Ego, or something like it

As I mentioned before, I once decided to weed out my facebook friends list. I decided the other day that it was that time again.

It's almost hard to believe that at one point in 2007, I had 350 friends. What's funny about that is that they were almost entirely people I knew from college. I cut the list down to about 80-some, but it crept back up to 155 (today's count) mostly from adding random people I knew from my home town, but people I didn't really care to keep up with. As of a few hours ago, I now have 53 friends, including 3 family members.

I suppose I've grown more antisocial with age and having a child. Although some basic human social drive makes us want to be liked and feel important in the eyes of our peers, I can honestly say that I think I've "outgrown" this impulse almost entirely, with the exception of colleagues at work and some people I respect. Perhaps that's why I don't have even a tinge of desire to go to my class reunion. I won't go, in fact, even if I get invited -- which is somewhat nebulous, given that I have no idea who is "in charge" of sending out such invitations or how they get to be deemed the authority.

Maybe it's a consequence of being a sort of social pariah from my recent history of atheist activism. Maybe it's my unfailing sense of moral and intellectual superiority. It's got to be ego, or something like it, that drives us first to accumulate markers of social importance and then to discard them in the belief that they are like 99.99% of the other shit that constitutes daily life: absurd.

Anonymity

** UPDATE 8/24/19: Since I'm working at a public school (no longer at a religious school), I don't feel I have to maintain a pretense of anonymity. At the same time, I take professionalism as a teacher seriously and will refrain from posting personal information. **

** UPDATE 2015: I know that most people, if digging here at this site long enough, could probably identify me. My anonymity is tenuous, at best. I just ask that if anyone desires to identify me, they consider the consequences for me: there's a reason I went from a serious blogger about ten years ago to a very infrequent blogger now. It's called family and career. And those two things take huge precedence over this little soap box. In order to protect them, I write anonymously. Thank you for respecting that. **

Dowd writes something today that is a little near and dear to me. The issue is anonymous blogging. I think the takeaway lesson is this: if you're an anonymous blogger, you have the right to say whatever you like, but there may be consequences for it when you start bashing other individuals or topics that some people are enamored with (politics and religion). But it's far less likely to wreck your life if you have an anonymous blog where you make fun of, say, Christians in general than if you have an anonymous blog where you call an individual a "skank" and "ho" and "ho bag"...After all, no judge can find for a plantiff in a defamation suit and out you if you don't single out someone by name (or identify them individually in some other way).

I think it's true that most people are anonymous on the internet due to the desire to hide from the consequences of their writing. Noble usage of pseudonyms through history was often politically-motivated and the writers feared for their lives or livelihoods. Today people just want to have a soapbox but wear a costume as they stand up there and talk. I guess you could say I'm like that now. It didn't start out that way.

The status of my being a blogger has changed a few times, for a few different reasons (most of the following links are broken because I moved all my posts to this new site and made most of the personal stuff private):

1. I began writing a blog in Nov 2005. It was a public blog that used my real name. It didn't have many readers. One day, I wrote something on Sternberg and it got linked to, and from there, I had a lot of interest in keeping readers. Some of the original research I did has been incorporated into this article at Expelled Exposed.
2. A few people from my hometown, and relatives, learned of my site and I learned of that. I got nervous in Feb 2006 and made my website private. I stupidly deleted a lot of my posts. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I was no longer religious and, while I didn't mind them knowing, I didn't want them reading my stuff in which I "debunked" their religion. If you hunger for more details, here they are.
3. I changed my mind about three months later and began writing again on a public blog. Once, I realized I was in trouble with getting my Ph.D. finished because of the time I was spending online. We see where that worry took me...
4. I ended up doing an interview on Hannity & Colmes in Nov of 2006 over a controversial topic concerning politics and religion. I got really active in doing hands-on real-world stuff for a while there and did less personal blogging.
5. That trend was fairly unbroken until I got my M.S. and started the job search. Then, I decided to go private again, because I was afraid that people at my new job would find this site and I would have to deal with a bunch of BS from it.
6. I planned to write less due to work; I'm pretty much still in that same boat, and my writing over last summer increased only because of free time.
7. Now that we have a child, free time isn't really an issue anymore, since I don't have any.
8. Finally, on around 1/11/09, I decided to use Blogger's export/import feature and start a brand new site. I used a text editor to search and replace all instances of my name and identifying information I could think of and also change all URL references to my old site to this new one -- that's why there are so many broken links, btw. I made a lot of my personal posts private (leaving only rants about politics and religion, mostly). I published them here at NSEFL. And I really want to stay anonymous here.
9. ** UPDATE 8/24/19: Since I'm working at a public school (no longer at a religious school), I don't feel I have to maintain a pretense of anonymity. At the same time, I take professionalism as a teacher seriously and will refrain from posting personal information. **

I guess I think I have lots of really important things to say and I need a soapbox. But regardless of merit, I think everyone has the right to have an anonymous soapbox so long as they don't single out individuals or put up embarrassing or defamatory things about people. At that point, IMHO (and the in humble opinion of the judge in the case Dowd writes about) you lose your right to privacy:

“...the dangers of its misuse cannot be ignored. The protection of the right to communicate anonymously must be balanced against the need to assure that those persons who choose to abuse the opportunities presented by this medium can be made to answer for such transgressions.”

