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My name is Cody Jassman and I grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada called Burstall.

In early 2005 in the weeks leading up to my 18th birthday, I started reading some arguments from atheists on the internet. Not every argument and point I was encountering was sound in my mind, but I did run into some very good questions that got me thinking about stuff I had not considered... and then, when I started asking questions and having conversations, it became apparent to me that most of the Christians I talked to were not that familiar with the teachings in their own books, which also indicated to me that they might not really think it's as important as they claim. I don't know that it was an entirely fair assessment now, for a number of reasons that I won't get into here. Anyway, a combination of exposure to alternative information and reasoning, along with others' attitudes about questions was enough for me to eventually decide that I was an atheist. I found my deconversion story that I posted in July 2006 which still exists, thankfully, in an internet discussion forum. I'll come back to that briefly at the end.

At the tail end of my time in Burstall, and in the period beyond, I became a pretty annoying type of atheist... always wanting to debate the existence of God with people who were up for it. Not to say it was all bad; there were some great discussions I think, but it became such a strong focus for me for a time. By the time Richard Dawkins released “The God Delusion”, I didn't even have the urge to bother reading it, because I was already so familiar with all the arguments he would be laying out in his book.

After Burstall, I spent a year in Medicine Hat, and then moved Calgary at the end of 2006 to attend SAIT, a tech school, in 2007 & 2008. The atheistic period continued in full swing. In fact... and I'm now quite ashamed to say this, I even had a custom t-shirt made for my second year, a joke play on the SAIT logo: “SAIT'N”. Not that I actually believed there was such a real being as Satan at that time. It was just my immature young adult attempt at edgy humor as a deconverted atheist. But anyway, that's the way I was at that time. I found the photo after searching around for it at the beginning of April. I'm glad it exists; I remember being the guy on the other side of the camera lens, but it also makes me sad and sorry to see. I even noticed recently that I'm still the administrator of an empty Facebook group from 2008 that I called “Prove a Historical Jesus”. That should give you a bit more information about how interested in “the God question” I remained as an atheist. I was searching, but not hard enough.

Atheism + psychoactive drugs = pantheism

While I did have some interesting psilocybin mushrooms experiences in college and beyond that I would be happy to discuss another time, the thing that really moved me back from belief in the deterministic, mechanistic universe of the atheist was my use of a certain surprisingly legal psychoactive substance called Salvia Divinorum after college (but back at SAIT Residence hanging out with friends) on October 24, 2008. I now see this stuff, and other substances that can alter mental perspectives, as the potential extreme dangers they are. So this is not something I endorse, I'm merely reporting where I went and what happened with me, and I do caution others against such things. A roughly 10 minute experience in October 2008 (felt a lot longer to me while in it though... a lot longer!) essentially made it impossible for me to conceive of a godless universe. I now think that there was a deceptive aspect to that experience too. But... at least in my case it brought me a little closer to the truth. After that, I was no longer an atheist. Some time in early 2009 I moved toward pantheism; the notion that the universe was God. That it was all a conscious entity experiencing itself. Still not a personal God. Still not Jesus Christ of Nazareth. But... that was still a key breakthrough for me as I've chronicled my journey. At the very least, I was on board with God, a conscious entity that was everything, even if I wasn't really sure what that really meant or how the finer details worked.

Pantheism would remain my core belief system for the next 15 years. In the years beyond 2008, I had slowly developed a pretty complex mental framework for geopolitics, and a libertarian / individualist / anarcho-capitalist point-of-view. The political research also led to my learning about the horrible depths of the evils perpetrated by those that at the top of the world hierarchy. I won't go into detail about that darkness here, but I couldn't leave it out; because discovering what some powerful people were doing, and a bit of the why and how, is also one of the major factors that helped get me to a place where I could be pulled out of the pantheistic delusion. Secular people, and some Christians even, mistakenly think atheists run the world and hold the power. But the truth, as far as I can tell from years of personal research with few other hobbies to take up my time, is that Luciferians run the world. Alright, I know that part doesn't flow too well with the rest of this, but it's necessary to mention so that my mindset coming into the events of 2024 can be fully understood.

