The Fourth Ring of the Ninth Circle of Hell, Judecca, Where Satan Eats Judas Forever

The fire inside went on burning, and we didn't know whether to fan the flames or douse them with the cold water of reality
We were looking for something
Someone to whom we could give our lives
A movement or cause or fad diet
Something
Something big. Something meaningful

We thought about gods or no gods

We went looking for new masters, for politicians and pastors. We went looking for gurus
We went shopping for housewares
And we bought the bestsellers on the bestseller endcaps of our department stores
We went looking for the secret
We were going to be self-made men. A girl-boss
We bowed before the digital gods and the useless cryptocurrency of online brand management

We gave up carbs

We were going to know more and be more than the culture that reared us
We chose new masters, new things to believe
Sometimes we chose them to hurt someone else
Our parents, our teachers, the small town we left behind
We wanted a new movement

What was important to us was that this new movement look entirely unlike the one we had been handed at birth

The old movement was a sheep pen. A herd. It was a rule-based hierarchy based on saying and doing the right things in order to maintain good standing
To belong
The old movement was an antiquated moralism of someone else's design
Suspended on the brittle wire of ancient answers to modern questions
The old movement wanted us to wipe our feet on the mat
To remove our hats indoors
To say the Pledge of Allegiance
The old movement came with a uniform

The new movement welcomed us in
All of us had been spit from the unforgiving maw of the same old world
Everyone there was eager to take the old movement apart, to deconstruct it, to move on. Onward and upward
Everywhere we looked, someone was telling us we were right
We fed our sadness a steady diet of frustrated cynicism
And our cloud god became increasingly shapeless to the point of nonexistence
But what did it matter? This was all part of the deconstruction, the moving on. Onward and upward

We learned a new language
We didn't realize it at first, but there were new rules
There were things you did and didn't say
There were good guys and bad guys
We didn't realize it until we'd been wearing them for a long time
But we traded in our old uniforms for new ones
The new uniform hardly looked different at all
But that was okay. We chose to believe it was

We knew more now, we were smarter
We'd outgrown the old things
We'd evolved. Deconstructing was evolution
Only sometimes we felt as if we'd not so much evolved as changed sides
We were doing the same thing on the other team

Sometimes we felt as if we traded one herd for another
One dogma for another
One rulebook for another
We were promised ambiguity
But things turned out a little more settled that we'd hoped
There were black and whites
There was objective truth dressed up like mystery
And we wanted so badly to believe it that somehow we convinced ourselves it was so
It wasn't

Sometimes it felt good
Being smarter and better, being on the right side of history
We constantly reminded ourselves of the inarguable awfulness of that Christian world we'd left behind
We sat around talking about it, patting each other on the back for our brave escape from it all
We let the world know
And the world loved us for it

Maybe our parents worried
Or our grandmas complained
But this made martyrs of us and we loved it
We refused to receive anything other than praise
And anything that contradicted our new herd we translated as persecution
And we loved that too. It made us powerful

We knew we were right because we felt so right
We felt sorry for the sad, deluded souls the world over
Who had walled themselves up in a dogmatic, unthinking ivory tower of assumed spiritual superiority because that's not at all what we were doing

Not at all