Bogosity

Dear readers (if there are any of you left), I believe the time has come for me to thank you for your patronage of this blog and take my final bows. I’ve decided to focus my energy on other things and I’ve been finding less and less energy for this blogging gig of late.

I started writing this blog in January 2005, probably as a new years resolution. I remember at the time, I wanted to get really serious about my religion, start reading the bible daily, saying morning and evening prayer and also letting the world know about something exciting that I had found: a way of expressing Christianity in social justice, compassion for others and peaceful meditation. I thought that people ‘out there’, especially the left wing blogging community might be interested to hear an alternative to the usual right wing bigotry that seems to be associated with Christianity (I was wrong about that: a great many non-Christian bloggers prefer Christians to be complete arse-holes as it makes them an easy target)

The name Bogosity was to remind me not to take myself too seriously and also to suggest that I would be critically examining my faith to eliminate the bogus stuff that I felt resulted from my time as an evangelical.

My first posts were just reflections on the daily readings and I wrote many of them while at work, first thing in the morning. I would read the morning prayer before work and then think about the blog on the way to work and write it over my morning coffee.

At this time, I was going through a period of searching in life, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I was disappointed with my engineering career, and at the same time had dropped out of the evangelicalism that I was into and somehow ended up in a liberal church and really digging it. I had dreams of becoming my own version of the messiah, God’s gift to something or other if I could just figure out the right cause that suited me. I was also gearing up to become a father and really didn’t have the foggiest what that would mean. At that stage, Bogosity was almost therapeutic: my place to nut things out and get inspired.

By 2006, I had decided that the answer to my questions of career and spirituality were to become a priest. At the same time, I was starting to ask myself some tough questions about my own beliefs. I was reading a lot about Christianity on the web, a lot of criticisms and a lot of things from atheists. The new atheist movement was gaining momentum as atheists started to become pro-active about opposing religions in the context of the ongoing ‘war on terror’. As an newly enrolled theology student, I was also starting down that road of deconstructing my faith in order to understand what I believed and why.

Bogosity jumped the shark sometime about the beginning of 2007 / end of 2006 when I basically admitted that I’d lost my faith and sunk pretty low when it came to my feelings towards the church, other Christians and God. I was pretty over trying to find religious things to blog about and probably should have wound things up back in June but I had invested so much in this blog that I felt I had to reinvent it and keep it going.

I know over the three years of writing here, I’ve shot my mouth off more than a few times and probably revealed some less flattering things about myself: my self righteousness, arrogance and insensitivity towards others at times. I hope that I have also written the occasional uplifting thing – I know I mostly enjoyed writing and reading my blog and that’s probably what counts the most.

Right now, I’m pretty tied up with being a dad, being a homeowner and seeing the good side of being an embedded programmer. I guess I’m pretty content and maybe the busyness is a big part of that. I’m still practicing Christianity but I suppose I’m pretty resolved on all that as well – to be happy to not know answers to many things and to not let other people define what it means for me.

So without further a due, I bring this blog to a close, thank you all once again for reading and I invite you to visit me at Smithology for engineering, sci-fi and other nerdiness. Oh and don’t forget to checkout the tumblog Bogosities