Hardware failures, life reflections, and a second look at old things

So, I'd been feeling some work burnout starting in November 2023 from working the same software project by myself in a basement, socializing very little except with family, for nearly 5 years. My work output was slowing down quite a bit. Being your own boss is great until the boss starts letting the worker slip... Then things had improved a fair bit in January, and I began prototyping a new project for a week and a half, for the first time ever in that whole 5 years. I made some great progress on the new project in a short period of time. Then I circled back to the main project, a virtual reality video game, because it is almost completely ready for launch on mobile VR headsets and things were in really good shape on February 14. I finally had some spring in my step again with my half decade project and was excited to move forward with whatever was left. I had a meeting set the next day with a guy who runs a VR testing group who I met on Twitter via my company Twitter account in May 2020 and who had various players test and report feedback from time to time in the intervening years. We would be discussing the state of the game builds, a potential launch window, and some other things for the mobile version of the game (as it was out on PC already).

In the process of setting up for the meeting on my computer, I pulled a USB microphone preamp out of my computer (that I had been using for basement office karaoke) without shutting down the accompanying software which resulted in a computer crash. So I attended the meeting via a mobile VR headset (we used another game as a medium to have a discussion). I already knew that he had a strong faith from our first discussion back in 2020 (which was a 6.5 hour audio conversation with maybe a single two-minute break!), I knew he was a drummer for his church's band. During the course of our meeting, I left him a good opening, intentionally, to speak about his faith. Because I was already pro-God, but from a long-time pantheistic perspective, I was interested in having the conversation. He took the opportunity to ask me various questions, but I was: (a) actually happy to be challenged by the questions he posed, and (b) reflecting on and answering his questions honestly. And they were having the intended impact. But the really important part was that he left me with some specific actionables: read the Gospel of Luke, and then Acts.

After the meeting, I learned the horrible news that my hard drive was likely crashed and unrecoverable, and I wasn't sure about how recent my game development file backups were. My backup process had become somewhat irregular over the years, and many backups were partial backups, meaning they'd still need a fair bit of work to be pieced back together. And some files were probably just gone entirely. But I had to quickly leave for the weekend with my family, so I actually had very little time to audit the damages. And yet... for some reason, I was getting a strong feeling that I should not worry about it. Normally, I'd be pretty panicky about this type of situation, especially because I wasn't able to confirm the unknowns for a few days. But in this case, for the whole weekend away, every time I thought about it I got the same sort of "it'll be alright, deal with what's in front of you right now" feeling. And it was effective... it was a good weekend actually.

When I got back, I confirmed that things weren't as bad as they could have been (thank God!), but that the drive was indeed unrecoverable, and that meant a fair bit of rework on my part still, even with a somewhat recent backup. So... I was back to a demotivated state work-wise, but I found an app for my phone called AudioVerse that had audiobooks of every version of every book of the Bible. I set it to New King James Version, as it was the version recommended to me for a couple reasons. I then began the Gospel of Luke. Over the next couple weeks, on walks with my dog Daisy over the valley west of my house, listening to Luke started to make a surprising impact on me. I was truly listening with an open heart, rather than with a hyperskepticism, and it was actually getting through to me. I remember freezing in place for a moment when I got to Luke 12:4-7. I was also coming to the quick realization about all that I had been so tragically wrong about. Completing Luke was really all I needed for me to hit a tipping point in my head and in my heart. I did get through about half of The Book of Acts by the end of February as well. On the Leap Day, February 29, I decided that my real “Leap Day” was to be the following day. It was time to take that leap of faith.

“When thou prayest, enter into thy shower...”

