Where I Stand
The post that stopped me was about terrorism.
I wrote it around 2016, in my militant-atheist years, and its argument fit in one sentence: religion makes it easy to accept preposterous ideas, and then to die for them. It was confident and tidy, with no room for nuance, and I believed every word of it at the time.
It didn’t make the move. Neither did a lot of the posts I wrote in that voice.
Until recently I ran three separate sites: one for philosophy, one for what I was reading, and one for development. They’re now one site, this one, and moving everything across meant rereading all of it. Seventeen years of posts, the oldest a 2009 piece on CSS shorthand.
Why one site
I merged them because I thought I had too many hobbies. Each site needed new posts, and I felt the pressure to keep all three going. I couldn’t just say “I’m going to work on my blog”, because I had three. Whichever one I picked, the other two were left out and quietly going out of date.
In reality there was only ever one hobby. Debugging is asking whether the code does what I think it does. Reviewing a book is asking whether it shows what it claims. Philosophy is asking whether an argument survives its best objection. It’s one habit, checking whether something holds, pointed at three different things. Three sites made it look like three hobbies, and three hobbies felt like three obligations.
So if you came here for one of the three and found the other two alongside it, that’s the point. Within a single week in September, this site published a post on joining on multiple columns in Entity Framework and another on whether an unchanging God can answer a prayer. It’s the same hobby both times. And when I say I’m going to work on my blog now, I finally mean all of it.
What came across
Most of it came across as it was, and the development archive is the easy case. The oldest posts here are CSS tips, PHP tutorials and Cisco router configuration, most of it from 2009 to 2012. None of that is wrong, just old, and a dated tutorial is safe to keep because its date does the warning for it. Nobody reads a 2010 PHP walkthrough as current advice.
An argument has no such label. It reads as what I think now, whenever it was written. That’s why the philosophy posts needed sorting in a way the development posts didn’t.
Some held up better than I expected. In 2017 I argued that search engines aren’t foolproof, because they rank for relevance rather than truth. It was a tech post whose real subject was how we decide what’s true, and it aged well enough to earn a sequel about AI.
Others needed work, for different reasons. Why Atheists Speak Out kept its argument and lost about half its words. My 2016 page speed tips got a 2026 successor, because the tools had moved on. And the post in this series about being an atheist became Why I’m an Agnostic, because I had. Development posts get rebuilt when the tools change. Philosophy posts get rebuilt when I do.
The rebuilding was done with AI assistance, and those posts say so at the bottom. The decisions about what stayed, what changed and what went were mine.
What didn’t
Most of what stayed behind wasn’t worth rebuilding. One post had a single paragraph worth keeping, about who gets to speak for a culture, and it grew into an essay of its own.
The terrorism post had nothing like that. Its explanation was satisfying if you already thought religion was the problem, which is exactly why I never checked it. If it were the whole story, the most devout would be the most dangerous, since they’d have absorbed the most of those ideas.
The people who actually studied terrorists found something closer to the opposite. In 2008, MI5’s behavioural science unit analysed several hundred people involved in terrorism in Britain. Many didn’t practise their faith regularly, many were religious novices, and a well-established religious identity seemed to protect against radicalisation rather than drive it. In 2016, the Associated Press went through thousands of leaked Islamic State entry forms and found about seventy per cent of recruits listed as having only “basic” knowledge of Islamic law, the lowest option on the form. And the anthropologist Scott Atran, whose book Talking to the Enemy draws on years of interviews with militants, sums up what he found: in the end, people don’t kill for a cause. They “kill and die for each other.”
The preposterous ideas are often there by the end, and so is the hate. They’re much less often what starts it. The more common beginnings are ordinary: friends who are already involved, a grievance someone finally takes seriously, the promise of mattering. The doctrine and the hatred tend to be taught afterwards, by the group, rather than brought to it. Religion isn’t innocent in any of this, since it can supply the story, the enemy and the permission. But it’s rarely why someone walks in the door.
What persuaded me at the time was an argument from Sam Harris: non-violence sits at the very core of Jainism, and you don’t find Jain terrorists, so what a religion teaches must decide what its extremists do. There’s something to it, and it’s the point I just conceded: a tradition can hand its extremists a script, or refuse to. But it proves much less than I let it. Buddhism teaches non-violence too, and Buddhist nationalists, monks among them, have still stirred up deadly mob violence against Muslims in Myanmar and Sri Lanka. And when the political scientist Robert Pape counted the world’s suicide attacks from 1980 to 2003, the group behind more of them than any other was the Tamil Tigers, a Marxist movement openly hostile to religion. What a religion teaches does matter. It just matters later, and less, than I thought.
So what was wrong with that post, and plenty of others from those years, wasn’t only the conclusion. It was how I got there. I took a complicated behaviour, found the one cause I already disliked, borrowed an argument that seemed to settle it, and stopped looking. The MI5 findings had been in the news for years by then. That’s the checking habit from earlier, switched off for exactly the claims I most wanted to be true.
Where this leaves the series
This is the fourth part of Where I Stand, and in a way it explains the other three. Part one, part two and the agnosticism post each take a label I’d use for myself and work out what it actually commits me to. Moving the site made me do the same with seventeen years of writing at once: not what I call myself, but what I’d still sign.
That’s the standard for the archive now. Every argument still on this site should be one I’d defend today, and when one stops being defensible, it gets rebuilt or it goes. I can’t promise I’ll always keep up. I have a job, this is a hobby, and turning it back into an obligation would undo the reason I merged the sites in the first place.
If you only came for one of the three, the menu splits them into it, thinking and reading, and each section has its own feed. The series page is the best map of everything else.
Written with AI assistance.
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