A few years ago I deleted my website where I had videos, a blog, and other links. I deleted it for a couple of reasons.
First, I'd mainly started the website to promote my comedy, back when I was working hard at trying to become a professional stand-up. But for personal reasons mostly related to emotional burnout and increasing horror at how much the stand-up world tends to protect abusers, I eventually decided to take a break from performing. Then the pandemic started, and then I gradually lost my enthusiasm for doing stand-up altogether. I only perform stand-up on very rare occasions now, and generally I am only comfortable doing it in queer spaces. All of that is to say, at a certain point my website was no longer serving the purpose that I created it for.
Second, tech platforms have gotten really stupid in the past few years. Right now the stupidity is at an all-time high with companies always pushing less-than-helpful AI technology in our faces. After I started blogging for a while, the website I used to build the site became increasingly unusable. In light of some developments in my life and with the world in general, I also became less interested in constantly being on social media, and so I deleted some accounts, hid most of my old comedy content, and scaled way back on being an online person (honestly it's one of the best things I ever did for my mental health). So deleting my website at that point just made good sense. My only regret is that I didn't succeed in saving my old blog posts (I somehow ended up losing a good number of files that I tried to save in Google Drive, and this included the blog posts).
So why the new blog? Two reasons. First, I've been wanting an outlet for writing out thoughts mostly related to philosophy and religion, and especially (though not only) in order to explore the topic of non-religious theism.* One of the things I've struggled with most since leaving the Christian community is that, in philosophy of religion, the dominant positions seem to be Christian theism or non-theism. As a result, even though I have great interest in the topic, I'm constantly feeling the frustration of not seeing my own position represented. There seems to be a widespread assumption that believing in God means believing in the Christian God, or at least the God of one of the Abrahamic religions. Arguments against belief in God are often aimed at Judeo-Christian ideas, and arguments for belief in God are often packaged with arguments for Jesus's resurrection or arguments for intelligent design theory.
There are Christian philosophers who I enjoy reading a lot and agree with strongly when it comes to issues of metaphysics, metaethics, and natural theology, but then when they get into applied ethics or other theological issues, it becomes very unpleasant reading very quickly. On the other hand, I tend to agree quite a bit with non-theistic philosophers when they critique religious institutions (especially the evangelical church) and advocate for more progressive ethical views, but when it comes to their metaphysics, it's not just that I usually disagree, it's also that I'm often shocked at how bad some of their arguments are.
On a more personal level, socially I tend to be surrounded by non-theists and people who are (very understandably) emotionally turned off to saying anything positive about God and religion. I don't see this as a character flaw. Having come out of an incredibly toxic religious environment myself, I think it's perfectly sensible for people to not want to engage with a topic that is still dominated by voices who unapologetically represent the very kind of harmful religious ideology that has caused them so much pain and trauma. For me, even just reading books and essays by Christian philosophers can become emotionally taxing. So I generally do not try to push that in my friends' faces, and I have tended to keep a lot of my views to myself just because there's not much of an outlet for talking about them. The downside is that sometimes that can feel a bit isolating. So I think there is probably a practical benefit to having a forum for working out some of my personal thoughts on a variety of philosophical topics. Plus, I can respond here to criticisms of my writing as well.
Who is this blog for? Mainly just for me, as an outlet and a way of organizing some of my thoughts. If anyone finds it and enjoys reading it, then great! I'm definitely open to hearing from readers, even those who disagree with me (as long as they don't, you know, scream vile obscenities at me). I don't expect to post here very consistently, but we'll see what happens.
* The term "non-religious" is not ideal but I'm not sure what else to call it. The popular distinction between religion and spirituality has never seemed very helpful to me. There's an old distinction between revealed and natural theology, where revealed theology is grounded in the testimony of an authoritative text or religious leader, while natural theology is grounded in reason and experience. In that sense we could speak of revealed religion and natural religion, and then perhaps I would say that I am open to, or practice, a sort of natural religion. However, natural religion has often been associated specifically with deism, and I don't usually think of myself as a deist, since it tends to view God as sort of an absentee landlord, and that's not really my view (although I am aware that there are other versions of deism). Also, I think that the words "natural religion" could be more evocative of some kind of nature worship, which isn't really my thing either.