Hi everyone. I’ve been out sick for a couple of weeks and have gotten terribly behind on our reading selections. I’ve just asked Dale McGowan, author/editor of Parenting Beyond Belief to help me get caught up by writing a guest post about finding good non-religious reading selections for children. After I post that in a week or so and we have a little discussion about The Ghost on Saturday Night, we’ll move on to our next selections.
Also, here’s a short excerpt from a post I wrote for The Atheist’s Way:
I constantly have to fight the black-and-white mentality that I adhered to as a fundamentalist. Being an ex-fundamentalist is being like a recovering-alcoholic. You’re never quite free of that past, never able to relax and have just one beer, just one thought. You have to be on guard all the time. In my flight away from fundamentalist Christianity, I found myself with the tendency to fall into a kind of fundamentalist atheism.Â
Read the rest here.
Books are hard write… they take years of patience and rewriting etc. Maybe you could settle for something shorter?
Correction: “books are hard [to] write”.
You’re right, Freiddie, I like writing books, but that’s why I also blog, faster, easier, and more instant gratification. :-)
Very, very thought provoking post, DD!
I think the kind of book you’re trying to write must be the hardest of all forms of books. You are trying to look back at your life and your past decisions and put it all into perspective. Yet your perspective keeps changing as you grow older and (hopefully) wiser. So unless you can write VERY quickly indeed, your perspective has shifted noticeably by the time you go from the beginning to the end. It’s almost as if you have to give up growing during the time you are writing the book if you want it to make any sense! Makes fiction seem pretty easy in comparison.
No matter whether you are successful in finishing your book, I commend you for your willingness to show us your thoughts as a work “in progress.” There is a lot of vulnerability in admitting uncertainty about things. Especially in matters of faith (or the lack thereof), where people have such strong feelings that they’re not at all hesitant to share!
I hope you do finish your book someday, as I would enjoy reading it. You have an interesting point of view. Whether or not I agree with you on any particular topic, you always give me something to think about. And for that, I thank you.
Thanks Steve. Agreeing on everything isn’t always important, but having open and interesting discussions is. IMO anyway.