Cyberbullies, she wrote, cannot hide “behind an illusory shield of purported First Amendment rights.”

Indeed.

Cleaning things up some

After hearing about someone getting fired at Hammond School for what they had on their MySpace page, I decided to take privacy to the next level. I made my Blogger profiles private, am in the process of killing the links and references to them I had on my index pages, and have whittled down my list of "allowed readers" to 18. If you're reading this, I must think you're a genius.

Seriously, though, it's sad that someone can't have a private place to enjoy freedom of speech without worrying about losing their job, but there are consequences to actions, even when they're protected constitutionally. Right, Maurice's BBQ owner Maurice Bessinger? So I'm also googling my name and variants of it and my email addresses and trying to go through and do what I can to make finding material about me online as difficult as possible. One good thing: the revolutionary war hero by the same name makes it harder to search for me.

If in the future you find yourself unable to read the blog entirely, don't think it's personal. It's just me being a little overly cautious. Even people whom I trust cause me to worry because they may forget to log out of their computer somewhere and someone else, whom I don't trust, may see it or use it against me. I've whittled down my Facebook and MySpace friends list and changed the privacy settings there for the same reasons.

If you're bored enough to wonder how many times I've changed my mind about whether to make this blog private, public, or somewhere in between, read this or figure it out yourself from the various postings.

The many motives of blogging

It seems that blogs bring to mind one of two sorts of person: 1) thinks they have really important things to say and needs a soapbox, 2) wants to "overshare" all the inane trivia of their life with a world who, by and large, doesn't give a fuc*. I don't know exactly how I stumbled onto a blog post about oversharing, but this led me to learning about Lena Chen. This led me to finding out things about her I really didn't want to know (NSFW: or see), but out of it all came a sliver of good, as she wrote something I find strong rapport with:

Part of the reason why I write about my life is because I am scared of not remembering anything about it. I have a terrible memory, no doubt an ironic symptom of childhood bullying that taught me the art of forgetting terrible memories. (Truth: I routinely have problems with recalling things that happened before the age of 12). Unfortunately for me, I never quite unlearned how to forget. Now that I am full-grown and expected to remember things like faces and names, I find myself standing around dumb-founded as all my friends recall events at which everyone but me seems to have been present. I routinely fail to recognize guys with whom I’ve gone on single dates, or even people I went to high school with. It seems I am a spectator to other people’s memories but never the one doing the remembering herself.

And it’s not just memories either. It’s skills like how to use JSTOR (thank you, high school debate) or how to swim (thank you, community pool) that I must relearn because I’ve somehow magically forgotten despite everyone’s insistence that there are some things, like riding a bike, that you remember forever. Well, trust me, if there were ever a person who could forget, it’d be me. In Ibiza, for example, this was precisely my problem. Here I was with miles of unpolluted ocean before me, and I was terrified of wading too far out because I hadn’t swum in years. I was always scared to go into pools as a kid until I braved swimming lessons during early elementary school. Then I promptly forgot and had to learn again, this time during a summer around age 10. I don’t think I’ve really swum again since. Eventually in Ibiza, I gave it a go at a shallow beach but I conceded defeat after several gulpfuls of seawater. This was a performance from someone who used to relish jumping off diving boards several yards above her head.

Although my ability to remember how to do things physically (ride bikes, swim, ride 4wheelers, play ping-pong, pool, &c.) is not a problem, I strongly agree with her motive of wanting to document her life out of fear of forgetting. I found myself last week in my hometown talking to a friend I literally went from K-12 with, and she reminded me of universal remote controls at Richlands Middle School, as well as other funny tales, that I had completely forgotten about.

Now I'll have to write a post just to explicate the details on that.

Blog-as-journal/memoir works for me. I must confess that I have this creepy urge to see how many people would read my blog after I died, and how long people would still find it on the web. In 2000 years, will the internet as it exists today still be archived somewhere? In a million years, will aliens from some far-off system store the entirety of the internet on little cubes and put them on a shelf somewhere?

The status of this blog being private has changed a few times, for a few different reasons:

1. I began writing a blog in Nov 2005. It didn't have many readers. One day, I wrote something on Sternberg and it got linked to, and from there, I had a lot of interest in keeping readers. Some of the original research I did has been incorporated into this article at Expelled Exposed.
   
2. A few people from my hometown, and relatives, learned of my site and I learned of that. I got nervous and made it private. I stupidly deleted a lot of my posts. A lot of this had to do with the fact that I was no longer religious. If you hunger for more details, here they are.
3. I obviously changed my mind and began writing again on a public blog. Once, I realized I was in trouble with getting my Ph.D. finished because of the time I was spending online. We see where that worry took me...
   
4. That trend was fairly unbroken until I graduated from UF and started the job search. Then, I decided to go private again, because I was afraid that parents at my new job would find this site and I would have to deal with a bunch of BS from it.
5. I planned to write less through the work year; I'm pretty much still in that same boat, and my writing over this summer has increased only because of free time. Once my son is born, that won't be an issue.
   

Also, I think I have lots of really important things to say and I need a soapbox.

Blog Readability Level: Genius

Trust me, I know that things like this mean nothing to you nor my ego:

TV Reviews

Of course, all it's doing is looking for a few key vocabulary words they've arbitrarily decided indicate reading level. But still, I got a screencap:


Just remember that if your blog is private, you'll have to go in and make it public for a few minutes before allowing the website to scan it.

