A Real Resource for People Who Are Interested in New Ideas About the Origins of Religion

It is Friday so I wanted to write a little short note to my readers, thanking them for participating in this little venture.  It would be of course impossible to expect that I would ever attract enough bloggers to be come a 'champion Biblioblogger.'  We have a very elite group of readers here.  The topics are very esoteric without being 'new age.'  And let's face it - most of the other bloggers are cheating.  They are do not really engage in any serious discussions or promote any new ideas about the origins of Christianity.  They are better described as Bibliosocial Blogs or perhaps social blogs for religious-minded people who have no social life. 

I mean let's be frank.  There is an incestuous community of 'Bibliobloggers' who have no friends, no life and are very ugly and so spend their time pretending that what they do actually constitutes something meaningful.  It certainly does not.  It is basically a small fraternity of religious-minded people who recycle news stories and old, stale views about 'faith' and religion.  There's a place for that I guess but it has no intellectual value.  It is one step above watching Keeping up with the Kardashians.

To this end, I was thinking today about starting a serious ranking of so-called 'Biblioblogs' in which there was a limit of one 'news story' per month.  I mean have you ever seen most of these sites.  It is just endless recycling of other people's news.  They add one line which represents an attempt at humor or somehow to make it seem topical or timely and then 'link' the story that they get from a newsfeed somewhere.  As I said there is a place for that, but there is also a place apparently for fully scripted shows which pretend to be 'reality TV.' 

I have never seen a value in any of this.  Yet that isn't to say that there aren't a lot of great resources out there for people interested in new information and new ideas.  I don't happen to keep a blogroll but I follow a wide spectrum of sites.  I read Roger Pearse's site every day as well as Vridar, Jesus Granskad and even a number of blogs run by monastic orders.  I used to love reading Timo's site but he is only prepared to return to blogging in December. 

I am very seriously considering establishing a list of serious bloggers who don't abuse Facebook and Twitter with endless links to stories that aren't there own.  That would mean no Jim West, no Joel Watts and the rest of that portly gang of thugs.  There will always be a place for this type of social media but there should also be a resource for smart people who happened to be interested in new ideas about religion.  I wouldn't break it down in terms of being 'athiest' or 'theist.'  I means these are the kinds of people whose ancestors would be running Jews and blacks out of town a few generations ago.  Now they get they get to get to have a megaphone and link to articles written by smart people to disguise their true nature. 

The true test to me is untimeliness.  Is any going to ever find anything written at sites like 'Unsettled Christianity' of value in a years time, ten years time other than a testimony to what lonely people did at the beginning of the twenty-first century?  Say what you want, in the two thousand five hundred posts we established in the last two years, we have a ton of useful information ranging from why Rabbi Meyer changed his name from Mayesha to whether or not the Letter to Theodore is really a hoax.  I have had the priveledge of having a lot of excellent teachers on many different continents and they taught me about a lot of interesting stuff ranging from the beliefs and habits of the Samaritans, the Coptic tradition, the Marcionites and yes, the crypto-Jews of Europe and Asia Minor. 

There are a lot of other excellent sites like this one out there.  I think it might be useful to provide a monthly ranking and highlight some of the excellent work that is being done in the blogsphere.  I was thinking of calling the Hypomnemata Rankings because really all the serious blogs represent the 'mental notes' of thinkers who might or might not be remembered in the future.  I am sure that this blog will end up at the bottom of that list in terms of popularity but that would sit just fine with me.  It's all about the truth.  There will always be the kind of people who want to joing a 'Bibliosocial network' and then there is Plato, Aristotle, St. Mark and Nietzsche.