I am cutting out time from the internet to focus strictly upon writing my book and hopefully finishing it by this month. I want it done, but every time I learn something new, I feel compelled to incorporate it. It doesn’t help that I am always deeply involved in political topics due to my focus of study and interests. There’s always so much going on and changing or something new I’m learning that I fear discredits a specific point I wrote down in my book and so I must check, re-check, and re-write so that my points and criticisms are salient. The book will be utilizing logical fallacies, Cognitive and Social psychology, and Nietzschean philosophy for my critique of religion. I want this book to be the sum-total of all my criticisms of religion. It doesn’t help that I deep dive into rabbit holes of knowledge over and over to thoroughly learn something specific and new. I fear it may weaken my critiques unintentionally at this pace, but also feel like covering as much ground as possible is incredibly important. These incidents have been the entire journey of writing this book so far; I originally intended a book of general critiques for all religions and then expanded when I realized it wouldn’t hit the crux of the matter. I divided the book into Parts with Part I being the general criticisms and Part II being the criticisms related to specific religious theology. Even in the context of Part II, I need to make some generalizations because being completely specific to certain branches of a religion is impossible to cover accurately in arguably even one lifetime and so I focus on core teachings. I think the approach of focusing on the core teachings of each major religion is the best middle-ground for Part II. I often have to utilize different approaches to different beliefs. However, as I was writing Part II, I began to realize the excuse that “religion does good for some people” could be used to exonerate bad beliefs and so I made yet another expansion. I have yet to write Part III at all so far as I’m currently finalizing Part I and amending Part II, but I will hopefully have Part III written down and have at least the draft form completed by this month.

For that matter, when going through the process of writing and critiquing each particular religion, I was forced to make different amounts of chapters depending upon the religion. Buddhism doesn’t have as much convoluted sophistry as the Abrahamic faiths. Thus, I could finish the entirety of my critique in one chapter in the draft I have so far and it includes both the Theravada and Mahayana branches of Buddhism. By contrast, due to their respective forms of convoluted sophistry, Christianity and Islam are both taking 6 chapters for their Part II critiques. A friend has suggested I’m taking too much time and that I should just make it into separate books, but the Part I critiques are to introduce guiding principles in order to go forth critiquing Part II and I think Part III will be very relevant to that entire ensemble for the book. I want it all there and I think its best that it’s all placed together in one whole book to cover all of my criticisms.

Honestly though, throughout the process and years spent writing this book, half the time I’m spent wondering that it’ll all be for nothing. That it’ll all be a complete waste of my time. That despite all my time and effort, it will have meant that I just wasted 4 whole years of my life. The other half of the time, I get enticed by the prospect of making a best-seller… but let’s be serious, every author who has ever written a book has probably dreamed of their book being a best seller and making a lot of sales at some stage in the process. I do hope this book does well, but I have very good reasons to doubt all the effort I’ve put into it. It truly worries me that I’ve just been wasting my time. But, I have to finish it and once I do, I’ll either be promoting it or moving onto another book and learning from failure.