Catalog of newly-published drafts

Yesterday, I decided to go through the long list of drafted posts and actually do one of two things: discard them or finish and publish them. Twenty-two posts were published yesterday, yet only one of them was made from scratch that day (the last one listed below): all the rest were drafts I finally put on the blog. Some of them are quite old, some fairly new; some required extensive editing, some required little.

Here is the catalog of posts I put up yesterday with the dates they're set to:

1. What a shield we have in Jesus, 6/21/2006
   
2. Requisite revelation, 6/30/2006
3. On Hume, Skepticism and Intelligent Design Creationism, 7/05/2006
4. Spock is my hero too, 7/19/2006
5. The heat is on, 8/1/2006
6. Secular scorecards, 9/18/2006
7. On presuppositional apologetics generally, 10/7/2006
8. principe nuovo, 11/12/2006
9. The PoE and "God's glory", 12/6/2006
10. Discrimination against FSM geology, 1/5/2007
11. Statistical note of interest, 3/2/2007
12. God is a dick, 4/15/2007
13. God is a dick (cont'd), 4/18/2007
14. Atheism as a religion with respect to the 1st Amendment, 5/21/2007
    
15. House for sale, 6/30/2007
16. Blogger hack, 7/13/2008
    
17. Snake handling, 7/17/2008
18. One of my predictions came true! 7/17/2008
19. William Lane Craig on Dawkins' "ultimate 747" argument, 7/17/2008
20. Welfare and race, 7/17/2008
    
21. Skeptical thoughts re the Bible, 7/17/2008
22. Summer reading, 7/17/2008
    

Definitely my most prolific day ever in terms of raw number of posts published...it appears that May 2007 was my most prolific month ever, with 54 posts. This post will make 849 total published posts I've written since November 2005. So much has changed in that time, but remarkably little of gravity.

Blogger hack

If you haven't already activated draft.blogger.com, you should.I don't think that Blogger, or Google in general, makes errors very often. However, their "help article" on how to make an automatic link to the profile of a post's author in the post footer simply doesn't work. The XML of the link written by the script is parsed wrong. So, with the help of a forum tip, I made a custom little snippet of code to automatically display the profile of someone who posts to the Godless Columbia blog:

<xml><b:if cond='data:post.author == "XXX" '>
<data:top.authorlabel>
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/profile/YYYY" title="author profile">
<span class="fn">
<data:post.author></data:post.author>
</span></a><b:else>
INSERT REPEAT HERE IF NECESSARY
</b:else>
</b:if>
</xml>

Personal reflections

The decision to finish with an M.S. in Chemistry rather than staying to complete my Ph.D. is something I've been mulling over in recent days. For one thing, I attended Hammond's 2008 commencement, and I was looking at everyone else's robes and hoods and thinking about the pride of wearing doctoral regalia. Shallow, eh?

With a baby on the way, (now at 23 weeks, 8 inches and ~1 lb., we've decided to name him my son) it sometimes seems that my career options are limited by the responsibility of raising a family and keeping a steady income stream. I look back and wonder if I'll ever live to regret the decision not to finish, given that it seems now my professor was right: if you leave with the statement, "maybe I'll come back to finish it later," you probably won't ever do so. And I think that subconsciously I knew that, even then.

Timeline of my thoughts: I look at my blog entry preceding the defense of my research proposal, then the one directly proceeding it, where there is a hint of wanting to quit:

It's a relief, I guess. I'm also just tired, and I've been thinking of taking the M.S. and getting a job...*sigh*

However, about five days later, in one of my blog posts, I refer to finishing the Ph.D.:

I certainly agree that my wife takes priority over everything else, that staying healthy is tied with my Ph.D. in close second, that running the AAFSA group is a distant third, but should still take huge precedence over blogging...

However, then on April 22 I admitted I was looking for jobs and was making the blogsite private again as a result. So it really seems that I made my final decision to quit the Ph.D. program some time between April 11 and April 22. About the only big thing I know that happened between those times was the shooting at VT, but I really don't think that influenced me (unless it was subconscious). I didn't go for my Hammond interview until the end of June, and I was notified I got the job only a few days later.

It's so funny, because as a kid and teen and even in college, I was so concerned with the question, "what will I do with my life?" My view then was that carefully choosing my career path and following crucial steps in the process would produce unbounded happiness and success. What seems to have happened, instead, is that a somewhat-arbitrary set of circumstances simply showed me, along the way, that I would be happier changing course from my originally-perceived "perfect" career path(s). And it appears to be the case that teaching chemistry to highschoolers at a private school in Columbia was never "in my sights" as a goal, yet happened nonetheless.

I know that for some people, this would be a nightmare: I have a childhood friend that I think of as almost preternatural in his ability to plan and determine his own course in life. He was valedictorian, an athlete, he wanted to go to med school since I can remember him, and all he's accomplished has proven, at the least, that some people have a powerful drive and deliver on their own goals. I was just never that way. Maybe I never will be.

I wonder, as with kids who are not planned, if some of life's surprises are the best things to happen to us. The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and perhaps our preconceived notions of our own happiness and success are often flawed, much to our chagrin. Lou Holtz reportedly said that,

"Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it."

If that is indeed the case, then I wonder if I will one day look back upon my responses to life's happenings (i.e., my decisions) with regret or with pride. At the least, I have more options available to me if anything about my present choices should prove to be beyond accommodation and incapable of living with.

