POSTSCRIPT. So last night I was thinking about the last post from yesterday. Two things about it in particular. The first was that I forgot to mention one other good result of my early unhappiness, which is the sense of lack and necessity that drove me to philosophy. Unhappiness can make people really self-protective and risk-averse, thus averse to rigorous philosophical seeking. And I think I did that too, especially when I was in high school and on my big relativist kick. (Relativism, of course, means never having to say you’re sorry.) But the more lasting effect of unhappiness for me was a sense of drivenness, a goad–something the Rat has called “being pursued by Furies.” That sense of drivenness and need makes it harder to stop philosophical questing when things start seeming dangerous or unpleasant.

The second thing was that I wondered, “Why did I post that?” It seemed pretty unusual for me. I think there were three main reasons:

1) I had figured some stuff out. And at this point, I’m so used to having the blog that when I figure things out, I tend to either post them here or incorporate them into my fiction writing.

2) I’d been blogging about politics for days and days and I was starting to bore even myself. Wanted something different in the mix.

3) Arthur Silber of Light of Reason asked me to comment on this post, and on Richard Dawkins generally. You can read my somewhat over-strenuous and irked comments at his site; but I wanted to give some idea of why Dawkins’s worldview strikes me as totally insufficient. And I think the post below limns some of my reasons for thinking that.

This last point is easy to misunderstand. The immediate response is, “So… you bought into this whole religion because of some bad experiences you had?” I tried to show, in the initial post, that my experience was part, but only part, of the evidence I use to try to figure out what the world is. And the point of that post was to show the connections between my own experiences and various philosophical or religious stances and questions.