OK, it’s almost a year since I grabbed this blog name and I’m finally ready to start some posting. I have a feeling that if I’m lucky enough to have readers and comments I’m going to spend a lot of time going over rules for how I want this blog to work, so I’m going to put stuff in this post which will perhaps evolve over time.

I’m interested in SF/F and I’m interested in religion. My religion is Judaism, I’m against labels, but it’s fairly safe to label me as orthodox. I’m interested in hearing viewpoints of other religions, not particularly in an effort to convince me that one or another is correct (as a friend said to me the other day, that’s kind of like saying “I don’t believe in unicorns but I want to show you why I do believe in leprechauns”), but rather to see how they deal with modern day (or future) issues.

One thing I love about science fiction is the opportunity to speculate on the consequences of (as yet) impossible technologies. Books and books have been written examining, for example, the moral implications of murder when consciousness is ‘backed up” in some storage and can be reloaded into a new body (see Altered Carbon for just a recent example) or the definition of “humanity” if animals have their intelligence raised (like the Uplift books by David Brin). I think that the discussions about these stories can, if treated well, help us to better understand our current situation too.

So, I want to start discussions on subject which interest me in the religious sphere, by asking sci-fi kind of questions about them. My hope is that some sort of discussion will lead to a better understanding of our current views too. Another hope is that reading any of the future posts will give you an idea what I am on about. If any turn out to be particularly good, I may link here so you can see what I think of as a good discussion.

If your basic attitude is “well, all religion is nonsense and you’re arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin”, I’m very happy to respect you opinion, and admit that this blog is probably not going to be for you.

If you have an axe to grind about how your strain of Judaism (or Christianity or Islam or Pastafarianism) is better than someone else’s, and how their path is just leading to destruction for all mankind. I would respectfully ask you to leave it at the door. I can’t find a superlative strong enough for how much I don’t care.

You don’t have to be super knowledgeable in my religion (or your own) to comment and have an opinion here,  but I’m really interested in people who can support opinions with “chapter and verse” rather than the current internet metric of “I reckon”.

In a discussion between intelligent people about a subject as complicated and divisive as religion and its practice, disagreement is set to abound. I’m very happy with that. Please respect everyone else and I’ll do my best to police out anyone who gets out of hand. I can only promise that my decisions will be absolutely arbitrary and subjective.

I imagine I will add more here as I think of it.