Here are my pipe dreams career-wise:

1. Go to law school, perhaps while working as a teacher by going to USC, and become an IP attorney. With my technical background, I qualify for the USPTO exam.
2. Get my left scaphoid non-union fixed and my 90° wrist bend back so I could enlist and attend OCS to become a pilot for the Navy or Air Force. (The age window is closing fast, however)
3. Sign up with the Effa Bee Eye or the CIA. The new FBI drug requirements will help (modified 12/06), as I experimented a little during my senior year of high school. The CIA's requirements seem extremely lax, but, as with most things in the CIA, they're probably just unpublished publicly and highly flexible. However, I haven't used any illegal substances since I was 17 (roughly since November of 1999), so I should be good with either one.

At least in theory, all of these are open to me and I could work them out financially if I really wanted to go for them. For the time being, I'm happy teaching at Hammond. Perhaps Lou Holtz was right, and this is just my response to what life handed me, but I don't feel like I'm "settling for less".

Reason for blogging

It's good for your health!

Or wait...is it? (yes, the article in the NYT is all about people who write for a living and get very little sleep and inadequate rest/exercise, plus it provides anecdotal evidence, no studies)

My blog writing reasons are...complex and change from time to time.

Thoughts on writing

Wow. 800 posts. Two and a half years of blogging (since 11/05). That's a lot of writing.

Lots of quantity, but as for quality, I must suck. I've submitted entries to three contests, but won none (from oldest to newest):

1. FFRF 7/1/06 -- here was the entry
2. AA 1/23/07 -- here was the entry
3. Seed Magazine 6/25/07 -- here was the entry

Perhaps of more importance to me than the contests themselves is the act of writing, even if I'm not sure why I do it. I have tried and failed to stop blogging here, although I was successful at extricating myself from a site where I previously blogged. I've been blogging less since taking my new job, but I still write a lot on the weekends and in the mornings (sometimes saving drafts to be finished later). I've felt one way or another about blog privacy, but for now, it's staying private. I can't afford to lose my job, not with a kid on the way.

In the meanwhile, it seems clear that from my contest failures I'm not a spectacular writer. But it's something I enjoy. And it's something I see myself doing for the rest of my life. I love documenting my thoughts and seeing how I've evolved as a person over the last few years. It's almost like something you can pass down to your kids -- to show them how you grew and changed over the years.

To everyone who does actually read my ramblings from time to time, thanks for letting me share my thoughts and my life with you.

A new way of stating the PoE

I was browsing an old e-buddy's blog a few moments ago (one who promised he was going to stop blogging, but like so many of us, failed to do so) and found an interesting way to approach the problem of evil:

1) Events have happened in the world that are such that any person able to prevent them would be morally obligated to do so.
2) Premise (1) is logically incompatible with God defined as an all-powerful, morally perfect being.
3) Therefore, God does not exist.

Premise (2) I take it, is simply a fact of logic: to be all-powerful is to be able to prevent the sort of events described in (1), and to be morally perfect is to fulfill all of one's moral obligations, so if there were a God so defined, there would be no such events as described in (1).

As for (1), it appears to be almost universally agreed upon. A few decades ago it was reported that a woman named Kitty Genovese had been murdered and no one had done anything to stop it even though dozens of people had heard her screams. The story provoked some deep-soul searching and discussions about human psychology, all of which took for granted that the right thing to do had been to stop the murder. The international community has been harshly criticized for failing to do more to stop the Rwanda genocide. The current administration had been harshly criticized for failing to do more to rescue people from Hurricane Katrina.

Chris has emphasized here the concept of moral duties or moral obligations; I think this approach to the PoE is very important, and highlights a basic starting presupposition that some Christians may subconsciously hold: that God has no obligations or duties towards its creation(s). Kant's formulation of the categorical imperative was focused here, on what we are obligated to bring about by the nature of moral normativity. He argued that we must always act in such a way that our behavior is compatible with a sort of absolutism; or, that we can only justify our moral behaviors if they are universally true and correct.

This is where the disconnect occurs for believers in God.

While they will heartily agree that they are morally obligated to care for and protect their children from harm, they hold no such absolutism about this moral issue towards God. God can do whatever it feels like doing -- arbitrarily deciding to protect this or that prophet while at the same time neglecting a massive proportion of the earth's population. When they claim that God has to give us free will, they commit petitio principii: they are claiming that God's first obligation is to allow its creation to be free, rather than acting on behalf of the creation's best interests.

This logic certainly would not apply to the parent-child relationship, and most believers would agree to this. They would almost certainly agree that any parent who allowed his toddler to run through the house with scissors was not a moral, good parent, despite the justification offered by said parent that, "I just wanted to maximize little Johnny's freedom!"

We've trodden this ground before, of course. But it is helpful to frame the argument in terms of moral duties, because the immediate presupposition of God's lack of moral obligations, on the part of many theists, renders this God's "goodness" fatally flawed and illogical.

On promiscuous Facebook "friending"

After my own great Facebook purge on July 16, in which I cut my list into ~1/4 its original size, I found this article in Slate to elicit a smile.

I know it may be judgmental and shallow of me, but I can't help but agree with the author's analysis that the most promiscuous "frienders" are overcompensating for insecurity, much like the most sexually promiscuous men usually are:

...if we're dealing with a promiscuous friender. (You know, the kind of person who thinks, "I need to break 700 friends so I can rid myself of my crippling sense of shame." Trust me, it won't work.)

