The day had already been long by the time rswfire turned the camera on himself for this one. He had been recording all day — an adventurous day, he called it, footage stacking up across the hours of movement outdoors — and none of it could go anywhere yet. The compile happened at the camper, and he was not at the camper. So he stood where he was, in the dunes field, and set the rest of the day's work aside to say a thing that had nothing to do with the day's work. He named the reason plainly: there would be no point raising this topic except to stir people up, and he had another reason, and he was going to get to it.
He began where the sequence began. As a kid he had been raised around a Christian church, though his parents were not the ones driving it — they did not go every week, did not go much at all, and it was he who asked to be taken. He liked it, he said. He could not say why. Then the young-adult years, and a wider field: astrology, numerology, all kinds of stuff. He believed in a God then. He prayed to that God. He described himself, for most of his life, as a very spiritual person.
Then the turn, which he narrated without being able to date it or explain it. He is analytical, he said, and at some point the analysis arrived somewhere and stayed: there is no way to know, with any certainty, whether or not there is a God. He was careful about the word for it. Agnostic, not atheist — and he stopped to say there was nothing wrong with atheism either — because the position was not a belief about God's absence but a statement about the limits of knowing. How could we ever know. Astrology went. Numerology went. Everything in that category went, filed under pseudoscience by a brain that, he said, just went there.
Then came the part he flagged as hard to say, and said anyway. Some part of his brain — he specified his own, not everyone's — never truly let go of the belief in God. He landed on the shape of what remained: it's a name. Not a doctrine, not a cosmology. A name. And he could not tell whether that was residue of childhood programming, of society, of the thoughts placed in children's heads, and he said so rather than resolving it.
The boundary went down hard and separately. He does not like organized religion. He does not expect he ever will. He said it twice over that he respects the right of others to practice, that he truly does — and that he does not want it near him. He gave the reasons in order: his Aunt Brenda, the most religious fanatic he has ever known. That he is gay and older and knows how most religions treated people like him. That he grew up internalizing all of it, that it made him hate himself, that the internalized homophobia is something he states he still deals with, and that organized religion is a large part of why. That the first people he came out to were a church, and their reaction was not good. That the most vitriolic material he encounters online comes from religious people. And then the policy, stated as policy rather than argument: if it comes up in his comments he will have a problem with it, and the few who have tried are no longer on his channel.
What reopened the terrain was not an argument either. It was the night before. He had been sitting outside at the camper, looking around, and the dunes were dense with it — so much life in nature, he said, like somebody had to have created that. And separately, herbalism had begun surfacing in his YouTube feed, the word half-escaping him mid-sentence, a subject he used to be into before his brain filed it beside astrology. He noticed he was interested again. He offered no conclusion about any of it. He said he is a little more open-minded, that he does not know what changes his mind but that it has changed many times on this subject over the years, that something about the new life and what he is experiencing makes him think there may be some of this in his future. It might not be anything. He wanted them to know he had been thinking about it because he had been sitting outside last night. He is always searching, he said — like everybody, he thinks — and he hopes he finds whatever it is he is seeking, because he knows he has not found it yet.