Sunday, May 07, 2006
Post 69
This will the sixty ninth posting on Atheist Seeker since I moved to Blogger and overcame my original miscalculations. That's a milestone of sorts. I should celebrate somehow. . .
I had a moment of clarity the other day, and as with most of my flashes of spiritual insight it occurred while I had my coffee cup in one hand, and was standing in the shower. The result, a diluted cup of fair trade coffee and a water stained note with these two words:
Promote Blogging.
I have come to the opinion that blogging be the greatest technique for the development of the soul and the mind. Blogging, I shit you not, can save America and the World. There is already an immense body of research that will tell you that the cultivation of a diary and daily writing exercises are good for your brain and your understanding of self. My opinion is that the reading of other sentient beings' blogs has an equally valuable effect upon the soul of the reader.
Of all the fucking things in the blogosphere that irritate/sadden me, the one that I feel has to be railed against with the greatest fury is the compartmentalization of the population. You have a certain set of beliefs, you are surrounded by friends and family that tell you those beliefs are true and you are good. You only listen to radio stations and watch television programs that are 'approved' by your belief structure - be it evag christian, 'fiscally' conservative, or even racist in nature. Other points of view are either demonized or ridiculed, but the important point is you would never actually interact with that 'other' point of view. The 'secular' world that the evags refer to is nothing but a collection of stories about drug addicts and the craziest tidbits from the ACLU that can be spoon fed to them. 'Conservatives' rant on and on at a straw-man depiction of 'liberal', they even have pencil-necked limp-dicks on their networks playing the role. Trust me - John Kerry in 2004 was not a fucking liberal.
Most Americans are not this partisan and not this set in their ways. Yet this compartmentalism skews the public discourse and allows those who truly are ideologs to feel that their world-view is both correct, and perhaps more importantly, not silly. By remaining closed off from the rest of the world, they insure that they will not have their positions challenged.
Many evag leaders fight against evolution with the 'argument of entropy.' If you take a bag of stuff and shake it up, it ain't ever gonna form a digital watch. Things tend to move into chaos and disorder, not naturally align themselves into more and more complex lifeforms. This is true, of course, in any fucking closed system. Unfortunately, the planet Earth is not a closed system. The Sun pours loads of energy into our ecosystem every day, thus energy is being added to our system from outside - the arguement of entropy is so foolish, it must be some sort of inside joke.
I bring this up because I believe the analogy ties my glorification of the Random Blog Experience into whatever I started this posting on (yeah, post 69.) When you exist in a ideological bubble, no outside energy is ever going to enter your system. The world has been defined, and all further contact you have with it be for the purposes of reinforcing those beliefs. The soul is starving to death, you are incomplete for the task of citizenship; it is just not enough to think you've learned enough already, time to focus on the routine and the almighty dolla'.
Contrast that with the experience that I feel I can have when I surf blogmad, just stumbling accross random blog after random blog. A while back, I read the blog of an overweight twentysomething describing the shittiness of public transit for his kind of guy, an insight into the prejudice and painful alienation that just these simple experiences often cause. Because he shared that with us, I felt something stir inside of myself. I'd never thought about that before, and my empathy and understanding of yet another aspect to life grew. I felt like some of my own prejudices had been identified, and it stung a little bit.
This is 'energy in.' I'm open to whatever I find on the blogosphere, and some of it does make me reconsider my positions. I feel that this experience, that feeling of growth as you learn something new about the world - that's outside energy being added to your spiritual ecosystem. That's an indicator that you are still on The Path.
Even when I read the blog of some raving evag mother who's gonna pull her boys out of the public school and start homeschoolen' if they don't stop talking about gay marraige. . . I'm don't think that her statements are every going to make me reconsider my Atheism (although I could, I think of that more as a 'perponderance of evidence' than a 'without a shadow of a doubt' thing) but her statements will give me insight into just how fervidly and deeply she feels these feelings. I can still be inspired by he defiance in the face of a society she honestly thinks is trying to bind their souls to Satan. (Hook them on tobacco, send them to die protecting an oil reserve, get them to buy into a system where they purchase cheaply made goods at inflated prices because of a powerful advertising campaign; that I can believe in, Mama Bear, just not the 'god hates fags' rhetoric.)
Comments:
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This is exactly what I have been thinking of for a while now. I also do some headless traveling from site to site in order to know more about different people and their different ideas. One thing that has been striking is, that everybody seem to find their "home" with the like minded people and exchange mutually agreed opinions, and doing it happily ever after.
I quess, this is just one more manifestation to prove that we are living in a highly specialized world. There hardly seem to be any room for well rounded individual. You just have to make sure that you know everything about one thing, and that will quarantee that the new economy will treat you well. It certainly would be interesting to see some of the genius renaissance men, that we admire so much, trying to make it in a today's world. Can you spell; welfare?
I quess, this is just one more manifestation to prove that we are living in a highly specialized world. There hardly seem to be any room for well rounded individual. You just have to make sure that you know everything about one thing, and that will quarantee that the new economy will treat you well. It certainly would be interesting to see some of the genius renaissance men, that we admire so much, trying to make it in a today's world. Can you spell; welfare?
# posted by 
: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 3:32:00 AM
: Wednesday, May 10, 2006 3:32:00 AM
Ooooohhh, you said shit, fuck and fags all in one post. I'd say that ranks higher on the vulgarity meter.
Good stuff. There's a danger in the growing personalisation of the internet, in that people who do not want to have their beliefs challenged can virtually entomb themselves in sycophancy ad infinatum - this goes for people of any creed.
Mind you, most cool things are dangerous, so I guess this is the deal we make with ourselves.
Mind you, most cool things are dangerous, so I guess this is the deal we make with ourselves.
Thanks for the feedback on one of my recent posts (about Hollywood and Christian movies--even though all I did was post an article from Yahoo.)
This may surprise you, but I've read several of your posts before, and was flattered to have received a comment by you. Most of the blogs I have bookmarked or blogmarked are hardly ever other Christians, though some are.
Keep on keeping it real. Your posts are very thoughtful and provoking.
This may surprise you, but I've read several of your posts before, and was flattered to have received a comment by you. Most of the blogs I have bookmarked or blogmarked are hardly ever other Christians, though some are.
Keep on keeping it real. Your posts are very thoughtful and provoking.
No one can believe the talking heads... or rather, I guess I should say that no one "ought" to believe the talking heads. I am more interested in hearing the words and opinions of people who aren't getting paid to express them. The unpurchased minds, if you will.
I think that saturation in information will cause a general increase in the awareness of the public in general, and people will make more informed decisions about things. I like to think that people get past the "posting shots of my ass at myspace.com" phase of the Internet experience, eventually.
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I think that saturation in information will cause a general increase in the awareness of the public in general, and people will make more informed decisions about things. I like to think that people get past the "posting shots of my ass at myspace.com" phase of the Internet experience, eventually.
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