I almost feel embarrassed that I felt the need to allow 345 people into my list at one time, 95% of whom I hadn't had a meaningful conversation with in years, if ever. I guess it goes to show that even the cockiest and most self-assured of us are vulnerable to social pressures, despite how we perceive ourselves as perched loftily above such inanities.

Just say no, people.

Blogger Template Hacks

I am definitely not a computer scientist, or even nearly so.

However, I spent quite a few hours learning some of the language involved in Blogger 3.0 (layouts), and I did some Google work and bastardized others' scripts to produce a website I'm proud of (given my almost-nonexistent programming background):
http://www.gatorfreethought.org/

The reason I'm posting about it is because I wanted to share the post template in order to make life easier for others. I put in a few HTML comments to make it easier to analyze.

If you find it useful, please let me know. If you have questions, though, you might want to ask someone else, since I'm a novice :-) Please comment.

Here is the template as a .txt file, and here it is as an XML file (probably want to R-click and "Save As").

Why do you blog?

So a meme is circulating on the Scienceblogs -- "Why do you blog?"

Ed quotes Mencken and claims it's all ego.

Martin says about the same, quote, "There are two main reasons for me to blog. A, I love to write. And B, having readers makes me feel like a ten-foot diamond on a Christmas tree."

Courtnix replies with his typical 38 links per post, and thus demonstrates what he admits -- he's an addict.

Tara cites the ability to share things of interest with others who want to hear them.

My favorite response is from Corpus Callosum:

Then I started a more serious blog. The name "corpus callosum" was intended to reflect an interest in the brain, but also an interest in making connections (of various sorts), and --originally -- I thought I would sort of try to bridge the gap between left and right on the political spectrum.

That latter purpose got lost somewhere. There is no point in trying to use a blog to promote a moderate political stance. Not only that, but at present I do not believe that it is proper to promote a moderate political stance. A little bit of radicalism is needed right now. Maybe later I can get back to being a moderate, bridge-building kind of a guy. Once we have a government that is not primary run by sociopaths.

I think this is a really good point, not only on its surface -- in politics, but applied in general. People don't tend to read blogs that promote moderate stances, just as they don't tend to watch talk shows that do. That's why O'Reilly and H&C are continually dominant -- they don't even pretend to be moderate.

And perhaps that's why PZ is always uber-dominant at the SB: he's probably the most radical writer there, both politically and religiously. People want entertainment in the blogosphere just as much as they do on TV and in real life. PZ gets your pulse pounding a hell of a lot more than the average blog (like this one). He often has interactions with ideologues on the opposite side of the fence, and the slurs and rhetoric heat up.

I spelled out what has already been predicted and observed: the demise of the small blog genre. The powercurve problem continues unabated, and I think it is irresistable. My own efforts will never catch major attention, and as I said, that surely isn't why I write. Will I eventually get discouraged from lack of feedback or readership? I doubt it.

My blogsite gets around 100 hits a day, on average, (a little higher this week) and varies according to how much I post. That doesn't tell me how many people read my different RSS feeds, especially since I started the Facebook import. I know some people do, because the "came from" function tells me so, and I get sporadic comments on Facebook. Nonetheless, although I value feedback, it doesn't keep me writing. Do I write to be read?

I tried to stop writing here once, but it didn't work out -- I feel the urge to write like a sort of building pressure to move my bowels: fear of terrible consequences from holding out. Perhaps my writing doesn't matter much to you, gentle reader, and perhaps I don't care. I'm not sure how to peg that quite yet. Do I only write to inform? Persuade? Do I think that I actually accomplish either? Am I just rambling or ranting for my own sake?

You'd never guess how fruitless I admit blogging is, given the amount of time I spend on it, with respect to "inform and persuade" motives. But I do think it's fruitless to be motivated solely by those two things; I think we all know that we listen to people who think like we do and who we consider intelligent: deserving of our time. And we humans have this awful prejudice to paint people as unintelligent whom we disagree with drastically. People with views diametrically opposed to our own may get our ear once in a while, but only if they write great stuff, and still, not nearly so often to learn as to argue/refute what they have to say.

However, I do write for myself, certainly more than for anyone else, given the paucity of feedback I receive on this particular forum, and I think it's undeniable. I get a few comments once in a while, and sometimes I even do something that the "power bloggers" think is worth linking to (check my crème de la crème in the sidebar for examples). But those rare instances account for the majority of my traffic over a given three month period, and 90% of my comments or more. It'simportant to realize how much of your writing is for an "audience" and how much is for you -- for expression, catharsis, improving your writing skills...whatever. And it's important to be realistic about it.

I certainly agree that my wife takes priority over everything else, that staying healthy is tied with my Ph.D. in close second, that running the AAFSA group is a distant third, but should still take huge precedence over blogging...but I spend more time than I mean to with the latter--despite even knowing that the former categories are suffering.

It's in my best interests to get out in the real world and do something. When I started devoting more time to AAFSA, I got letters to the editor published in our campus paper and eventually a media spot on FoxNews: more attention than I would get blogging for 3 years, 3 posts a day of great material. And I've even gotten a little honor for my activist efforts. So if I was driven by an audience, I have picked the poorest medium as my highest priority. If you notice, people who run large groups and companies don't tend to waste a lot of time blogging, except where it advances the group or the company -- not fluffy opinion pieces and diary-esque daily introspection. And they get money--so it's not "success" per se, either.

