even tangentially related. I grew adept at scouring the internet for relevant bits of information from reputable sources, a skill that would certainly become useful as I penned research papers in later years. My testimonial stands diametrically opposed to the concerns of Socrates regarding the debate between Theuth and Thamus, as I was successful in attaining new knowledge even as I read it from secondary sources myself. As to whether I operated with a full understanding of the topic as I wrote about it in turn was for my readers to determine, but I seldom had any complaints.

While I certainly did write on a great many other things, no subject had a more profound impact on my psyche than did atheism. I continued posting increasingly skeptical pieces on religious doctrine, on morality as it related to the modern world, and on the existence of a creator. In my eight posts on the existence of god (creatively titled “God, Take [1–8]”), I gradually but noticeably shifted from loose theism into deism into lazy agnosticism and finally hard atheism. My commenters took note: of my six or seven regular readers at that point, none of whom I knew personally, a few Christians began speaking out in the comments beneath my posts, challenging my ideas or pointing out flaws in my logic. As I rebuked their counterarguments and amended my arguments to patch up any holes, I gained a clearer understanding of what it was I actually believed. They made me a strong debater, and they taught me which favorite Christian arguments I might anticipate in future conversations—and how to beat them.

This new skill set boded ill for my experience in theology classes at school. I became argumentative and combative with teachers who pontificated that homosexuals were doomed to eternal hellire, and I debated those teachers who would cram doctrine down the throats of impressionable children. My iconoclastic reputation from the time isn’t something I’m proud of, but it definitely made a name for me around the high school as I even managed to convince a fair number of my classmates that religion might not be as bulletproof as our instructors made it seem. Despite the fact that I quite often won debates against theologians four times my age (an admittedly easy task, as it happens), I wasn’t happy with the person I’d become.

In an attempt to improve my situation, I altered my blog slightly to allow for a great deal more popular culture content. Although the serial debates with rival bloggers I’d begun publishing garnered by far the most interest with new and old readers alike—and, by extension, the most advertising revenue—I geared more and more posts toward album and movie reviews rather than that which allowed loudmouthed spats with theists. I was a child shouting out to the uncaring internet to notice my intelligence, to validate my existence, and over the years it felt increasingly futile and overall quite a silly endeavor. After some eight months of the less controversial fare, I resigned from the blog and signed off with a post entitled “Waxing Indignant.” I allowed the ad revenues to trickle in from older popular posts for a few more months before pulling the plug entirely.

My time writing under my pseudonym Masoni helped me develop not only as a writer but also as a thinking individual. Had I not had to research so extensively different philosophical concepts to keep up with my more knowledgable readership, I might never have come to the conclusions and opinions I hold today. By the time I took my little slice of server space offline in January 2010, I’d racked up almost a million visits from nearly every country on the planet. While similar blogs have before and since performed much better in shorter expanses of time, my teenage self was thrilled with the recognition and exposure that the little blog had given me. Going forward into more advanced writing pursuits, the powers of persuasion and debate I learned fending off those anonymous Christians have yet to fail me. Maybe someday I’ll resume my iconoclasm and yet again enter the foray of internet religious debate, but, for the present, I’m contented with shutting the hell up already.