The author writes a decent essay, but the claims that he makes about the mathematics curriculum don't really line up with my own experience of the subject, and I suspect has nothing to do with his actual trauma.

This passage sticks out to me:

>I kept getting put into advanced mathematics classes while missing core concepts from previous years.... Eventually I was in classes with no standard curriculum at all, classes that had names like Discrete Mathematics and Advanced Topics II. To this day I have no idea what level of math they were meant to correspond to.

I don't know how an adult who has spent so much time actually trying to learn mathematics can maintain the hallucination that math is organized into "levels". The lack of a standard curriculum is an actual fucking blessing. God forbid someone except for the bureaucrats at pearson/macmillan and whatever federal committee decides on the standard curriculum for K-12 get to plan a math course. The author's opinion on this is backwards.

Moreover, he wasn't "lacking the core concepts" needed to take on these elementary topics, because there aren't any. That's the point. Math is built from nothing.

Second, you can feel the resentment in the author's voice when he talks about his friend who became a mathematician of sorts. And that resentment is that his friend is actually interested in mathematics. This is an interesting insight, but it's unrelated to his thesis.

We can gain more insight into the author's world view by considering some of his other essays. In "Math Team", he lists an impressive set of extra curriculars, but for some reason shies away from the mention of his church. However in [1] we see the following:

>Church was a big time commitment for us. We had prayer meetings on Tuesday night, Friday night youth group, Sunday services and Sunday school, and then Bible study later at night.

This is an altogether different account of how his time was spent as a youth. Maybe it's important to the author not to place anything online which would cause conflict with his parents, but it seems to me that the obvious thing putting too much pressure on his childhood time is this.

This essay on church is generally full of contradictions as well, for instance:

> [Church] makes it hard to be honest. In church we valued having deep, personal conversations with each other, but it felt like people always held something back.

followed not two paragraphs later by the exact opposite claim:

> It’s easier to trust a group of people if you know that you are all committed to the same things.

In [2], the author concludes with a summary of what he believes faith to be:

>Faith is not a process for choosing what to believe in or what to commit to. It is a tool for helping with what comes next. Creeping doubt and regression to status quo is natural, even in the absence of any new evidence. Faith is the virtue of counteracting that regression, through repeated internalization of those truths and commitments.

The conclusion I draw from this collection of essays, is that the author knows exactly what was wrong, but considers it a virtue to lie to themselves about it. Perhaps denying your natural doubts can sometimes be good for you, but to me it sounds a lot more like the spike protein on the mind virus of Christianity wreaking havoc. Regardless, if you're not willing to engage with your doubts, then you have no business putting your thoughts into an essay under the pretense of intellectual honesty.

1: https://www.benedict.one/2020/12/09/church-and-community/
2: https://www.benedict.one/2020/03/02/faith/