introduction

The last thing anyone needs is another blog about anything, so the scavenger hunt is done now. This is the last thing and we can all go home.

This is basically for me.

This is a place for me to think out loud about what I'm reading - not everything I read, not always the best of what I read, but the things that inspire things to say - and a place to talk about religion, politics, morals, ethics, that whole trip. It's sort of two blogs in one, but those two areas overlap considerably because of what I read. My background is in religious studies, history, and philosophy, and I try to keep up a schedule of reading in those areas in order to keep from atrophying; on top of that I have various goals I set for myself in terms of areas I want to study, which at the moment includes a cluster of topics I'm calling Ocean Studies. Ocean Studies includes online coursework in marine biology and a lot of related outside reading, including nature writing, oceanography, climate change, cultural history, and biology (including evolutionary biology, molecular evolution, and the philosophy of biology). It will take several years.

The "talking about religion" part was inspired in part by the latest round of attacks on Planned Parenthood, and the sheer audacity and arrogance of pro-life groups. A particular strain of conservative Christianity has seized the podium and defined the terms of debate when it comes to religion in the United States. They have persuaded the general public that their version of Christianity is the most authentic, and that other approaches are somehow diluted, compromised, or apostate. Sometimes they don't even stop at Christianity, and state or imply that all religious people see certain issues the same way, and that only atheists oppose them. It's offensive but it's become the norm.

This is intolerable.

I'm not proselytizing, per se: it's not important to me for other people to follow the Christianity I follow. It's not important to me for you to experience the world as I experience it. But it is very important to me that people understand that the loudest voices in the conversation of the last century do not speak for everyone. It's very important to me that literalist, fundamentalist, Hell-and-Armageddon-obsessed Christianity, as championed by the Moral Majority and many in the pro-life movement, as adopted as a strawman by so many of the New Atheist writers, is not the only Christianity, not the oldest, not the biggest, whatever adjective you need here.