Blech! Just the other day, I said that I wanted to write more and, to that end, I would try to be more spontaneous. As the former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, might say, “How’s that spontaneity thingy workin’ out fer ya?” I’ll tell you how that’s working out, I’ve written 1200 words of a post today and got burned out by fact checking.

For the first time since I started this blog, a couple of days ago I deleted a comment. As I mentioned in that post, “A Comment I Almost Made,” the final leg on my journey to a skeptical viewpoint was learning to take received wisdom about health and “wellness” with a major grain of salt. I have no idea why health issues are relegated to the lifestyle section of the newspaper and covered in the media with less rigor than “hard” news. The commenter was understandably unhappy. I’m not sure there is a polite way of deleting a comment. However, I’ve heard that when people are presented with false information, they retain it even after hearing a correction. Somewhere in the box of papers in which I threw everything that was sitting on my desk the last time I moved there is some notes from a lecture I went to go hear in which a philosopher was discussing the question of how we know what we know and he seemed especially disturbed by the spread of false information on the internet. On a similar note, the website of the magazine Popular Science shut down its comment section. However, one of the reasons I wanted to start a blog was to reach out to people and I have not found commenters on this site to be uncivil.

So, if someone makes an incorrect claim, unintentionally in this case, what should I do?

Anyway, I’m still chewing over this incident because I’m not entirely comfortable with it. Beyond that, I had to ask myself the question, “Was I right.” Because if I’m going to delete comments over facts, as opposed to opinions, then my facts should be correct.

So I started to write a post about diet and skepticism and it’s turning out to be a much bigger job than I thought, even though it’s quasi-autobiographical as almost all my posts are.

Anyway, that’s where I am at the moment.

I wouldn’t have started a blog if I was just going to post frivolous stuff, but on the other hand writing serious stuff is time-consuming.

A week or two ago, I came across a blog post in which a woman debated the merits of correcting people on the internet. She was referring to things that are easily checked with a quick search on the internet. I was sympathetic to what she had to say having five minutes earlier just corrected someone who claimed that there had been no slavery in Canada. Although it was never an integral part of the economy, a quick search on the internet will bring you to a page on Wikipedia with a brief summary. I already knew this fact because my ex-husband’s cousin had done research on their family and had it privately printed in a book, which I read. One of their ancestors had owned a slave. Also, I once watched a documentary on CBC about blacks in Canada. Slavery in Canada was mentioned. Although my ex-husband’s ancestor was not mentioned by name, the slave he had owned, Olivier le Jeune, was.

However, if you’ve ever gotten into a dispute on the internet, you probably know that even fetching easy to find links is time-consuming. If you’re trying to find reliable information on something a little more controversial, as I was doing earlier today (well, yesterday morning), it can be quite time-consuming. So I wound up not putting up the post I intended to put up today:

Banned Books Week: What Should I Read?

Didn’t like the list over at the website of the organization that’s promoting Banned Books Week. Actually, if you read the fine print, it’s banned and “challenged” books. This is a different list from the one promoted by Banned Books Week. I found it over at OCLC. It’s a list of books that are on both their “Top 1000” list and have been frequently challenged, so it contains more classics. Still, I thought it might be fun to read something but I haven’t decided what yet. Pardon me for getting lazy with the formatting halfway down the list. Actually, there’s 120 books on the list and I’ve only typed the first ninety-nine. The ones with an “x”, I’ve already read.

Now, suddenly, I’ve been doing some reading on nutrition and my reading plans for the week may have changed. Still, if you’ve read any of the books I haven’t and would like to make a plug for them, please go ahead.

…which I think means that I have to be more spontaneous if I don’t want blogging to take over my life. Right now, I have three or four posts I’ve started within the past week that I haven’t finished because they involve double checking some facts. Believe it or not, I do try to do that before posting, or I indicate when I’m speaking off the cuff. I know that I’m as subject to biases as anyone else, but I try to check things. After all, I don’t want to continue to hold beliefs that are untrue.

So I feel a bit torn. For instance, I read a short historical article the other day and it made me think of a few other things I’ve read in the past. I began to write about it, but then I figured that I should check and make sure I remembered what I read years ago correctly. It’s just a matter of rereading a chapter of a book that I read about a decade or so ago, but I haven’t been in the mood and the post is just sitting there.

There’s a question that I’ve tossed around with my sister a few times recently. I’ve said many times recently that I don’t remember religion as being important during my childhood. I keep asking her if I’m remembering things correctly. She assures me that I am, or that my memories parallel her experiences. Some people have suggested that I grew up in a marginal subculture. I guess that’s possible, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. It seems to me that people who were raised in a fundamentalist household that limited or policed their interaction with people of other backgrounds were in a more marginal subculture.

It was only about five years ago when I realized quite how freaky fundamentalist Christianity is. One day, I was listening to Earth Wind and Fire and I was singing along with the music when I realized that the words I thought I heard in “Serpentine Fire” were a little weird and I decided to look up the song on the internet if it really said, “Going to tell a story, Morning Glory, wow, about the Serpentine Fire.” Now, I thought about it, and having read Foucault’s Pendulum right after reading The Name of The Rose way back when, the possibility that it could be about the Serpent Kundalini crossed my mind. Now, admittedly, that goes along pretty well with ankhs and the Egyptian symbolism that Earth Wind and Fire used. Still, I was flabbergasted, really totally blown away, when I came across a site that said that “Christians” shouldn’t listen to Earth Wind and Fire because of the pagan symbolism. Wow. I’m sorry that I have put scare quotes around Christian in that previous sentence, but if your church tells you that there are things you shouldn’t listen to or shouldn’t read you belong to a cult, not a mainstream religion.

I think there are a lot of these cults out there that fly under the radar because they call themselves “Christian” and members of the mainstream culture don’t think to question it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Earth Wind and Fire is “harmless”, exactly, because if art and music can be credited with affecting the way people perceive the world good art can’t be anodyne, still, it was widely popular. According to Wikipedia, Earth Wind and Fire was the first African-American band to sell out Madison Square Garden in New York City.

There were ways in which my childhood was not mainstream and I like to think I know what they are. For instance, as a teenager, I watched late night drag shows on the far west side of Manhattan from the lighting booth. Not typical. I know that. However, when people seem to suggest that having sex with my high school sweetheart or not going to church is indication of having grown up in a marginal subculture, it really makes me feel a little disoriented.

According to the Center for Disease Control in the U.S., in nineteen eighty-eight, fifty-one percent of girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen reported being sexually active. I graduated from high school in the early eighties, not the late eighties, but that was the best I could do with a quick search. It’s apparently declined significantly since then, which most people probably think is a good thing, but I would disagree. Self-reporting differs from the actual numbers, but it seems that the majority of Americans don’t go to church regularly.

Aw, damn. I looked that up. I’m already wrecking my intention of being more spontaneous.

I actually have a pretty good memory. Another way in which I was not mainstream: I didn’t take drugs and I didn’t drink until I was seventeen or eighteen. I’m not going to look this up to confirm this so you’ll just have to take my word for it: I once saw a graph of drug use among high school students and the peak was my sister’s cohort, one year ahead of me. I remember casual drug use as being rampant in New Jersey around 1980.

So, when I’m told I don’t know things I’m pretty sure I do know, it’s disorienting and it makes me want to withdraw.