I once created and maintained a website called A180.net. I was a Christian minister who enjoyed philosophy and Christian apologetics. My site was devoted to both, but primarily the latter - at least initially. As time passed I leaned (reluctantly) more and more towards agnosticism and even some form of non-theism, and as my thinking evolved, my website likewise reflected such a paradigmatic shift.
My intellectual pursuits were put on hold for a while in 2004 when my wife and I separated and I hit rock bottom financially, socially, mentally and emotionally. I was a little too low on Maslow's hierarchy of needs to worry much about things like the teleological argument or Pascal's Wager, although I must say I spent a lot of time pondering the problem of suffering and evil, albeit more existentially than academically.
Four years later I started to finally pass through the storm, and with life looking up, I had thoughts of picking up where I left off. I went back to school. I began making serious life plans. I even got married in October 2009 in spite of the fact that I never thought I'd take that risk again given how things went the first time around.
[DIGRESSION] Of course, as chance or luck or fate or Descartes' malignant demon would have it, wife #2 turned out to be not only devoid of rationality, trustworthiness and character, but completely out of touch with reality. I am grateful, though, because this experience showed me that I'm okay. I was hurt, but I'm not scarred. This was a setback, but nothing I can't handle. I loved her, but I can love again (cue Tim Minchin). I'm not the same person I was five years ago, and that's a good thing. I'm stronger now. Honestly, my life has improved greatly now that she's no longer a part of it. I have absolutely no complaints. [END DIGRESSION]
As I climbed back up Maslow's mountain, I wanted to pick up where I had left off and create a website similar to the one I created back in the day. One catch, though: It had been over four years since I gave any serious thought to where I stood on the issues of god, faith and religion, and because I was in somewhat of a transition the last time I thought about it, I wasn't sure where I stood vis-à-vis my own personal religious predilections.
Fortunately, grad school kickstarted my brain. I had to write a 20 page "Learning Autobiography" for one of my classes, and I wanted to share it with people, so I posted it on this blog... though it wasn't really much of a blog back then.
I fell into the world of blogging quite by accident. I created a blogger ID a while back so that I could post comments on my friend Eric's blog. I wasn't thinking about blogging at all then. Like I said, I wanted to create a new website like I used to have. I honestly didn't know much about blogging and didn't really take it all that seriously.
[DIGRESSION] In spite of the fact that A180.net was a Christian apologetics website, I wrote on a number of other topics as well, and even had a few, well, peculiar features on the site. I'm proud to say that there was a time when, if you typed "ninjas and donuts" into Google, my website would appear first. [END DIGRESSION]
After I acquired the name "Dead-Logic.com" I pointed it to this blog, which was supposed to serve as a placeholder until I created the "real" site. As I got back into the swing of writing, I posted my articles on this blog "for the time being, until the real site was finished." I was fairly clueless about the whole thing.
You can figure out the rest: I kept writing on the blog, people started reading my blog entries, and here we are a year or so later - an actual blog!
Dead-Logic.com
NEXT: The Journey to Atheism, Part Two - "The Fear"
The Journey to Atheism, Part One
The Journey to Atheism, Part One
"The Blog"
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