Stuff I'm not saying

We (update: may have) lost the house, no-one's fault I guess but we need a new house now. I don't have much to say about that.

There are things I'd like to blog about but one of them involves individuals whose privacy should be respected and another involves groups who I don't want to misrepresent.

All in all there's a lot of stuff I've got to say, but that I can't or just really shouldn't. The Internet, whilst a fantastic conduit for free speech, doesn't really make self expression any easier.

Abstract philosophical musings or whatever, I can do, but I don't want to because they are boring and I don't want to write them any more than anyone wants to read them. Next time I have something real to talk about that I actually can talk about then I'll do that. For now, go amuse yourself with some free music or just stop reading altogether.

Friends and friends.

Today T-Block had a Christmas roast, which was pretty nice, we all worked together and it didn't turn out to bad, even if the sprouts were completely raw.

Obviously it was as secular as Christmas can get, which I supposed was how I'd like it. There's no reason I see to focus on the mythology side and everyone knows the whole Jesus thing isn't why we have winter celebrations anyway. No moments silence before we tucked in either.

Well in fact, there were quite a few silences, but with a "little s" where the conversation just died down. What I didn't expect was how incredibly awkward it made people, and how they had to say that it was making them feel awkward just to get rid of the silence.

Without really realising it, I've been brought up to tolerate silence, not just tolerate it but to actually enjoy it or at least feel comfortable in it. I doubt somehow that it's a skill unique to Quaker children but somehow my sheltered upbringing or something left me ignorant to how much people suck at just sitting around.

It's around this point that I'm supposed to go into some beautifully versed ministry about what silence means to me, to talk about different types of silence and how the inner light is bound to shine through all them, even the noisiest. But I'm not going to and to be honest anyone that really cares has heard it before by someone smarter than me anyway. Today didn't make me think about silence, no matter how important it is: today made me really think about who I am friends with.

There's quite a few people who I'm fairly fond of with whom I don't share that much in common beyond an ability to sit together in silence for an hour. There's quite a few people without any of the above who I'm fond of anyway, most of my flatmates for a start; it's not like silence is a necessary criterion for friendship. It maybe that what's bugging me is really all me, I can't understand how people can't do silence, I completely fail to empathise.

For the three months since I've been at Uni I haven't really spoken about myself as a Quaker, or myself at all really. The fact is, I'm really bad at it. If someone were to ask me about silence or integrity or pacifism then I would become bumbling and awkward and generally useless. People may suck at silence, but more importantly, I really suck at talking.

The people who I'm really close to, seem quite often to be Quakers, I think part of the reason for that isn't what we have in common, but what we don't have to bother explaining to each other: it makes things easier when you can gloss over the religion bit and get down to the nitty gritty of drinking habits and musical tastes. That sounds awful doesn't it? That it'd be so much easier to be friends with someone of the same religion, I feel a lousy Quaker for just thinking it.

At Quaker youth events there's always some conversation or debate about how friendship works alongside with Friendship. I always ignored those, it sounded to much like hippies moaning that the man was out the get them (armed with peer-pressure and conformity no doubt) which to be fair, it was. There's always a lot of bother about how someone can only find their true family amongst other Quaker children and that their relationships with school friends were shallow and meaningless in comparison. I always though, how fucking ignorant it was to assume that the rest of the world can't do close and meaningful friendship. Of course in retrospect my peers at the time weren't saying that at all, they really did find it easier to make friends with kids who'd been brought up in kind of the same way as them and, as much as it pains me to say so, I do to.

Whiny little teenybopper hippies are a lot more insightful than I ever gave them credit for.

A house

My current flatmates (and one school friend) have decided on a house to live in next year, we have reserved it and will put a deposit down the moment we can.

This is, fantastic.

I'm a grown up now.

A bad thing.

PZ Myers is an intelligent guy, what he writes is pretty much always worth reading even when it's tempting to find what he writes offensive.

His recent rant, Viewing Religion Through Panglossian Spectacles is a pretty direct attack on a common defence for supernatural beliefs and the points he makes are mostly fair (I'm not going to give a detailed critique, you can read it and reach your own conclusions), but as is so often the case he immediately ties religion into it as if he'd never met anyone else who is religious but doesn't feel the need to believe in the unobservable or the simply untrue.

I get tired of constantly repeating that religion doesn't imply theism and it doesn't imply supernaturalism either. I've repeated that many times.

But that's not quite how Myers phrased it:

Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth over comfortable delusions.

That's the bit that really bugged me, of course I value truth, I'm a Quaker, that's what we do. I value truth because I have faith in it's merits. It's a consequence of religious upbringing that I have always been encouraged to value truth. Sure an irreligious upbringing could encourage the same values but that doesn't mean religion can't.

I tried thinking of things I believe that are not true but the testimonies are all too subjective, matters of opinion that whilst I'll stick to them with some zeal, no-one is to say if they are true or not. I don't think that can be believing in something that is not true.

Then there's that thing that early Quakers called that of God in Everyone, if you have plenty experience with Quakerism then you know what I mean and if you don't then I can't really explain without stumbling over semantics and getting lost in redundant mythology or something. A Friend called it "Shared Humanity", that'll do for the sake of discussion. I suppose this could be a kind of comfortable delusion, that's kind of worrying and I have to admit that maybe Myers is on to something. I don't think he is, I don't think my faith is comfortable and I don't think I'm deluded. If I am, I'd be grateful for someone telling me.

That terrible first post

I've started writing blogs before, but given up because I didn't have anything to write about. In hindsight the motivation for starting them was all wrong: I wanted to be part of something or I wanted to make my mark on the big wide web.

Friends read them, and people on forums that followed links because I asked them to but that was about it, there was never any readership because there was never any content. Those blogs were pointless and they've faded away into the past.

This blog is not radically different, the only real difference is that I don't need anyone to read it. I don't need attention to carry on writing, I just need a working keyboard and and something to say, I'm getting better and the latter and steadily worse at the former but this blog will keep going so long as I have both.

My grammar is poor, my syntax awkward, everything I do is ridden with typos but that's o.k. because I'm not an English student: welcome to my blog.