WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO?

Several bloggers I read all the time have burned out. Another one bit the dust last night. He’s tired of the same old arguments and the same old responses.

And the sense of not accomplishing a damn thing.

I’ve been blogging a very long time despite the fact this blog isn’t very old. I never managed to get the traffic and the number of commentators that most of my favorites enjoy. I’ve moved through several different sites with different blogging software and have used many different names and titles. I started in 1998 immediately after the stroke. My first move was stroke awareness and activism, subjects which I had some very marginal success with. At the same time I was writing quite a bit of religion criticism. That didn’t exactly work very well with the stroke related material; it seems a lot of people involved with strokes were looking for religious comfort.

So I couldn’t find an audience.

By the time atheist blogs started appearing, I had pretty much given up trying to find an outlet for my anti-religious ramblings. I kept a general purpose journal going in which I ranted about whatever was on my mind at any given time only occasionally bringing up religion because it seemed to offend what few readers I had. The trouble with that journal, however, is that I don’t exactly lead a very exciting life and I have a hard time convincing myself that anyone finds my observations all that interesting. I’ve got about 30 to 40 regular readers and that’s not too shabby but I always dreamed of more.

During the course of all of this I also became a big fan and practitioner of digital photography. Before the stroke, I was a painter of fantasy style landscapes. The damage to my right arm and hand, however, put an end to that. That was very frustrating at first but then a camera clearance sale led me into a love affair with digital cameras and photo editing software. I quickly decided I wanted to make a living with a camera. So I eventually purchased a Nikon D70 on October 31, 2004. (Hard to believe I’ve had it for four years now. I just went out hiking yesterday and took some 1200 pictures of all the lovely but really late fall foliage.) That camera was supposed to be my first step toward making a photography business.

I mention that because that was the beginning of an elaborate site I had that combined all my interests, including writing science fiction. I was up to nearly 70 pages of content before a series of financial disasters forced me to give it up, I couldn’t afford the cost of keeping it online. This spectacular fall from grace pretty much wiped out my entire online presence except for that little online journal I mentioned previously.

Since then I have been trying to find my way back.

I tried to revive my previous anti-religion blog but that failed miserably, it attracted no interest whatsoever. I just recently deleted it permanently. I tried setting up a photoblog a few months back. That was even more of a spectacular failure. Thanks to Google Analytics I was able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was the only one who ever looked at any of the photos on the site. Someone in Michigan running the Safari browser on Windows XP was 99.9% of the total traffic on the site. That was me and only me. So the photoblog is gone as well.

This blog is supposed to be the beginning of my return with a huge site covering all my interests once again. The stats here are quite good, far better than anything I have ever done before and very encouraging. But the crash and burn going on in the atheosphere concerns me.

What do atheistic readers want? Do you want the same old arguments over and over? Do you want personal stories about leaving religion behind? About trying to adapt to a new worldview? About problems encountered in trying to live in religious America? Politics? Seriously, what do we have in common as a group? Are we even a group?

My passion for religion and stroke activism has cooled over the years. At first, I was very seriously and very intently confronting those issues in my own life. But after ten years, I know what I believe and what happened to me. There’s no more internal conflict going on, the matter is settled. I tend to look back at that and compare it to things that are happening now. The difference astounds me but I frequently feel like all I’m doing is covering ground that someone else has covered much better previously.

I understand these bloggers feeling burned out.

So what I’m asking is what will it take to revive them? What do all of us need to do to keep it interesting and exciting? What new directions can we go in? Do we really need more college boy reasoning and debate or do we need real people dealing with real world scenarios? Or do we just need some good, old fashioned ranting?

This entry was posted on 2. November 2008 at 16:54 and is filed under communication, wild guesses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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