Peter Thiel, David Perell & Detroit Steve

Detroit Steve sent me a link to a story about Peter Thiel written by David Perell. The name Peter Thiel rings a bell, but David Perell doesn't, so I check. David writes, writes, hosts a podcast, and runs a writing school called Write of Passage. Apparently that is all, not a celebrity, not a zillionaire, just a writer, kind of like me, only different / better / more writer-ish?

Just to be clear, Steve is not a fan of Peter. I guess I'm not either, since I don't know who he is. I started reading the linked article, but quickly realized that while it was telling me about this Peter Thiel, is wasn't telling me who he is, so I went to Wikipedia where I found out he's the gay billionaire who shut down Gawker. Okay, now I know who he is, more or less. Oh yeah, the linked article says he is a Christian and conservative. I like this line:

In a profile in the New Yorker, Thiel said: “I believe Christianity to be true. I don’t feel a compelling need to convince other people of that.”

While many people, both nominal Christians and anti-Christians, have demented views of Christianity, I tend to view Christianity as a general good. After all, it's basically the foundation of Western Civilization. I suspect forgiveness is at the heart of it, why it became so popular, and why it has endured. It's all very well to hate your lying, thieving neighbors, but if you have to carry that hate around with you all the dang time it becomes a burden and weighs you down. At some point you need to let that shit go.

JMSmith, a Catholic, has a few words to say about hate.

There are a few Catholics I follow in the blog-o-sphere. The stuff they write is mostly about people and society and it generally makes pretty good sense. I feel a bit like a traitor since I am nominally a Lutheran, but I haven't come across any protestant bloggers, or at least none who claim to be a member of some non-Catholic Christian sect.

Of course, I'm not really a very good Christian. I don't believe in all the mystical mumbo-jumbo, but the Ten Commandments seem like good advice, and there is stuff going on in the universe that science is unable to explain. Maybe someday we'll find out that all the mystical mumbo-jumbo is actually true. I mean we've seen weirder stuff in shows like Star Trek and Star Wars.

I haven't read all of Peter's story, it's really long (look at the slider in the scroll bar). However there are a bunch of slides, so it isn't infinitely long. Anyway, I only got three or four screens into it before I got sidetracked.