A Few Quick Thoughts

I was out of town for a few days, and didn't have time to prepare today's regular post (normal bible reading will resume tomorrow). But I figured I'd just throw together a quick post about some things I've been thinking about lately.

First of all the Christian commentaries I have been adding for the last week. I like it a lot. In July I tried a thing where I wanted to provide some idea of what Christians might think of a passage. It didn't work well, because I was trying to think of how I would have analyzed things from when I was a Christian, which is when I was a kid. It just didn't work. This seems like a better version of that. The only downside is that it is very time consuming, I like the idea of doing my post and reactions first, then afterwards reading what the Christians have to say and responding to that. But this means I have to do a whole separate pass at the reading. Ideally I would be able to read the whole commentary for the chapter written by a Christian, but I don't think that's really realistic. Instead I am going to only focus on parts I have a problem with or a question. This unfortunately also limits which commentaries I can effectively use as format is important, I need to be able to get to a specific part of their commentary quickly. I've found a few that I like, I've also found a few that would be great, but their format doesn't work well for me. Currently, I'm looking at bible explained and blue letter bible as well as ewordtoday thanks to TWF. If anyone knows additional sites that they like please let me know.

The podcast is going very well, in my opinion it makes the blog better, because while preparing for it I have discovered details that I don't think I would have found otherwise. I also have quite enjoyed doing it, and surprisingly, it is not terribly time consuming as I had initially feared it might be. At some point I had worried that the content of the blog and podcast were too similar and nobody would want to read and listen. After a conversation with Grundy, I decided that this is a feature and not a bug. There will be little bits that will be unique to each for sure, but for the most part things I care about will be in both the blog and on the podcast. This allows people to get roughly the same content whichever way they choose, and indeed people can mix and match as it fits their schedule. I used to commute 3 days a week, I can imagine listening to the podcast on those days and reading on the alternate days for example.

Some of you might have noticed I have been adding more things in my "summaries" posts. Originally I had wanted them to be very short and sweet, really just the most important or significant stuff and leave out the more nitpicky detailed stuff. I have been leaning toward more detail lately because of the way I have been using it, I use it for reference. I will often have a vague recollection of something I read about a while ago and I want to find the post, I can use the overview label and then to a page find for the phrase. If I have it in my overviews I can get to my post quickly. Since this is a primary use of the overview post I want them as detailed as possible. I still don't want to clutter them too much, but I'm leaning toward putting more there.

Finally, just some musings on the future of the blog. I have genuinely been enjoying reading the bible (not sure how much it shows). It can be infuriating, but it is also very informative and I have always been intrigued by religion in general. Once I finish the new testament my plan was always to go back and do the old testament. My posts and style already look so much different than when I started, part of me wants to go back and redo some of my original posts. I think after I finish OT I will at least want to do the first 4 books again, the Jesus stuff certainly deserves a second look, I already know so much more about these things I'd like to see what my second impression is. So after OT I'll dig at least a little way back into the NT a second time. We are already talking about 5 years out probably, as I like this level of detail which requires this slow pace, but after that I suppose the next thing to tackle would be either the Koran or the book of Mormon, although if I could somehow get my hands on the holy book scientologists use I'd definitely go with that one.

Well, this wound up much longer than I intended, oh well.