The Blog Against Theocracy Blogswarm

One of the fallouts from being so wrapped up in the final week of library access was missing the opportunity to participate in this Easter Weekend consciousness raising blogging event, The Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm sponsered by Blue Gal, Mock Paper Scissors, Neural Gourmet, and Talk2Action. Participants were to post on the theme at least once over the weekend and then email their link to BlueGal who would then post it on the BAT blog. There was such a huge response she is still busy getting the links posted. I discovered the project too late to participate as it was already after midnight Sunday when I surfed onto Orcinus, one of my regular haunts and encountered the meme for the first time in Sara's sunday post. I followed the link there to the BAT site and went on from there to T2A where I read several of the participating posts.

I considered knocking off a quick post and setting the timestamp back a couple of hours but my conscience wouldn't let me. Besides which I knew that knocking off quick posts is not my forte. I was exhausted from the day's family activities. And I still had over a hundred pages left to read in that novel, the last library book, which needed to be in the bookdrop by nine in the morning. So I returned my attention to the novel but my thoughts continued to return to the BAT blogswarm throughout the night and the next day. This evening I decided that the least I could do was write a post pointing to the project and do my small part to help promote it. Even though the weekend swarm is over, there are more than a few amazingly written and cogently thought out posts among the participants which will not loose their relevance in the passing of a few days, or even weeks.

I also want to make a point of saluting Talk2Action, a community site which is focused on this issue every day and features posts from a number of seasoned journalists and researchers. T2A requires a free registration in order to comment (not to just read tho) but that registration also allows the member to maintain their own diary on the site. I signed up with them last month in order to post a comment but by the time I got through the registration process I had forgotten what I wanted to say. Sigh. But I have been planning ever since to start keeping a diary there once this library thing was behind me. When I do start posting at T2A I will crosspost here at Joystory. The value of posting at T2A is the ability to participate in a dialog and get feedback from a likeminded community which is more about educating and finding solutions than it is about fear mongering or spluttering ones frustrations into the blogosphere. The threat of theocracy and the gradual erroding of the laws protecting liberty of conscience and the integrity of acedimic research are still themes that monopolize a great deal of my thought and I suppose they will for the foreseeable future. Well over half of the books I still had out last week touched on this theme in one way or another.

There is already talk of making the Blog Against Theocracy blogswarm an annual event. Personaly I think once a year is far from enough.