Back in Black

Life is strange. After a couple month hiatus from the blogosphere, I decided to return to writing a bit. When I stopped my previous, now defunct blog, Assault On Reason, I was tired. Though a lot of my posts were silly, I also wrote about many issues that really mattered to me. It wasn't easy to do that consistently. To be honest, I got a bit burned out. I felt like I tried to write some thoughtful things and I didn't feel like it made a difference. I think that's how a lot of us feel.

I was also going through a tough time personally with some uncertainty involving my marriage. Since I did such a bang-up job of resolving that, I now suddenly find myself with much more free time on my hands. When I have free time, my mind tends to wander and I get itchy to comment on current events again.

In truth, the catalyst for my creating a new blog was something far more illustrative of the beauty of blogging and the internet. Recently, a friend of mine sent me an email with a link to a video of Wafa Sultan, an Arab secular humanist who has openly spoken out against Islam and Muslim extremism. In it, she said that she had heard that Ms. Sultan was murdered. This disturbed me because in the Fall of 2005, my best friend and I went to a humanist conference at the Center for Inquiry in New York. Ms. Sultan received an award there and was an inspiration because she risked her life every day to try to bring rationality to an irrational world.

In my internet search to verify whether Ms. Sultan was, in fact, alive (she is), I stumbled across a reference to my blog in another blog, It Ain't Necessarily So. The author had some really complimentary things to say about my blog and that of my best friend. He even quoted a small section of something I wrote about homosexuality. His compliments really touched me. Of course, we all like to be complimented. But here was someone who was saying some really nice things about my writing for no reason other than to be a decent person who appreciated a viewpoint. It made me realize that I might have been selling people short. I didn't have a massive number of visits to my blog but, by and large, the people who visited were thoughtful and interesting and genuinely good people. I miss their thoughts.

So, I'm giving this another go with a new look and new title. When I was in graduate school, we always talked about how some patients simply required .38 caliber therapy. The solution to all your problems. I know, it's in poor taste but if you spent a few years as a therapist, you'd agree. A few months later and we're still at war, I still think atheists are right, I'm not yet a millionaire, and I still don't understand women. Hmm...maybe I should have taken a longer break.