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Hello Guys This will be a very long post... I want to share with you my journey with FDR so far: I discovered Stefs podcasts on youtube about three or four years ago (I am now 27). I was watching a lot of political and atheist debates at the time. I think it could have been the video “19 tough questions for Libertarians”. Anyways I started to watch more and more of his videos and just loved the stuff. The NAP videos, the property rights, it all fit together and that was great, since in what I have heard before, there was always somewhere a hidden contradiction. The next big milestone I think was the argument from morality and the UPB book. My interest started to shift towards ethics. (It had come from atheism over politics, society / economics, libertarianism / freedom). So I started really digging into the idea of rational scientific ethics, which I still find extremely fascinating and important. I am also currently working on a book of my own trying to improve UPB. I want to share it with you some day, but so far it is still not ready. Also the RTR book was a real eyeopener for me. I think around 2 years ago I read it and also introduced it into my relationship with Rahel, my girlfriend. It had a truly wonderful effect on our relationship and allowed us to come closer and closer to each other ever since. Then in November 2015 I saw the truth about circumcision video. It hit me like a hammer blow to the head! I have seen the video in the recommended videos on youtube for probably 2 months before I finally watched it. I think I was afraid of it. But I also wanted to see what Stef had to say about it, since it also pertains to me. I grew up Jewish, so I was circumcised just after birth. I was very shocked and confused and I went to Rahel and asked her to watch the video with me. She also was shocked and said that she had never thought about it, (Circumcision is not common in Europe), but that for sure we would never do this to our future kids. The following month I was very shocked and disoriented, and I could barely think of anything else. I just could not grasp it that I was the victim of a human rights violation and that my parents were the perpetrators. In January 2016 I wrote them a letter that I handed to my mom when she came to visit the town where I now lived. I was stomach-turningly nervous and so was Rahel, when we went to meet her. (She came with me to assist me in this difficult task.) In the letter I told my parents that I have come to realize that circumcision was wrong, that I want to talk about it with them and that I expect an apology from them. I also put the link to the video in there. They have been very uncooperative in finding dates to talk about it. In the past 1.5 years we have maybe had 5 conversations about it, always initiated by me calling multiple times and insisting on it. It is now also just one year that I started going to therapy. It was very hard for me to start going to therapy. I talked a lot about trying it to Rahel, but I never actually went and did it. In fact she started to go to therapy before I did because of exam anxiety. I supported her going to therapy very much, but I myself kept merely talking about it. At some point she kind of kicked my ass to just go and do it, which was a very good thing. She finished therapy after roughly a year, I am still in therapy and probably will be for some time to come. I think I am now at the point where my emotions start to come back to life. I am still often dissociated, but sometimes I feel a lot of sadness or anger. It has happened twice in the past 4 weeks that I really broke down crying and sobbing. Also just two weeks ago I felt for the first time real anger towards my parents for an extended period of time. It was not just like a flair up that I immediately suppressed back to zero, but it lasted for around two days. The reason for this was that my mom has written me to invite me to a dinner at my grandparents birthday. I called her and said that I dont want to go there and act all happy as if everything was fine, but that I first want to sort out the things that we still have not sorted out. I also said that Rahel has offered to act as an arbitrator between us, since she felt (correctly) that we were not getting anywhere. So my mom said that she would talk it over with my dad and that we could maybe meet the following weekend (14 days ago). Then the next day she sent me a text that we could not meet on the weekend, because my dad was planning to go on a skiing trip the week after and these conversations make him feel unstable. (That btw was their reason why we could not continue the conversation for the past 7 weeks). So I felt that I got really angry. And the anger stayed with me. I called her the next evening and wanted to say that I was angry, but I could not bring myself to say the words. But I was so loaded, that she perfectly heard it out of my voice anyways. She then tried to calm me by making one concession after the other, until she offered that we could meet just the two of us on the up coming weekend (14 days ago). So we met to talk together. She had asked again that she still does not understand exactly what I want from them. So I said again (probably for the third time) that I want to be able to have a real relationship with them. I want to be able to share thoughts and feelings that are important to me and I would also like that they would share more important memories, thoughts and feelings with me. And that being able to have a real relationship requires that they respect me as a fully fledged human being, which means for one, that they do not have the right to cut of an important body part of mine. And then it started again with the evading and fogging and so on and I felt that I got angry again. I said that this is a prime example of what I am talking about, since I am explicitly stating a feeling and a desire of mine and now I am again in a position that I have to justify myself instead of being heard and understood. She said that she and my dad would be willing to come to a psychologist of my choosing with me, of which I was positively surprised. But at the end of our conversation I felt very strongly that there is no point to it. I felt that we would just go through the motions but nothing would come out of it. It was a weird feeling, it felt like a cold kind of certainty. I am not sure what will come next but this feeling has not changed since then. I feel like the guy that has always tried to find the hidden door in the wall of a castle, and has suddenly realized that there is no door, just a wall. So now I am standing in front of the wall kind of dumbstruck and sort of starting to look around and trying to regain my orientation. It is a really weird but also kind of a good feeling. I also feel like I have a ton of sadness inside me which I sometimes feel, but mostly I am dissociated from it. Even though I often feel a lot of sadness and sometimes anger, I generally feel much better and happier than I ever did in the past 15 years. I am happy that I start to have feelings, even though it is kind of unfamiliar and a bit curious. I am happy that I feel my confidence rise and that I can start to stand in for myself. I am happy that I have such a wonderful relationship and a wonderful vision for my future family (unschooling, peaceful parenting, attachment parenting). I am happy that I have a good compass (ethics) to navigate by through the difficulties of life. Philosophy is a stony road and I sure have many stones still before me, but I feel that I am on the right road and that makes me feel positive and happy.

The study of rational and empirical philosophy has been the beginning of a new stage in my life. I was first introduced to FDR last year, at which time I considered myself to be a libertarian with an agnostic viewpoint of religion, though I was already leaning toward atheism. Over the past several months, I attempted reading a couple of Stefan Molyneux’s books; however it wasn’t until I tried the audiobook versions that I was successful in covering the material in ‘On Truth’, ‘RTR’, and ‘UPB’. After completing those, I wholeheartedly dove into the podcasts and though I have a lot of catching up to do to get caught up to the latest podcasts, it’s a daily endeavor. I find myself wishing that I’d heard of FDR and Stefan Molyneux back in the early years of his podcasts, so that I could have progressed along with others who have been delving into self-knowledge for far longer than I have; it is such a progressive process. I have to admit that I find posting to any FDR forums to be daunting because I feel like I need to know absolutely what I’m talking about before I participate. Having attended lectures at Fermilab, it’s the same feeling I get when I walk into the auditorium to find a seat, knowing how little I know about the topic to be presented, while surrounded by scientific minds that have been schooled in and experimented with such topics for their entire careers. My enthusiasm for continuing this path is, fortunately, not daunted. I look forward to being a part of this community.