And so all I can conclude is that although the value of this blog is highly subjective, it is highly valued nonetheless. No matter the toll it takes on my free time, it overcompensates in emotional or psychological reward. I don't believe in free will, and so I know that I always do what gives me the greatest happiness. Maybe I need some kind of echo chamber for my own thoughts, or, like Francis Bacon, perhaps I think reading makes broad men and writing makes them precise (i.e. forces them to be a little focused and logical), and so this blog helps me be and stay rational and think clearly. Or maybe I'm full of shit and I really just want an adoring flock of sycophants...

I'm not sure, but I am sure that writing is good for me, and that, despite my best efforts to curtail it, I can't. Not now. Maybe not ever.
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Technorati tags: blogging

Statistical Note of Interest

This post is solely an observation of facts, using the benchmark of a well-known theistic group blog that I think serves well as a comparison to this group blog. Don't go over-analyzing my motives or what this is supposed to mean, please.

That said...Debunking Christianity is set to overtake Triablogue in site traffic, according to data from sitemeter for both sites:

Triablogue Sitemeter traffic prediction


Debunking Christianity Sitemeter traffic prediction:

In comparing stats, you want to use the largest data set possible to minimize your error and maximize your confidence interval approach: thus, use the data from the entire previous month. Based on that data, the Triablogue gets 1 more visit per hour, 35 more per day, 243 more per week and 1,053 more per month than DC. Of note is that DC has been around since January 2006, while the Triablogue has archives going back to April of '04.

Also note that the stats will change over even the course of the day, so don't fuss at me for poor subtraction if you aren't using the stats from the pics above.

Possibly of more interest is that the readership of the tblog has been pretty stagnant over the past year, and the upward trend of DC's readership may indicate that within 2 months, we will have higher stats across the board:

DC (year)
tblog (year)
As I said, these are anecdotally amusing to me, not indicative of any deeper meaning. Thanks to all the readers of DC for your support and comments: theists and nonbelievers.

George Orwell on Writing

Why I won't be a great writer anytime soon:

George Orwell’s Rules for Clear and Simple Writing

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I wish I had the time and energy to make my writing (and life in general) into a purple cow ...

So far, though, I'm just busy breaking Orwell's rules. HT: Alister Cameron
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Technorati tags: Miscellany

Footer Buttons Code

I just spent a few minutes fooling around with notepad and came up with a nice template to help people install footer buttons for bookmarking and saving posts. You may notice the new buttons below each post as of today. If you aren't interested in modifying your template, ignore this post. See here for more on modifying Blogger templates.

Step 1: Copy the entire code (indented) below into Notepad
Step 2: Use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace all "[" with "<" Step 3: Use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace all "]" with ">"
Step 4: Use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace YOURIMGSRCHERE with the root URL of the folder you will store all of the icon image files to.
Step 5: If you are in Blogspot, skip to step 8.
Step 6: If you use any other blogging platform besides Blogger, use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace all "$BlogItemPermalinkURL$" with whatever tag your software (such as WordPress) uses to indicate a post permalink.
Step 7: If you use any other blogging platform besides Blogger, use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace all "$BlogItemTitle$" with whatever tag your software (such as WordPress) uses to indicate a post title.
Step 8: (Optional) Use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace "|" with a non-breaking space before and after the "|" -- use "& n b s p ; | & n b s p ;" without the spaces [if I try to type it out it immediately becomes a non-breaking space...]
Step 9: Use the Find and Replace (CTRL-H) function to replace "YOURSITEURLHERE" with your site's URL.
Step 10: Download all of the image files for the icons, and upload them to root URL of the folder you will store all of the icon image files to.
Don't change the filenames! If you do, you'll have to change each image file name in the code to match. Don't steal my bandwidth! If you do, the server manager will notice all the extra drag and cut off your image leeching.

I hope you found this a useful tool. If you have improvements, suggestions, or questions, comment on this post, or email me.

