A matter which I cannot address in public without some disquiet has risen again, and courtesy asks I address it.
My reluctance in taking up my pen to discuss this hideous divorce between orthodoxy and its various deviations is partly from a natural dislike of voicing disagreement with beloved brothers. If my tone seems controversial, that is due to the nature of the controversy, not due to any pride on my part. It is simply a fact that I cannot say why I think I have found the right answer without implying that those who say otherwise have not.
My reluctance again is partly from a pragmatic dislike of exposing the weakness of disunity to our mutual foes, secularists, atheists, Leftists, cultists of Political Correctness, and other jeering and famished monstrosities circling with bloodshot eyes and lolling tongues the broken bulwarks and the fading fires of our dying citadel called civilization, assaulted from without as betrayed from within.
My reluctance finally is partly from, surprisingly enough, humility. It is rare emotion for me. Frankly, I am jovially proud of nearly everything else in my life, from my excellent education, to my natural skill at writing, to my happy family life, to my towering height, to my monstrous girth, to my fine-looking beard like a manly yet silent explosion of hair. But when it comes to divine questions, I was in this matter for so long and so deeply deceived, and so thoroughly sunk into the very Marianas Trench of folly and error, that I take no delight to disagree with another reaching conclusions other than mine. From age seven upward I was an atheist, and a skillful and zealous and successful proselyte of that false doctrine, and I grew from a youth too stupid to grasp the palpably obvious, into a man too arrogant to see the blindingly obvious. So I am reluctant to give voice to my vain imaginings lest wiser men and more learned come across them, and expose them to a just mockery.
On the other hand, my loyalty to Christ and my love of truth for its own sake bids me speak, and the hope that my words might aid some other in any struggle he might have with conundrums akin to mine.
I have elsewhere given an account of the visions and miracles and ecstatic experiences which overwhelmingly and unambiguously transformed me from a zealous atheist to a zealous Christian. It was a supernatural event, and it is not within my power to repeat it for the inspection of casual onlookers. Consequently, I do not expect to convert atheists to theism by power of reason alone, for I was not converted by reason alone, but by the Holy Spirit.
Unlike my supernatural transformation from atheist to theist, the decision which of the competing denominations to join was a natural one, and I relied upon my own unreliable nature and mother-wit to make it. It is that decision this essay is meant to recount and justify.
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