A Return to Writing

It has been over two years since my last post. During this time I have moved from California (Sacramento) to China (Shenzhen) and from China to the UK (London).  I also had a few stops in Colorado (Denver) while waiting for various visas to clear.

I stopped writing this blog in part because I became busy with other things as I’m sure anyone who tries to keep up a blog can relate with. But I also stopped writing because in a way I stopped caring enough about what I was writing to keep doing it. This blog began as a blog about my time in Korea but soon morphed into a blog dealing with issues about religion, faith, philosophy and the like. I wrote from the perspective of a person who used to be a bible believing, Christ following, Evangelical Christian. I believed almost everything my churches had taught me and thought it was my mission to carry that message to the rest of the world. After years of dedicating my entire life to the Christian faith (one version of it) and seeking ‘God’ everywhere I could, particularly in the study of history, philosophy and the bible I had to give up my faith as I discovered the beliefs of my youth simply were not true.

Leaving the church and my faith was difficult. My entire life had revolved around these things since I was a child and everything I had done and studied up to that point had been for and about these things. As I left my faith I found myself drowning in school debts for degrees that prepared me for nothing except work in the church. I was also lonely as I lost most of my social life and my Christian friends just couldn't be my friends in the same way anymore. In many ways I felt I had been robbed of much of my life and so I began blogging about my experiences hoping to engage with others who had had similar experiences as well as those who were still Christians in hopes of “helping” them escape their faith as I had. This led to many interesting blogs some of which were fairly harsh in criticizing Christianity. But after a year of writing about these things I became less passionate about what I was writing and thus found it difficult to keep writing. In a way I think up until now this blog has served as a source of release and healing for me. It allowed me to express my frustrations with my past and many of the beliefs I had held. Then as my frustrations began to wane so too did my desire to write about Christianity, religion or other faith based topics. In a way I was tired of “fighting” about these things.

But in the past few years I have found that while much of my anger about my past has dissipated my interest in these topics has not. I still enjoy reading about religion, church/biblical history, philosophy and modern science.  And while there are times I still feel a bit annoyed with believers I don’t have the same need to compete/fight with them over these issues. Now perhaps the one time I still want to “fight” is when religion crosses paths with politics and those of faith try and impose their beliefs on others. When that happens I can get quite riled up again. But for the most part I find I am much more relaxed about these issues than I was a few years ago.

So I come back to this blog with the intention of once again writing about issues of religion, faith, history and so on but I hope to write about them with less hostility than I previously did. Now I’m sure there will be times when things may get heated with various readers just due to the personal nature of these topics but for the most part I hope this blog will just be a place to encourage critical thinking, open dialogue and humor. I will be offering my own thoughts on various topics and share other people’s ideas that I find worth examining whether I agree with them or not.

I encourage anyone who chooses to read this blog to offer their own thoughts on anything and everything because I have found that I tend to learn the most by interacting with other people. I had made some good friends through this blog as well as some good competitors and hope they will return. Further I hope many new people will show up and help me once again have a fun blog about hard issues.