[a href="http://www.blinkbits.com/bookmarklets/save.php?v=1&source_url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="blinkbits"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/blinkbits.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to blinkbits" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.blinklist.com/index.php?Action=Blink/addblink.php&Description=&amp;amp;url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="BlinkList"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/blinklist.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to BlinkList" /][/a] |
[a href="http://blogmarks.net/my/new.php?mini=1&simple=1&url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="blogmarks"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/blogmarks.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to blogmarks" /][/a] |
[a href="http://co.mments.com/track?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="co.mments"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/co.mments.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to co.mments" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.connotea.org/addpopup?continue=confirm&uri=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="connotea"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/connotea.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to connotea" /][/a] |
[a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/add_delicious.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to del.icio.us" /][/a] |
[a href="http://de.lirio.us/rubric/post?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="De.lirio.us"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/delirious.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to De.lirio.us" /][/a] |
[a href="http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&amp;url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="post this entry to Digg"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/digg.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Digg icon" /][/a] |
[a href="http://cgi.fark.com/cgi/fark/edit.pl?new_url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]&linktype=Misc" title="Fark"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/fark.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Fark" /][/a] |
[a href="http://feedmelinks.com/categorize?from=toolbar&op=submit&url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="feedmelinks"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/feedmelinks.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to feedmelinks" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.furl.net/storeIt.jsp?u=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/furl.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Furl" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.hugg.com/submit?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Add to Hugg: [$BlogItemTitle$]..."][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/hugg.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Hugg" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.linkagogo.com/go/AddNoPopup?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="LinkaGoGo"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/linkagogo.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to LinkaGoGo" /][/a] |
[a href="http://ma.gnolia.com/beta/bookmarklet/add?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="add this entry to Ma.gnolia"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/magnolia.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Ma.gnolia icon" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.netscape.com/submit/?U=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Submit to Netscape: [$BlogItemTitle$]..."][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/netscape.gif.jpg" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Netscape" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.newsvine.com/_tools/seed&save?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Seed Newsvine: [$BlogItemTitle$]..."][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/newsvine.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Seed Newsvine" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.netvouz.com/action/submitBookmark?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]&description=" title="Netvouz"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/netvouz.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Netvouz" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.rawsugar.com/tagger/?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="RawSugar"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/rawsugar.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to RawSugar" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Add to Reddit: [$BlogItemTitle$]..."][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/reddit.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Reddit" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.searchles.com/links/add_link/?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="post this entry to Searchles"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/searchles.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Searchles icon" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.scuttle.org/bookmarks.php/maxpower?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="scuttle"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/scuttle.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to scuttle" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.shadows.com/features/tcr.htm?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Shadows"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/shadows.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Shadows" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.simpy.com/simpy/LinkAdd.do?href=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Simpy"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/simpy.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Simpy" /][/a] |
[a href="http://smarking.com/editbookmark/?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Smarking"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/smarking.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Smarking" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.spurl.net/spurl.php?title=[$BlogItemTitle$]&url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]" title="post this entry to Spurl"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/spurl.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to spurl icon" /][/a] |
[a href="http://tailrank.com/share/?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="TailRank"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/tailrank.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to TailRank" /][/a] |
[a href="http://wists.com/r.php?url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&title=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Wists"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/wists.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Wists" /][/a] |
[a href="http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/myresults/bookmarklet?u=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]&t=[$BlogItemTitle$]" title="Add to Yahoo: [$BlogItemTitle$]..."][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/yahoo.png" width="14px" height="14px" alt="Add to Yahoo!" /][/a] |
[a href="http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://YOURSITEURLHERE/" title="Add to Technorati Favorites"][img src="http://static.technorati.com/pix/fave/btn-fave2.png" width="80px" height="14px" alt="Add blogsite to Technorati Favorites" /][/a] |
[a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=[$BlogItemPermalinkURL$]" title="View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this entry"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/technorati.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this entry" /]entry[/a] |
[a href="http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http://YOURSITEURLHERE" title="View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this blogsite"][img src="http://YOURIMGSRCHERE/technorati.gif" width="14px" height="14px" alt="View the Technorati Link Cosmos for this blogsite" /]blogsite[/a]

Hope you find this useful. Visit my sidebar, at the bottom, where it says, "Austausch" in order to pay me back, if you feel the urge to do so.
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Technorati tags: code, hack

Blogger Issues Solved

Some of you [hopefully] noticed that the site was down for a few days, and a redirect page had appeared in its place. If you are interested in the fairly boring and convoluted story, you can read how and why this happened below:

In reading about a few problems people had experienced in their update/upgrade from "old" to "new" Blogger, I decided it would be prudent of me to back up all of my posts and archives at a reliable location before attempting the upgrade myself. The easiest way to do this is to switch to FTP publishing, and thus I did.

Once I had backed up everything at my FTP site, I went back into the publishing settings to change "publish to FTP" back to "publish at blogspot.com", and reclaim my URL: nonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com. It told me that the URL was unavailable.

First, I freaked, of course, then [after re-trying several times] I actually checked the status of the URL. A blank blog appeared where mine used to, and the profile was owned by some "RV" [now "NR" -- but still a spambot, I'm sure]. Then, an obviously robot-generated redirect to a search page appeared. I kept flagging it as spam and reporting it as a TOS violation, and sometimes the redirect page was unavailable, presumably fixed by some automated process, and it reverted back to a blank blog. However, the blog spam kept reappearing every few hours, and it appeared the spammers had an upper hand on Blogspot to have bypassed their system so easily.

Then, my friend Matt advised me to take this issue to the Blogger Help group usenets, as he remembered the same thing happening recently there, and the Blogger techs fixing it. I did as he suggested, and they fixed it within 12 hours.

So what's the moral of the story? Well, I suppose I would suggest setting up a new (unused) blog in your dashboard that you can use as a "placeholder" for your URL anytime you want to switch to FTP publishing, or have to leave your URL for any reason. As soon as you leave the URL open, just use the other blog to claim it. Then you can switch back after you're done.

I won't be making this mistake again. If my blog again disappears, then you can find an update on the situation by checking my "old" Blogger profile, which should have an updated link to the location of my blog. If you can't, try my new Blogger profile, my webpage, here or here, and be sure I'll be using one of the new URLs I've saved [just to prevent such a FUBAR-level occurrence as this]:
http://getbusybloggin.blogspot.com/
http://stevennonserviamergofiatlux.blogspot.com/
http://danielmorgan2.blogspot.com/

Thanks for your patience, noble reader. Always know you can email me.
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Technorati tags: Blog stuff

Blog Issues - Redirect

I'm in the middle of a mess -- my old URL is gone. I've relocated everything HERE for the moment. Please bear with me.

