Housecleaning completed

After the usual procrastination, I've finished the job of culling old, unwanted posts. I left in the ones that I think may still be of interest, as well as a few that I just happen to like. 

My criteria for elimination were pretty straightforward. In general. I deleted posts that ... 

• dealt with transient political issues, without raising any larger philosophical questions
• existed only to publicize a link that is now defunct 
• advertised upcoming events, now long forgotten
• promoted my non-paranormal books 

I did not check the links in posts that had enough relevant content to stand on their own. Doing so would have been an endless job. No doubt there are many expired links, but as long as a post still had something to offer, I left it in. 

I also tried to clean up the weird formatting that plagued the earliest posts. 

With a handful of exceptions, I did not delete posts merely because I now disagree with them. My opinions have changed considerably over the years. Today I'm not inclined to explain away reincarnation as possession or errant ESP, as I was at first. I'm also less inclined to see the Bible as a valuable tool of spiritual insight. In the early years of this blog, I was influenced by conservative New Testament scholars like N.T. Wright, with the result that I tried to find a historical underpinning to Gospel stories wherever possible. I now think those stories were mostly invented by ardent believers who combed the Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament) for "prophecies" of the messiah and then incorporated those details into the life of Jesus. 

I was quite obsessed with Ayn Rand in the first few years. Though I had broken with her philosophy, Objectivism, I was still in the process of, so to speak, "deprogramming" myself. I was probably overly hard on her as I worked to escape any remaining hold her ideas had on me. 

My attitude toward mediumship, life after death, etc., was pretty wishy-washy in the beginning. In some of the earlier posts I make more concessions toward skepticism than I would now. 

I haven't looked at the comment threads. Reviewing them would take forever. There have been many, many excellent comments, and there have also been some that were irrelevant, silly, or even crazy. In the early years I did not use comment moderation, so everything got published, including stuff that moderation would have blocked.

Naturally, the fact that a comment appears somewhere in this blog does not mean that I agree with it. I don't even agree with all of my own opinions anymore, much less the opinions of other people!