Back to Blogging

It has now been just short of a full year since my last blog post, and I find myself being drawn back to the lively writing and obscure hypertext of the bloggesphere.

Of the numerous reasons for my absence from posting over the past year, the primary (though not only) problem which has plagued me has been the looming trap of repetition. Unlike some of the other ‘skeptical’ blogs, I have little to contribute to the great and interminable religious debates.

I am far more interested in the internal mechanisms and consequences of belief and non-belief.

Over the 16 months which spanned my (active) blogging career, I have written of the potent differences between the religious and the secular mindset. In many cases, the starkness of the difference in orientation is so powerful that few people within one group can appreciate how reasonable and compassionate people can hold the disparate views of the other group. Often, the two sides see only a vague and distorted caricature of the other, from which they seek to explain each others’ behavior and values.

It is a product, for better or worse, of the uniqueness of my experiences (and quirkiness of my personality) that I have a singular insight into these two very polarized views.

If there is any possible significant contribution of my blog, it is to help each group catch a small, fleeting glimpse of the world through the perspective of the other. If you are secular, perhaps you can gain a momentary insight into the depth, complexity and multi-leveled sophistication of the religious experience. If you are religious, perhaps you can appreciate for a brief moment how people who never worried for an instant how the universe came into being can feel so passionately and certainly about a moral world.

And, with that, I will set out to scribble onward - on this topic and perhaps on areas beyond….