On March 1, I took a shower in the afternoon and I prayed. I invited Jesus back into my life, acknowledging that I know He is there, and I apologized for having lost my way, feeling the tremendous sorrow of having been without God in any meaningful way for about 19 years... just shy of 7000 days of my life. My prayer wasn't long, and I was certainly stumbling for words at times. But immediately after that... a very powerful feeling of peace and tranquility came over me like nothing I've ever felt. He made himself known to me that day, and the days beyond it in that month, in a way that I can't even really explain and I am so deeply grateful for it. I don't know that adding more words to this paragraph will help me explain myself better, either. It was quite an indescribable experience to be on the inside of. Please just know that I've had all the personal experiential proof that I should ever need, even if I can't really communicate that to you effectively.

In the days beyond accepting Jesus as my Lord and personal saviour, I did take a pretty good break from my work, slowly and casually piecing my project back together here and there while studying not just the Gospels, but some of the secular contemporary history around that time that references Christ (Josephus, Tacitus references to Jesus, etc.), and other fascinating works like C.S. Lewis' classic “Mere Christianity” and “Uninvented: Why the Bible Could Not be Made Up, and the Evidence that Proves It” by Mike D'Virgilio. I also finally rewatched Gibson's “The Passion of the Christ” on March 18 to see how well it lined up with Scripture. Very well it turns out; just a little bit of Hollywood for visuals, but the story is accurately told. There were a number of scenes that made me cry (it's pretty heavy-hitting stuff for a believer!). There were some other tearful moments in March as well, like finding the Bible my great grandparents had gifted me for my Lutheran Confirmation back in 2001.

I will never forget March 2024; what a strange and wild time period for me that I really just did not anticipate at the beginning of the year. What an unexpected gift!

Toward the end of March and all throughout April, I'd also not been able to avoid a compulsion to contact people from my past, especially Christians that have made an impact on me, and write some lengthy personal messages. I'd not understood this drive to do this except maybe that I was just coming to grips with the fact that I'd worked in a basement by myself for half a decade, but then on April 26, someone's problem was able to be solved precisely because I've been reaching out. And a fact that makes it even more amazing to me is that I wouldn't have even been talking to this person at this time if I hadn't sent a message after feeling the strong urge that I needed to forgive some things that had happened 5 years back.

Another one of the people I started messaging led to a good video conversation, where I was able to inform him that he really did make an impact on me (time-delayed as it might be) when he tried to talk with me about Jesus back at SAIT in 2007 while we were playing foosball one evening, and that it was a moment I had thought about a couple hundred times in the intervening years. He also invited me to join a 10-week “Bible Basics” course his church was putting on, that I could join over Zoom, of which I gladly took advantage.

I even began a correspondence with my pastor from Burstall who baptized me in 2000 and taught my Confirmation classes, updating him on my journey from and back to the faith.

I returned to church for the first time, not counting weddings or funerals, in over 20 years on Resurrection Sunday, March 31, 2024. And now that's what I do on Sunday morning; lots of unexpected changes in my life.

A long journey comes full circle

I mentioned that I found my deconversion story still online. I found this part fascinating to look back on (please do the appropriate eye-roll for the arrogant final sentence of my still-developing mind!):

“It was about the entire first week of March that I was so obsessed with reading all of that stuff that it was all I did on my free time. After school I would just read and read until it was time to go to bed. I think I considered myself an agnostic on the first night and an atheist about six days after. It didn't take me long to get comfortable with the “atheist” label (I've noticed this is rare from reading other deconversion stories). I've devoted a pretty good chunk of my time to educating myself with online reading ever since then. Looking back on this, I see that it was inevitable from my life's very beginning that religion would not be able to keep me.”

What surprised me about re-reading that so many years later, was that the intellectual part of what happened for me in March 2024 was basically the same experience but in the reverse direction. I just couldn't stop reading. Still can't. Each day, I'm hungry to learn more about the nature of God, His creation, my place in it, and what I can do to serve Him while I am alive. I am so thankful for what He has made possible for me because I most certainly did not deserve such clear signs to be given to me to offer me a chance to right a lifelong wrong.

