It is not a coincidence that the mascot of this blog is a Sonic The Hedgehog picture with the caption “Haters Gonna Hate.” In order for someone to be a prolific blogger, to devote hours a day to writing about one’s life even in the least interesting circumstances, requires a particular personality. It requires someone who thinks and ponders often about life and who has a compulsive need to share that intellectual and/or emotional life with others, as well as certain amount of shamelessness in exposing personal affairs to the casual web searches of strangers, and a certain narcissistic self-regard that assumes that other people will be interested in what we say and think. Whether for good or for ill, I am such a person.

Being a person who is often under time constraints when it comes to writing, not least because I do not like to spend too much time writing these pieces (and because I often have not had much time to spend in the course of other duties and responsibilities that I take seriously), I tend to write about subjects that are close to me. If I read a book, or listen to music, or read (or teach) a passage of the Bible, or find a good news article, or have something intriguing or noteworthy happen to me or around me in a day, that material happens to become fodder for naval gazing self-examination, and for the amusement or ridicule of friends and relatives and strangers all over the world. If something is not relatively close at hand as subject matter, I am generally not going to investigate it, since I do not get paid for my blogging.

When I first started Edge Induced Cohesion, my third blog (my first two were a current events blog on blogger and a personal journal on livejournal), I originally intended it as a historian’s view of the world. Namely, this blog is my own personal view on a variety of subjects, generally taken with the approach of a somewhat combative sort of historian with deep interests in religion, military history, and politics, and lesser interest in a wide variety of other matters. This blog makes no pretense at objectivity, even if I do my best to respect the views of others when they are respectfully given. In fact, I believe on principle that it is entirely impossible to be objective because the very presence of a perspective is itself a bias reflecting a given worldview, and I own up to my worldview and its repercussions.

When I first started this blog, my church was at the tail end of a long crisis, and some readers wondered if this blog would be dedicated simply to that controversy. When they left, and when my name stopped getting publicly smeared, it was no longer necessary for me to write about that controversy any longer, and so I have not. The same is true of any other conflict in my conflict-ridden life. As soon as my name stops getting slandered and as soon as there is some distance between myself and other combatants, the cares of life and the concerns of the present will keep it from being a frequent subject, except perhaps as a sarcastic joke or a tale of woe to go along with many others in my lengthy collection. And then people will find some other reason to come on this blog to read about something else, or will find old articles and bring up old business when I have already moved on. Such is the life, though.

Not everyone enjoys blogging. It is a sort of therapy to write blog entries and to put one’s thoughts and feelings in an organized fashion and share them with others. But many people simply are not comfortable being that public about themselves. Most people are simply not that open about their feelings, their fears, their concerns, and do not want anyone else to be that open about them either. And this is entirely understandable and proper. What I view as admirable or even excessive self-restraint in my writing others view as shameless and self-absorbed presentation. When something is deeply troubling to me, I feel compelled to write about it, and share it, and that compulsion means that very little in my life ends up being private business. At best, it means my life is an object lesson (for good and for ill) in others along their own journeys for truth and spiritual growth. At worst, it exposes people who are often deeply private to the harsh light of day when they do not deserve or wish the scrutiny that comes from having their private lives known, or even guessed by implication. How to solve that moral dilemma is something I do not quite understand how to manage. Not yet at least.