Welcome!

Welcome to Expanding the Proscenium! Partly, this blog is skin hunger 2.0. Partly, it is something else. When I started skin hunger, I didn't really know what I wanted it to be. But several months of writing and thinking have done a lot to clarify things for me, and thus Expanding the Proscenium is born.

I am an atheist, but this isn't, quite, an atheist blog. It is about the deeper, more interesting, and more important, issue: Reason vs. Faith.

Carl Sagan wrote, in Pale Blue Dot, that

Cover via Amazon

Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

That's what this blog is about. It is about expanding that "tidy anthropocentric proscenium." It is about Reason, and the poverty of Faith. It is about growing our imaginations to match the scale of the universe. Art, science, geeky fandom, philosophy, you name it -- it'll have a place here, as long as it challenges us to expand the proscenium of the theater of our minds.

I hope you'll join me on this journey! In the meantime, please pardon the dust. Everything will soon be up and running properly!