On the Other Side

I haven't really been on top of this blog lately, and the number of posts per week has dropped off sharply. At first, I thought this was due to my summer schedule, which had grown a bit fuller than it was when I started this blog. But something didn't feel right about that explanation. It seemed, rather, that my intense desire to chart my transition away from Christianity and belief in God had somehow subsided, and significantly so. Why was this?


Once I started following my thoughts down this trail, a couple of observations became clear rather quickly. First, I wasn't really thinking much about the "newness" of my worldview. I still did a lot of reading both of books and folks on the web, but much of that reading was, by now, reaffirming what I now believe rather than stretching or challenging my assumptions about the world. In short, being an atheist—even though it's still strange to write those words—has become my new normal. For that reason, I'm not constantly excited and provoked by new ideas, which ultimately served as one of the sources of inspiration for my blog posts.


Second, I remembered why I called this blog "ellipsis." My idea was to blog about life "in-between" Christianity and whatever now lay ahead of me. While I still want to understand myself as in the process of becoming, I realize that, practically speaking, I've come to the other side. I'm on the firm ground of cognitive harmony again, rather than the bridge of dissonance. I don't, of course, have it all figured out: I'm sure there are many, many things I haven't "figured out." Still, the framework within which I'll face those problems is provisionally fixed.


So, while I imagine that from time to time I'll throw up a new post, I think I'm going to let myself off the hook if I let the blog fall into disrepair. The blog has, I believe, served its purpose well, i.e., to help me document this major transition in my life. To those who have read, commented, and offered support: thank you. 


Until next time...

Still here.

Sorry I haven't posted anything in the last few weeks. Life can, as we all know, move by a bit too quickly. Still, I haven't forgotten about this blog, and have a couple of ideas in the ol' hopper I'd like to share with you when I get a bit of breathing room. Until then...

Words

My life is filled with words. When I was training to be a minister, a close friend and mentor told me that ministry is done almost entirely through words: preaching, writing, reading, studying, and talking with people—these are the main things a pastor/priest does. Now, as an aspiring academic, I find the situation really isn't too different. Teaching, research, and writing all have to do with putting thoughts into verbal form.


What's more, as a teacher and scholar (and to a lesser degree, when I was in ministry), I'm utterly responsible for my words. Being in the humanities, people will frequently challenge my use of a particular word or phrase, and entire scholarly arguments can be built upon what a single word means. So, not without reason have I become a little anxious about what I write and say. 


The result is that I am extremely self-conscious about any sort of verbal communication I allow to get out from my mind to anyone else. It causes me no small anxiety to publish an essay, or read a paper at a conference, or give a lecture. 


It might surprise you, then, that I have a blog at all. If I get worked up about other people hearing my thoughts, then why, dear reader, would I want to let you read them?

Understanding Evangelical Culture from the Inside

The greatest obstacle to a open, free-thinking society in the U.S. is Evangelical culture as it currently is. Perhaps I'm over-privileging my past by making such a claim (having formerly been an Evangelical myself), but no other significantly populated group within Christianity reflects the same degree of homogeneity as the Evangelicals. Sure, there are growing numbers of moderate and liberal Evangelicals (see here and here), but the vast majority of Evangelicals remain both socially and politically conservative (and even "liberals" tend to be socially conservative). This homogeneity actually builds confidence in their own assertions of truth and rightness, and leads many to ignore voices that deviate from what they are so certain is true.


(More after the jump...)

Ellipsis Is Now on the Atheist Blogroll!

The Ellipsis Blog has been added to The Atheist Blogroll . You can see the blogroll in my sidebar. The Atheist blogroll is a community building service provided free of charge to Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.


It's a great list of fellow-minded bloggers, and I'm happy to be in such good company!

Disaster

Is the term "disaster" a bit of a hyperbole? Maybe. But it captures what things feel like right now.


In two separate instances, I royally failed to communicate with anything approaching clarity. The first was a post (that I've since deleted), filled with what I felt were only loosely connected ramblings. The good news is that I could just delete it, and only the people who read that god-awful post would know how horrible it really was.


The second—and far more abysmal—took place when I spoke to a mentor (a former pastor and friend) over the phone, telling him I was leaving the church. I was so scared and anxious about speaking with him that I didn't really say anything that I thought, and most of the things I said were muddled half-truths that utterly failed to say what I now believe about the world.


It was nothing short of embarrassing.

Traction?

