I ran across a new blog the other day: Cream Crackers. It’s the blog of a 19 year old university student in the UK called Claire.
I found it because Claire’s first blog entry mentions Off The Map. It begins
I’ve been feeling pretty, well, un-faith-filled of late. My life’s gone pretty pear-shaped, and I’ve ended up completely stopping attending CU at uni, basically stopping attending church meetings, and my relationship with God just doesn’t seem to be there any more. To put it bluntly, I don’t want to be a Christian.
It’s not that I have particular trouble believing in God (although sometimes I’m skeptical and as I’ve said I don’t feel it right now), or that Jesus lived, was amazing, and even rose from the dead two millenia ago, but I hate the culture of mainstream evangelical Christianity, it makes me feel sick to my stomach and I don’t want to be associated with it. I know they’re doing their best, but all I ever seem to see is the damage and hostility their good intentions cause. If that’s really what the Christian faith is all about then my faith is dead, as I want no part of it.
Fresh hope has come for me tonight in the form of the concept of ‘Otherlyness’, put forward by Jim Henderson et al (see: www.offthemap.com).
01-02-2008 |
15 Comments »Here’s my response to a comment posted by Ronald on the blog entry Conversation or Declaration?
Hi Helen
A blog isn’t a real conversation, IMHO.
There is a certain amount of the communication in a blog that is subjectively inserted there by the predisposition’s (intelligence, wit, insight, intuition, stupidity, foolishness, etc) of the reader.
That happens in real-time conversations too, doesn’t it?
It’s not a real-time conversation. I don’t get to see you raise your eyebrows. You don’t see me fidget my legs or cross my arms. I don’t get to hear your voice inflections. You don’t get to look me in my eyes. I don’t get to ask questions to find out more information in real-time to clarify what you may mean or didn’t mean by what you said before I begin commenting. There is much more than a nuance missing that makes a blog woefully inadequate compared to a real conversation.
I like real-time best, but I think on-line can work too. What you’re saying about visual cues seems to imply that blind people can’t have ‘real’ conversations. I think they can - they adapt to not being able to see the other person. Can’t we do that online too? Read the rest of this entry »
07-18-2007 |
16 Comments »