Still looking for ways to improve the blogroll

Looking at a couple of recent additions, as I delve in:

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I can't remember where I saw "The Amateur Exegete," but I thought he looked promising at first.

He looks less and less so now.

He has a critical approach to scholarship, but it's on the conservative side of that. To use a "name" on the New Testament side? He's James McGrath level, probably.

His Aug. 24 roundup? (He hosts some sort of critical religious thinking blog roundup, or hosts it for himself) Believing in the historicity of Moses? At least he presents the modern critical conventional POV.

His Aug. 17 roundup? Worse, with the last entry, who he admitted in comment exchange is a personal friend:

Blogger καταπέτασμα writes about the Matthean narrative’s guarded tomb and argues that the story seems to suggest Pilate was aiming to kill a resurrected Jesus if push came to shove.

I clicked through, and while it's bad, it's arguably NOT the worse that guy has written.

That said, the roundups do give me a few connections. That's where I saw the idiotic new Testimonium Flavianum book, including a free PDF. 

A Sept. 11 post? He linked to the odious Tim O'Neill with No. 16 in his series of "Great Myths." I told this dude that O'Neill's greatest myth was his self promoted myth denying papal antisemitism. So far, he hasn't responded.

His Sept. 21 roundup? Links to reviews of multiple evangelical bible commentaries etc. This is NOT a blog carnival; it's a personal roundup, like the ones above.

I had thought he was an atheist, but reading his "about" more carefully, he's a None. He says his goal is to promote better biblical understanding. And he's not doing it, not IMO.

So that I don't forget about free books, I may move him to my links list but delete him from the blogroll feed. 

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Through a Bible Darkly is good, from what I can see — but posts so rarely.

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Markus Vincent is here to see how much he discusses other issues besides his "heterodox" take on Marcion vs Luke. 

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Thoughts on Papyrus is a lot more into fiction than I am and may move to the links list. 

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Atheology has been removed, period. As I read through it more, the author has much more of his own confusion than he claims "philosophers" have. 

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I have added ResoluteReader, who seems a lot more of what I'm looking for. Reads more nonfiction than Papyrus, and the same broad vein as I do. Well, sort of. He is some sort of Marxist, which this leftist definitely is not. For example, I would never try to situate environmentalism within even a semi-Marxist framework.

Funerals and obits: The quick and the dead

Per the header, and per the old saying about funerals being for the living, not the dead, the same is true, maybe even true in spades, for obituaries.

(Note: Throughout this, I intend to use the word “dead” as much as possible. “Departed” or similar will be used as necessary for linguistic variance. The words “passed” or “passed on,” except for this reference quote, will be avoided like the plague. I “love” how much they’re used in obits, especially by theoretically rock-solid conservative Christians. Last I checked, Paul said: “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” No “passed on” nor a Hellenestic world equivalent euphemism.)

As a newspaper editor, I first learned that professionally several years ago when, at the site I was at then, two different family members submitted different obits for the same recently dead loved one.

I can’t remember if both were created by a funeral home, one by a funeral home and the other personally written, or if both were family written. The newspaper wound up accepting both, then our publisher checked in with the home office of our small chain about long-term policy.

I have since then experienced that both professionally and personally with the same obit.

A couple of years after I got to my current site, I got my owner to agree to charge for the extra length on “overlength” obits. In other words, a basic length obir would still be free, but, if you wanted to go more than 850 or so words, which is one-quarter of a newspaper page, you’d pay for anything over that length, with the extra, in terms of newspaper column inches, being billed at the same rate as a display ad.

Well, a 97-year-old, who had worked at this newspaper for 70-plus years, including four part-time years overlapping with me, primarily in the small print shop we still run, died recently. And, his one granddaughter, who had written about 1,500 words two years ago for his wife, which we let pass, turned in 3,300 or so.

A lot of people liked and loved Alvin. Was it universal? At least about a certain baseline level of affection? No.

Frankly, an obit that long comes off as ostentatious, at least to me. And, they knew we’d run it.

There’s a corporate chain in the county seat, and an enhanced shopper there. Both charge from the get-go on all obits, and I’m sure the family didn’t pay for a full-length one at either place.

It’s an adjunct to other observations I have made about small town life.

One is that “The smaller the bone, the more two dogs fight over it."

The other is that income inequality, and a parallel, which I shall call social inequality, can be more pronounced in small towns than in big cities. The rich guy who owns an oil drilling company may live only a few blocks away from a trailer park.

And by small town, I’m talking not under 15,000, but under 5,000. I realize this is alien territory to the great majority of Americans.

And, in towns this size, when someone appears that beloved, those who don’t think so aren’t so comfortable with saying so. 

This ties in with the theme of this site in that psychology is in some ways an offshoot of philosophy, and that would include social psychology. (Contra Walter Kaufman and whatever the man himself might have said, David Hume, not Friedrich Nietzsche, was the world’s first psychologist, at least in some ways.)

Even more, per my “per the living,” it ties directly to a main theme here in being about secularism and metaphysical naturalism. When a person is dead, they no longer exist, so funerals and obituaries have to be “for” the living. They are “about” the dead, but that’s it. Ditto for celebrations of life, whatever the metaphysical beliefs the deceased held, and their family and friends still hold.

And, with that and critical revision, my reference to the Apostles' Creed and the old King James Version-style English of "the quick and the dead."