Sayonara!

Recently, I've had to re-prioritize my goals as I seriously take into consideration what I want to accomplish in the immediate future with my writing and, also, how to better provide and support my family.

Although I love blogging, there are just too many stupid people saying too many stupid things for me to even keep up with. Part of the problem is that they don't read this blog--or blogs like it. If they did, then they probably would be thinkers rather than, well, those who claim rape isn't rape or blame atheists for the killing spree of fundamentalist bread lunatics--but perhaps worse, all the monkeys who defend these idiots or who, in their indifference, pretend like these idiots are harmless.

I have grown tired of attacking these windbags and then getting called "hateful" or "intolerant" because I was critical of some asshole who claimed that rape wasn't really a bad thing. This is just an example of what has been frustrating me. But I think it shows exactly what I have a problem with--I can't keep being a voice of reason if people simply aren't going to listen to reason. It's like observing a captain a ship blindfold himself whilst trying to navigate the rocky coastline in a storm, all the time his first mate is shouting, "Be mindful of the rocks!" I feel like the lighthouse--watching the insanity unfold before me, feeling, such a pity that they will all crash upon the rocks and end in ruin--but that, it should be their own fault. Let's just say this, it's not like I didn't warn them.

So, I have decided to retire (semi-permanently) my Advocatus Atheist blog.

What does this mean? It means, I do not intend to devote time here when I should be spending time elsewhere. Does this mean I am through blogging? Of course not, I will always have the itch to write. But I have ranted and raved, critiqued and criticized, and thrown up protest after reasoned protest against religion and those that blindly follow it, and have tried my best to sponsor skepticism, critical thinking, and scientific mindedness over the past couple of years. I will continue to do so, but in a much more limited fashion.

There are a couple reasons for this shift in priorities.

First, it seems I have said all that I can say. Religion is, no doubt about it, man-made. All religion is. This is more than evident. "Revealed" religion is nothing but a scam, and I can say this with confidence because if it wasn't a scam, if it were at all real, then there would be REAL noticeable evidence for its truth--and ALL the evidence we have is, at best, anecdotal--and so cannot be considered the be proof to validate the claims of the religious. It merely seems, at least to me, a psychological hang-up of the religious--who haven't, in most cases, questioned their beliefs.

Meanwhile, religions like Christianity, Islam, and Judaism simply cannot answer for certain philosophical lines of inquiry or stand up properly to proper scrutiny, which they should if they were real. I'm not talking about the general criticisms of religion, I am talking about hard hitting arguments such as the Problem of Evil, the Problem of Divine Hiddeness, Ignosticism, Theological Noncognitivism, Coherentism, Evidentialism, and a whole lot of others, which by my estimation, religion has completely failed to adequately meet.

At the same time, science is doing a fine job of answering the questions about our possible origins and the possible events which better reveal the world to us, through honest investigation and experiment. Religion doesn't do this. Religion merely offers plausible accounts which only become plausible when you make room for a metaphysical worldview that blatantly shirks the responsibility of doing the empirical work required for any of it to actually matter. In other words, I find the supernatural claims of religions to be erroneous--in point of fact because they are lazy--and this impediment is so large that I simply cannot find such claims deserving of any further attention on my part.

I have said all that I feel I need to say at this time.

Secondly, as I work toward my goal of publishing my novels, and making a career out of writing (much harder to do than it sounds), I have come to realize that blogging has become a distraction from my real work. Blogging, sadly, doesn't net any revenue. One needs hundreds of thousands of daily readers and hundreds of ads before their blog generates any money. Having a few published books might help toward that end, but at the same time, the things I want to write are so wholly different from what I like to blog about that they compete for time. Since blogging is the easier form of writing, I tend to fall back on that instead of finishing the next chapter or my book, editing that final page, or getting the cover art just right. The distraction, it seems, is only hurting me in the long run. Books sell. Blogs don't. So I need to start focusing more on that which will benefit me and my family, instead of simply preaching to the choir.

But like I said, this only only semi-permanent. If I have something to say, that I believe is vitally important, then I will blog about it. Right now, I have a huge library of archived content which many have found extremely beneficial, helpful, and thought provoking. I will leave it up so that others might find it and that in itself will be a good.

The things I will not be doing much of is responding to every comment. This will probably kill the blog dead, as the lack of discussion will allow the blog to linger, stagnate, then grow stale as people move elsewhere in search of something more lively, thriving, and sociable.

I just don't have the time to engage in-depth debates and discussion like I used to. Although I would love to continue doing so, it's just not in my best interest to do so.

I will be doing a hell of a lot more writing in the fiction area though. So if you miss my blog presence, heave over to my author page to read about my most recent writing adventures. In the next couple of years I intend to do a lot of publishing.

I am finishing up the sequel to my zombie book Bitten, BITTEN 2: Land of the Rising Dead. Which will be followed by a third installment, BITTEN 3: Kingdom of the Living Dead. I just completed a short-story which fits right into the first Bitten story. I am currently plotting the third novel, as I complete the final chapters of the second. Additionally, I have plotted out a science fiction series called Daughter of Sol, which I'll begin writing sometime next year. It's my most ambitious project yet, and I wanted to sharpen my skills as a writer, and get all the publishing skills under my belt, before I even attempted it. 

I currently have three stand alone projects, which I want to begin sometime this year if possible. The first one is a non-fiction piece which collects the deconversion essays of some of my closest atheist friends, bloggers, and apostates. It will be titled Letting Go of God: Stories and Reflections about the Crisis of Losing Faith. Those of you who have contributed, don't worry, the project is alive and kicking! I just need more time to work on it, which is another reason I must ween my blogging habits.

The second stand alone project is a realistic science fiction called Painless which deals with the repercussions of modern nano-technology, bio-engineering, genetics, and DNA based computers. My idea is to write about humanity's success in eradicating pain completely using technology, and then following that simple premise to see the moral and physical repercussions of how it will impact the world, the human race. Needless to say, my outlook of what the world would look like if such a feat was accomplished isn't very optimistic.

Last, but not least, I am going to write a partly autobiographical but mostly fictionalization of my life in Japan. The plot is going to loosely follow how I came to Japan, met my wife, and all the crazy and funny cultural things that have happened to me since living in Japan. But it will be packaged as a fiction so I can take liberty with the humor, exaggeration, and write the characters in a way that is more compelling. It will be written kind of like a memoir, but only some of it will be true to my experience, the rest will build off my experiences as I imagine my experiences going off in different directions and exploring the "what-if" element to them. This book is titled Seasons of Heisei.

As you can clearly see, my plate is full for the next five years or so. Which means I will not be blogging regularly anytime in the immediate future. Like I said though, this isn't a vacation. I'm not burned out, however, on top of feeling like I have said everything I need to at this time, I just don't have the same luxury of time I once enjoyed before I started a full-time writing career.

Just a friendly reminder, my novel BITTEN: A Resurrection Thriller and the supplemental short story BITTEN: After Dark are both available for sale on Amazon.com.

Sincerely,

Tristan Vick
The Advocatus Atheist