Belated Worship

The parents were in town last week. And the sister and her boyfriend.

It was a nice week. Probably a little above average on the angst-o-meter when the subjects of politics and religion came up, but otherwise, nice.

We went to church together on Sunday. We visited an Assembly of God church. Really nice website. Interestingly, the AG has always been on my short list of denominations that I wonder, "do these people know how this denomination formed, and when?" The Southern Baptists are another. While the SB formed as a result of Northern Baptist churches rejecting slave-owners as potential parishoners and missionaries, the AG formed (as they outline here) as a result of the Bethel Bible College (Charles F. Parham) "speaking in tongues" renewal, and subsequent Azusa Street Mission revivals. The year of BBC was 1901. There is another AG internal article here, by J. Roswell Flower, the first secretary-treasurer of the AG (1914), entitled, "The Genesis of the Pentecostal Movement." It seems historical so far as I can tell.

The denomination (AG) is well-known for its emphasis on the "evidence" of God's "baptism of the Holy Spirit". To them, God's presence in a believer's life can be "improved" by participating in this experience, which ought to involve "speaking in tongues". Doctrinally, whether they like it or not, this divides Christians into two classes: those "baptized in the Holy Spirit", and those not. This obviously begs quite a few theological questions, which I may delve into later, but not for now.

What moved upon me during the service was not contempt for these people's experessions, emotional outpouring, and exuberance. I have participated in those things first hand. I tried, not all that long ago, to stir up some feeling of God's reality in my life with such worship. Rather than contempt, I felt a kind of sadness. Not for them, per se, but for all of us.

What I was thinking about relates to the subject of yesterday's Shawshank Sunday (just published today): hope.

There is nothing wrong at all with hope. The real problem, and what stirred up such deep sadness in me, was that so much hope is misplaced. So much of our hope is put where other people tell us it must be placed. There are only so many things we know for certain in this world, but so many uncertainties. So many things we cannot control. I am of the persuasion that placing my hope in things that I will never know until I die is like putting your money in a trust for your grandkids: it is great if you have that much to work with.

Most of us just don't have that much hope to spread around. And so why shouldn't we choose to place it in places we can see it come to fruition? Why not hope for the graduate degree that you are going to have to work your tears out for? Why not hope for the job that it might land you? If you can't place hope in your own achievements, if you can't put your expectations on positive footing in your own life, how can you put hope in your failures?

The philosophy that starts out with the basic premises:
i) man is utterly depraved, anything good about man is external (divine)
ii) man can accomplish nothing of note or of worth, everything he accomplishes is imperfect
iii) perfection is demanded by god, thus man depends wholly upon god's grace for anything, everything, and can achieve nothing without god

Leaves one with only one logical place to put their hope: in death.

To me, that is worshipping death. That is placing death itself as the horizon to which we ought to strive. Jesus minced no words when he said that to follow him meant to bear one's cross. Dying to self is the paradigm of the Christian. Buddha, Confucious, and countless others have taught the same. These take for their basic premise that death is certain, and that our life ought to mimic our death in order to truly live.

To me, my basic premise is that life is certain, though its extent is not. I read Atlas Shrugged recently, and it got me looking into Neo-Objectivism [edited note: not a Randroid, just interested in how their basic philosophy works and how they claim it justifies government-free economics and egoism]. As such, I believe that subjective metaphysics are philosophically necessary, and pragmatically healthy to a degree, but I do not believe that one's quality of life is instrinsically linked to one's take on metaphysics. What I am thinking of by "subjective metaphysics" include things like one's appreciation of art, beauty, music, literature, and even the appraisal of "value" and "purpose" in life to some degree. These are often the purview of religion, but shouldn't be because aesthetics has a rigorous philosophical background. Further, I believe that those who place subjective experience and mysticism above objective reality are doomed to misery in this life. In Rand's words,

[T]he only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.

Ayn Rand's ideas on morality, like the one outlined above in her fiction, are ridiculous. I agree that it is morally wrong to delude people, however, it isn't the "only moral crime"...

Her view on egoism as motivation in morality, though shared in part or in full by so many other philosophers, are perhaps some of the closest in their articulation to my own. I do not accept all the tenets of Objectivist philosophy fundamentally. I despise all forms of close-minded fundamentalism. To close one's mind and become dogmatic is, in essence, to say, "I already know everything, and no knowledge can shake my certitude...my hubris is equivocated as faith."

I reject assertions that life's quality is linked to someone else's subjective experience, and not to my own. If I cannot reason through a set of premises and assertions, then ought I to accept them as true? Why? I reject philosophical premises which are definitively subjective as having any authority over my life. Life's quality, instead, must depend upon objective reality, as mediated by reason. Reality depends largely on your perception and largely on your effort, but most of all upon your reason. What you know to be virtual, versus what you know to be "real", is 100% dependent upon your reason, unless we are all just brains in a vat.

Fear comes when reason is pushed out. Living your life in fear is the same as living your life in death. Living in fear and living as if "dead" to one's self, to one's rational self-interest, is, I am persuaded, worshiping the unknown as the known and death as life. Placing your hope in death, and consequently living one's life in fear, thus becomes belated worship.
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Technorati tags: God, Religion, Fear