Reimagined and Revamped. Fighting the spread of nonsense often feels like a Sisyphean task. However, the joy is in making the information available, not the hope of conversion.

Finding Common Ground

Posted Monday, January 07, 2008 by Techskeptic

As I have been blogging sporadically over the last two years I have come to really love reading people's thoughts on three main subjects. The first two are rather obvious for me, the first is skeptical thinking on all matters. For this there are a variety of interesting blogs such as Skeptico, infophilia, and moonflake . These blogs, along with many others I have not mentioned (just see the blog rolls at each of these, in particular Skeptico's as he has various critical thinking blogs categorized), are really great for examining a variety of subjects and they are less personal than other blogs I like to read like Berlzebub's.

My blog, while I certainly throw in a lot of personal stuff, is mostly about using actual raw data, rather than other people conclusions to get at a result. This is how I attack the Ancient Chinese Medicine myth, the education levels and political alignment of various states, and the validity of statements from companies that make technical products, like the Medis nonsense.

The New Thing
I have also started to participate in another endeavor. While I am quite comfortable in my atheism, and fully endorse all the work done by Dawkins, Harris, Hitchen's and PZ and many others, I am not confident that it is helping to unify our country. I know that they are right, and I do agree that if there was widespread realization of the nonsense of religion and the harm it actually provides our countries, we would be better off. However, in my lifetime, or even in my daughters lifetime, I doubt we will see our various countries growing out of their religions.

So I am offering my thoughts and insights to a new venue. Common Ground contains essays from people with various backgrounds, religious or otherwise. Each week will bring a new topic for essays. These are not blog entries with links and supporting data and so forth, but simply essays from peoples point of view.

I hope you will join me over there. Read posts from everyone, and perhaps even write your own. I think that only by understand where 'the other side' is coming from, and remembering that their entire life experiences have led them there, can we find places where we all can agree. I suspect there are far more places where we can all agree than we think.

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