Introduction

04 July 2024

In October of 2022, I started to wind down my previous blog, Formulalessness. It took me until sometime this year (or maybe not even all completed), to finish wrapping things up, doing things like reviewing what I had written, summing up important ideas, and relating what I had written to outside kinds of people. Some of this writing I did on that blog, as well as on my subreddit.

Now I think it's time to start a new blog. This blog is called Following. It is about how terms in an argument "follow" (philosophy) and how people "follow" things (religion / ideology). My intention is to also write about whatever I feel like writing.

I am currently still taking a break from doing philosophy (at least, holding back from fully pursuing it). But when I stop taking that break, I intend to read a lot of philosophy, to help me have a better background for whatever objections might come against MSL. I will probably write some things here about that.

I've been trying to figure out my priorities at this point in my life. One thing that stands out in my mind is "maintenance". If my writing were a software project, I would have "released it" and now I should come up with bug fixes and tech support. I feel like I can begin to do that fairly easily. But, it makes me a bit wary that I might say new things in the process, because new things can extend my project into new features, bringing new bugs, even breaking old features.

Another question is, what exactly am I trying to maintain? I've decided that VMH, MSL, ethical theism, and the temptation contract theodicy are the main ideas I want to defend. So I am largely letting go of the rest of my writing, in terms of emphasis. Those things become more like ideas or suggestions that belong to my past self. But the things I keep defending are the ones that my ongoing present self says. VMH, MSL, and the theodicy are largely "philosophy of religion" topics, or that's a natural way to think of them. On first inspection, ethical theism seems not to need further philosophical defense, and maybe VMH is close to being as defended as it needs to be. Both of those have some potential as reform agendas, VMH of religion, and ethical theism of secular altruism or activism. I guess if I were to "extend" my project rather than "defend" or "maintain" (granting that all three of those things can lead to each other), I could work on relating VMH and ethical theism to other worldviews, or to literature, current events, etc. Maybe those four topics are what are really central at this time, and likely for the long-term, rather than maintenance in itself. (I guess technically the theodicy could be part of the fuller version of MSL, like in Formulalessness, so it makes sense to think of my focus as VMH, MSL, and ethical theism.)

I'm not sure the status of my songwriting. I have some songs that are unreleased, that I'm unclear on whether to move forward on at this time. Maybe music is a thing to "maintain" or "defend" by putting energy into performing, explaining, or promoting it.

All of these things are relatively short (low word count). (I guess while the MSL booklet is short, it doesn't cover the fuller implementation in Formulalessness which is longer, and that implementation could certainly be developed more. But compared to the sacred scriptures of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, or current events, science, politics, or even other things, there's a lot less data in MSL, and from my perspective, if I have to back off from the fuller implementation of MSL to just try to defend the booklet, that's OK, at least for now.)

This fits how my brain works these days. For a long time, I've had memory issues (probably initially from early manic episodes, and quite possibly also from all the stress my brain has gone through over the last 11 years), so, issues accessing memories and holding them in my head. This gets worse with bipolar depression, but I'm never the best at holding things in my head, and now it feels a bit worse. Maybe this is all the stress catching up to me, or possibly somewhat hereditary or common aging. So I feel like the less I have to deal with, the better.

A practical benefit of having a finished project is that you can go on to implement it and promote it. But the danger of implementation and promotion is to stop searching for the truth. I don't want to get in a situation where I'm promoting things that I'm not trying to know the truth of at the same time. As my mental horizons shrink, I don't want to defend all the things I pursued when I was younger. So I hope that I can make a workable deal with myself where I commit to upkeep on a few important ideas, and let go of the rest.

I wanted to use Google less, and also set up the posts so that they're easier to make into a book someday. So I wanted to not use Blogger like I did for Formulalessness. (Someday I hope to make an ebook version of Formulalessness.) I wanted to host this blog on my own server, so then I thought of using Wordpress. But that seems complicated and maybe I would have to update it for security reasons, and I am burned out on even minor computer chores like that. Other platforms I thought might be less likely to be maintained longterm, and also would have to be updated. So I thought of making my own minimalist "blog platform" and this is what I made. I think for the kind of people who are into my writing, it's fine. And this blog doesn't have to become popular in this form.

The main thing it lacks is a comment section. In the four or five years of Formulalessness, there was one really valuable comment that sticks out in my memory, which was the one about Mormonism being like MSL. Certainly I would want people to let me know about things like that, or even other things, so they can send me an email. Comment sections can allow for a kind of social interaction between commenters. I'm okay with not having that on this blog (the subreddit does have a lounge you could post to).

In Formulalessness, I tried to put links in the text to other posts internal to the blog. Generally, I feel like not doing that in this blog, or doing it less, to reduce actions that feel like work. I don't usually click on links in blog posts, even sometimes when they would be necessary to fully understand the posts. Things that really need to be said should therefore maybe best be spelled out in every post. At the same time, I don't think I will spell things out in every post. I want to make an ebook version of this blog every year, and maybe that's the best way to read it, if you find yourself having trouble keeping up with my internal references, since you would be reading all the posts at the same time. Also using the "search function" of this blog (or sometimes of Formulalessness) might work. Hopefully I can use easily searched labels for my ideas. In some cases, using the search function could expand your abilities to look up things in my post, rather than just relying on the links I've put in.