A note on the “prayer in the shower” aspect: As a programmer, I'd gotten into the habit of taking a shower when I ran into problems that I couldn't resolve for hours. Problem-solving was, for some reason, very effective in the shower. It's always been a great place to clear my head. So when I made the decision to pray after coming to a firm conclusion in the preceding days that He was everything the Gospels said He was, taking a shower was a natural inclination for me. It wasn't until analyzing everything in post, toward the end of March, that I realized that the moment I decided back in March 2005 that I was an atheist and ready to accept the label, I also happened to have been taking a shower at my parents' house. So there has been a curious mirroring of my deconversion experience. I have now taken to praying in my daily shower. It's still a great place to clear my head!

It's all very surprising, really...

I sincerely did not believe I would ever be able to come out on the other side of the Jesus question, genuinely, even if I may have liked to for at least the last 5 years due to the aforementioned research into the power structure and the intimately-connected dark underbelly of the world. Knowing what they do and who they say, in their own words, that they serve, and not being able to believe in the very God that that implies was a difficult position to hold. I was a nonbeliever who wished I could believe for quite a long time. I even read about half of Matthew coming down off LSD at like 5am in August 2019 (again, not endorsing I want to reiterate).

There was even a moment some time in 2021 or 2022 when I was driving my car and pondering the whole Genesis 6 day creation story (as one does, I tend to let my mind wander in the car, haha) and while that was going on in my head, I saw a truck with a company name I'd never seen before or since: “Genesis Builders”. I don't expect anyone else to take such a tale seriously, but it certainly left an impact on me as if it were a real message.

Coming back to Christianity is not something I really expected to do (being a pantheist with a fairly Christian-aligned ethics had its strategic advantages in rhetoric... there are some types of statements I can no longer really make), but it is now such an exciting development for me in my life and I am looking forward to bearing fruit in the future by trying my best, as a flawed man, to walk the walk. Attempting to follow Jesus' teachings will be no easy endeavor. But it will be awesome. I believe God will make straight paths for me.

[END OF TESTIMONY]

–Cody Jassman, a guy God put in therapy he didn't know he needed

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Afterthoughts

Thank you for reading my testimony. I sincerely hope it encourages you to read the Gospels or at least makes you curious enough to consider that there may be something you are missing. Audiobooks really are a great way to take in information if you go for walks or other types of activities that don't require focused attention. You can “read” while you do that stuff. Perhaps you'll consider something like AudioVerse, which is totally free, and has lots of talk content beyond the Holy Bible too. I can't promise it will have the same impact on you as it did me, as we're all in very different places, but:

This is life's most fundamental question. God. Furthermore, if Christian theology is accurate and true, the question becomes even more important due to the necessity of accepting Christ's sacrifice for salvation during one's Earthly life. I mean, it's probably totally wrong because it sounds so goofy, right? But then again, seeing as it is life's most fundamental question, it couldn't hurt to take a look at the source material with an open mind and open heart, could it? The Gospel of Luke will run you about 3 hours as an audiobook (free). That's pretty easy to plough through for anyone. And besides, becoming more Biblically literate improves one's ability to enjoy literature and film, since Bible metaphors and references are used with abundant frequency in both. So either way, it should be worth your time and improve your life.

And if you'd like to try a book, check out that one I mentioned earlier, “Uninvented: Why the Bible Could Not be Made Up, and the Evidence that Proves It”. Though in my case I read it after I had already come to a new conclusion about Jesus, you may find it useful right now. There's plenty there that might give you pause to reconsider some things.

And yeah, again, this has all been quite strange for me. At the time of writing (April 30, 2024), the shock of it all still has not really subsided. I think in part because I'm less certain about what my future involves than I was before. Major changes mean major new unknowns. But I'm also not sure I can think of a time when I was happier, really.

Do you have any questions for me or anything you'd like to say? Don't be shy, I'm happy to talk!

