The Blogging Meme

Lynet has tagged me with a meme, which was started by L. L. Barkat.  The rules are:

1. Write about 5 specific ways blogging has affected you, either positively or negatively
2. link back to the person who tagged you
3. link back to this parent post
4. tag a few friends or five, or none at all
5. post these rules – or just have fun breaking them.

Having established the rules, I will now move on to the post:

1. Blogging has given me an outlet for examining questions that I can’t discuss with most of the people I know. Most of my friends and family are Christians who either don’t care about, or don’t dare to think about, the things I write about here. Raising the questions I raise here, and taking the positions I take, would undoubtedly lead to intense discomfort, if not outright conflict, if I discussed them with people I know.

2. Blogging has given me a voice in a community that cares as much as I do about the issues I write about. More importantly, blogging has been a means for establishing friendships with people I first met in the atheosphere.

3. Blogging has allowed me to learn more about other religions than I ever knew before I became an atheist. I’ve learned about Mormonism from C.L. Hanson, Islam from Kafir Girl, and Anglicanism from A Thinking Man, to cite just a few examples.

4. Blogging has given me the opportunity to participate in a weekly podcast with several other atheist bloggers. The opportunity to chat live with an intelligent, articulate group of atheists is a great balance to the written interaction that blogging facilitates.

5. Blogging has given me lots of material to read, but the price I’ve paid for this has been the reading of fewer books. I’m currently in the process of finding a more appropriate balance between these two activities. It would be much easier to find that balance if I didn’t have to work, but then I wouldn’t be able to pay for either books or an Internet connection.

I’m not going to tag anyone. Instead, I’ll just invite anyone who wants to participate in this meme to do so.

– the chaplain