Visits for the blog have now topped 250! So thanks for stopping by and checking out the blog. With any luck, we can keep up this momentum—and if not, at least I'm staying committed to posting and writing down my thoughts, which is what the darn blog is about to begin with.


Again, if you have any thoughts about the blog—especially if you've dropped by more than once—please leave a comment. I'd really like to hear your thoughts!

"Comments" Feature Now Available

As I mentioned in the previous post, the comments are now available. 


I'm really interested to hear what you, especially those who have come back more than once, have to say. Plus, I'm still tinkering with layout and design, and any feedback on that front would be gladly received.


And please tell me I'm not crazy about how I read my mom's email.

Eclectic Much?

Even though this blog is less than a month old, I already see that I don't have a clear focus for what it's "about," other than thoughts that cross my mind throughout the week. The labels for my post are all over the map, ranging from "civil rights" to "Grapes of Wrath" to "Harry Potter" to "Wendell Barry" to "leaving Christianity."


Frankly, I don't mind this. After all, it's a blog about my life and thoughts, and my thoughts tend toward the synthetic and eclectic. Think of my mind as a painter's palette (right), where there aren't clear demarcations between a lot of the colors. Sure, you can see where a green tint is and isn't, but the green and cream and red, etc., are all over the place, and they make new colors and interesting combinations. That, on my better days, is how I like to think of my mind: swirling around ideas and seeing what they do when they bump into each other. And sometimes, that yields a post where I can talk about leaving Christianity, Harry Potter, and death in a sorta-fluid way. Hopefully, such eclecticism is more interesting to readers than off-putting.

Motivation

It's amazing to me. When I wake up in the morning and loll around, doing whatever I feel like at the time, I never have motivation to work when it's time to get started. For someone like me, who writes for a living as an aspiring scholar, motivation is everything.


So, this morning, when I wrote about "Tomorrow," after having put it off for some time, I suddenly found myself with all kinds of ideas for blog posts, with motivation to do writing and research, and with energy and focus to do a number of chores I had around the house. And all this because I finally got up the initiative to write a damned blog entry!


This reminds me of a quote from Wendell Berry, though I won't get it just right (nor do I remember the source): Every farmer knows that the motivation to do hard work comes only after the task is begun. I only wish I remembered this more often.


See also this fascinating link from Less Wrong on motivation and procrastination.

Trying...

I'll do my best to avoid the clichés about starting a new blog. This is my third run at it, so I've already trod that path. (Please don't ask to see the other two failures. They aren't worth seeing.)

The aim of this blog—whether or not anyone actually reads it—is to chronicle a major change taking place in my life. That is, I've been an Evangelical my entire life, and am even in training to become a minster; but I now find myself as something other than an Evangelical, and even something other than Christian.

To a lot of people, this isn't that big of a deal. A number of people I've talked to informally, who live outside the bubble of Christianity, have asked me frankly, "So, what's the problem? What's changed?" For them, the answer is, "Nothing": I'm still the same person, with the same convictions about love, justice, freedom, ethics, etc. I just don't go to church anymore. Yes, I won't be a minister, but there are other, more important jobs to be done.

Other people—including my family, as well as many of my friends, mentors, and teachers—these people would see my departure from the church as a tragedy of the highest order. For many of them, I've punched my ticket to hell. Some of them, I'm quite sure, will never talk to me again when they find out.

If you still don't get it, let me offer an analogy: for my family especially—people whose entire lives are bound up in Christianity and the church—my admission of leaving the church is like me coming out of the closet. When I tell them (and I hope to do so in the next few weeks), they'll be shocked, and they'll surely say things like, "We still love you," and "You're still our son." There will probably be a time where they rarely talk to me, and I'm prepared for that (I think). It won't be easy, but it has to be done.

So, that brings me to the title of the blog (and yes, this is a first-blog cliché). "Ellipsis" is primarily a writing term, an omission of words or time, something that implies more than is said. For example, "O say, can you see..."; the ellipsis at the end points forward to the rest of the "Star Spangled Banner," the US national anthem. But the notion of "ellipsis" helps me think about this place in my life. There is something more going on than I can really say, and it seems like an in-between time that can't quite be expressed. Then again, I am trying to blog about it, so the whole experiment is like trying to explain what ambivalence feels like.

As with every other blog I've started, I'm at least a little optimistic that I will do more than three blogs before I forget about it. Something tells me that the urge to express what I'm going through will help motivate me to write.