Okay, I’m gonna try and reign it in a little on the politics stuff for a couple days. I just had to get a lot of that out of my system. I’ve gotta get back to writing these articles in preparation for my book on religion. The political stuff has definitely taught me a lot though, about how people use stories to influence each other, and all the arguing has renewed my interest in what happens when people collide whose story-systems don’t match up. These are all important areas which I need to give a lot more thought to how to crack them. Maybe I’ll do that by gaining some perspective.

I have this problem with things where I get really caught up in a certain way of thinking for a while and it starts to affect my brain. Everything gets cast in that light. It’s why I can’t do computer programming as a job. Because it fucks my mind up. I remember back when I was learning to code in ASP that I had this really elaborate dream before waking up for work that I was writing a function which would allow me to automatically set the snooze button several minutes back. I’ve also had dreams where I was zoomed into file in photoshop to 1600%, and was editing pixel-by-pixel. This is just the way my mind works when it’s trying to figure out things that are important.

But now I’m gonna get back to the preparation for the book. I wrote one really good piece today - amidst all the ranting and raving - about Myth, Ritual & Belief. In case you’re late to the game, here are all the other items in this series - in the order they fit, roughly. I’m hoping that by lining them all up like this, I’ll figure out what my next step with them is.

1. Anatomy of a Story-System (radical diagram)
2. How people relate to stories (good diagram)
3. How stories are modified by transmission (w/ pretty good diagram)
4. Version Control
5. Canon, Apocrypha & Centralized Distribution
6. Contemporary Apocryphal Culture
7. What is religious fundamentalism?
8. Fundamentalism 2: Brand Identity & Cultural Immune Systems
9. Types of Religions (features a kickass diagram)
10. Myth, Ritual & Belief

Now that I see them all together, I realize the organization and presentation of the overall idea needs to shift in a few places, but overall, I’m pretty proud and excited about the whole thing. Anyway, I’d love to have some comments from people who are interested in this stuff, because I’ve put a lot of work into it so far and received virtually no feedback. I realize its sort of outside the realm of what most people are interested in, but if you have some time on your hands, do some reading, and tell me what you think. Who knows, if I like how you approach it, maybe I’ll even tap you to be one of my readers when I put together my draft manuscript in another month or two.