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When I answered my phone, the young man told me his name, but not much else. I was still trying to figure out why he had called when he suddenly blurted out his disagreement with me.

“What you said doesn’t prove God!” he said with certainty.

I suddenly realized this man had gone to the trouble of finding my phone number and calling just to tell me how wrong I had been about something I’d written.

I rarely write overtly about religion or theology, but I’ve said a lot recently that’s required me to refer to elements of my faith more than usual. Something I’d written had annoyed this man.

At first, I thought he was an angry atheist calling to challenge my non-rational belief in my creator. I still wasn’t clear about what I had written to annoy him, but I explained that he seemed to misunderstand my intent.

“If you think I’m trying to prove anything, you’ve mistaken me for something I’m not,” I told him. “I’m just reporting what I’ve experienced. What you believe is up to you.”

That’s when he surprised me.

It turned out he was an angry theist, not an angry atheist. He was annoyed with me because I hadn’t cited the apologetic argument and the “proof text” that he had been taught.

He told me I shouldn’t talk about my own subjective spiritual experience. He felt certain that it was a waste of time to talk about love and silence and “fuzzy emotions” about hate and forgiveness.

I responded as gently as I could.

“Have you ever actually read the Sermon on the Mount?” I asked.

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This is how a lot of today’s Internet is created. Since this is a growing concern, let’s talk about that briefly.

I started writing professionally as a minimum-wage part-timer at a newspaper when I was a freshman in college. The video terminals on which we typed our news stories were barely smart enough to retain what we wrote. The idea that a machine could make up articles of its own would have seemed like pure science fiction to us.

I’ve been paid quite nicely for my writing over the years. I was first paid poorly as a newspaper writer and editor (and eventually publisher). I was paid far better for the ridiculous spin that I wrote when I was a political consultant. And I’ve been working for myself — for free — on this website for the past 15 years.

But I want to be clear about this. The idea that I would need a machine to write for me after all these years is actually offensive to me. Whether you like my writing or not, it’s my writing. My words. My style. My ideas. Keep Reading

By the standards of my younger self, I’ll always be a failure. And that’s fine with me.

Our culture is obsessed with riches and status. We unconsciously judge people according to their level of success. We’re envious of those who get ahead and those who have more than we do. We judge others harshly — sometimes loudly and sometimes silently — for not living up to their “potential.”

I grew up this way. Maybe you did, too. I wanted success and power and money. I saw those things as the path to status and freedom. And I expected myself to be very successful.

But something happened along the way. I learned there was a tradeoff between worldly success and personal satisfaction with life. I learned that I couldn’t “have it all.” I struggled for years to find a compromise between the two — to see a way to follow incompatible values. And I failed.

When I crashed, I crashed hard, like a train jumping off its tracks. I went off the rails about 15 years ago — metaphorically speaking — and refused to move until I could figure out what had gone so terribly wrong. Why I felt like a failure.

I finally discovered that my culture had lied to me.

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