Welcome to the new website. My website has been rebooted a number of times since the SAIT years in 2006–2008, and a web developer pays about as much attention to their personal website as a mechanic does to his car. So it has just kind of existed, without any real purpose. I did write a couple articles on the last iteration of the website (2015 redesign?), but I'm starting this fresh. I have included a page for Projects I've done, both active and defunct, including those that I do under the banner of my corporation, Neon Engine Interactive.

The website refresh was born out of two reasons. The first is that I was sick of being shut out on Facebook, not being able to get posts out to or receive posts from Facebook friends. Even my non-political posts get little traction at this point. So I want a place that I can write and that people will have to specifically come to to read. There's nothing really wrong with that filter for the kind of stuff I may wish to write. Good content should require a little work to get to rather than being fed to you as corporate slop in a scrolling feed. May the days of personal websites return! Everyone who has their own website: it is time! Time to do the linking back and forth between people's blogs too. I'd love to throw someone I know's site on a Links page.

The second reason is that I went through an unexpected conversion to Christianity after a very real and difficult-to-explain experience, so I wanted to write up my Testimony to attempt to explain it anyway, should anyone have any confusion about what happened to me. “What happened to me” is actually formulated incorrectly. I was a willing participant in the process. Anyway, yes I am a follower of Jesus now, and believe in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as told in the Gospels. Feel free to read my story about that if you're curious.

Also, I intend to load up this site with Easter eggs to look for. Fun “title” text on images (when you hover your mouse over on a non-mobile device), Error 404 pages with randomized messages, and whatever else I can think of. I miss the “Fun Internet” of 2007–2011. “Corporatized Internet” has its place (real work is done over the Internet at a significant rate in 2024), but the real “Social Web” has died. We shouldn't have let big corporations take over that space. So I'm bringing back fun in my own little corner of the Web. I may even do a classic Guestbook like the good 'ol days. Remember Guestbooks? What about Hit Counters? Mostly in the modern day, organizations don't want you to see how few visitors they actually get, and so the Hit Counters naturally went away. But I could have one...

Also, I'm building this all as custom software (as I have for 15+ years), and using the Laravel 11 PHP framework to do it. While it's going to be super custom, if it ends up working out well and other friends of mine wish to have websites again, I could refactor it into a generalized package so others can benefit. The way I see it, we could all have private websites (blog articles don't have to be insane efforts, they can be just like your Facebook posts), link back and forth on Links pages as friends, visit each others websites, and use something like Disqus to make it easy to comment back and forth. It is much better. Tom's MySpace was super customizable (which in practice meant a lot of ugly websites with flashing colors that screamed at you), but your Facebook or X profile is not. It is streamlined for mindless scrolling, with little uniqueness that can truly represent the unique people we all are. If, at a later point, you decide you'd like to have something similar, let's talk. As you'll see on the Projects page, I've done plenty of work for free in the past, haha. You could also just set up a WordPress site. But if you do, and you know me, send me a link!

So yeah, that's my big idea. It's a small idea from a prior era. A personal website. And yet... quite a novel idea in 2024 it seems. I'd especially love to see all my creative, artistic friends build themselves microplatforms and just use the main ones to share their stuff. Something has gone very wrong with the trajectory of Internet trends, and what they have been doing to us.

As for subject matter, I'll be all over the place. I am a forever interested man with many areas of interest. My first article is on a small piece of evidence in the Solar System for Intelligent Design that I haven't heard explained well in a very long time. Sometimes posts might just be short musings. It is, after all, intended to be a social media replacement of sorts for myself... but with the added benefit of my posts not falling into the abyss never to be seen again. Astute Internet Surfers (remember when people surfed on the Internet?) may even notice that all my URLs are super short and simple. The ones with dashes also work without the dashes, so I can refer people to articles in verbal conversation (potentially, should an appropriate opportunity ever arise). I imagine I'll have to record some music to fill up the Audio page as well, seeing as I only have that very simple song from 2007 as a placeholder.

I'll be writing even if no one is reading. And performing music even if no one is listening. I hope someone finds some value in what I do. But even if you don't, I will continue on like you do. I have many unachieved aspirations and time slows down for no man!