Frivology

I started this blog first on Wordpress.com, then on Blogger, thinking that I could leave the ‘development’ half of a blog alone (considering that’s what I do all day - it’s like an ER doctor going home and doing surgeries in their spare time). I found myself constantly mucking with what was there, trying to do more than anything would allow me and I finally gave up and gave in. I snatched up a domain name and some hosting and found a theme I liked.

This blog, in short, is a place for me to talk about pretty much anything - though I’ll likely stick to politics (the progressive sort) and religion (the ‘lack of’ sort). I like to mull things over in my head a lot, so this is a place where I can get all of those words out on “paper” or the like. I do keep a couple of other ‘lighter’ blogs… so this is for the heavy stuff. Stuff I wouldn’t want to bore other people with. In fact, stuff that many others have probably already written to death, I’m just chiming in my own two cents.

So, about me… I’m a thirty-something web developer who lives in Southern California. I grew up in NW Washington and didn’t have any money to go to college after High School, so I spent a lot of time working very hard to learn a lot of tech that people said I needed some sort of degree in order to understand. Now that I’m making enough money, I’m going back and slowly but surely working on the degree, so one might say I’m doing it a little backwards. All I can say is that it works for me and I’m a pretty happy person.

Let’s see… I’m an atheist, as that big, red ‘A’ on the sidebar should indicate. I’m a fairly young atheist, though, even though I’ve really been an atheist all my life. What that essentially means is that it took me a lot of dabbling in all sorts of religions before I finally decided that none of them worked for me and that I just didn’t - couldn’t - believe. I’ve been two shades of Christian, Wiccan, “Pagan”, dabbled in Taoism and Buddhism, called myself a Pantheist, then a Naturalist, then an agnostic, and now … atheist. With all that’s happening in the world today, I really think we need less religion, not more. I don’t know if you’d call me a ‘militant’ atheist or not. I think I sit somewhere firmly in-between being too firm and not firm enough. It’s probably most accurate to say that I’m agnostic about whether or not militant atheism is needed or if it works.

As a baby atheist, I’ll admit right now that a lot of things I talk about have probably already been talked about to death. I already feel very small compared to many fo the atheist bloggers out there who’s content I like to read. If anything, maybe my writing can serve as a sort of natural sleeping pill. I’ll freely admit that one of my problems as a writer tends to be rambling, and I’m constantly fighting to prevent myself from doing as such.

I’m also a progressive. I’d say ‘liberal’, but I hate the connotations that have been attached to liberal and I really think progressive is much more appropriate. However, even though I am a progressive and a democrat, I think there are some big problems within my party. The 2008 election is a big example of that. There wasn’t a single candidate running - Obama included - that I really felt was my candidate. I think democrats have gone too soft and need to embrace their secular, progressive roots because that’s just the right thing to do. We can argue shades of grey on certain things and talk about some diversive mutual understanding, but there are certain things that conservatives believe in that are just plain wrong and that should be stamped out with a vengeance. In doing that, my party has completely failed in recent years. Still, I remain hopeful that it can be fixed.

In my spare time, I like reading fluff fantasy novels, amateur photography, traveling (almost all of my travel is based on where I can get the best photography work in), writing and video games. I may dabble in talking about those things from time to time but, really, this blog is for the deeper stuff I want to talk about. The lighter stuff, I have other places to post.

That’s really all there is that I’m going to pop in an ‘about’. I just hope I don’t bore you to death too quickly.