Trying to see through the fog with my blog

Here are a few of my favourite quotes, which illustrate the guiding principles behind this little project of mine.

A (frequently) debated subject is often a symptom, a surface manifestation, of a more basic underlying disagreement. Unless this area is explored - and unless some agreement is reached - the conflict will continue, while becoming repetitious and dull. The result is a kind of "intellectual atrophy", where the argument proceeds without significant progress, where no new material is introduced, and where the participants know beforehand that neither side will convince the other.
George H. Smith

The areas I'm interested in (politics, religion) are just those areas where the debate is never-ending. My aim is to explore the underlying disagreements.

I don't want to hurry it. That itself is a poisonous twentieth-century attitude. When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else.
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

That's how I like to work too. It's unfortunately very difficult to find a workplace that lets you cultivate that attitude.... but my blog is my own and the time I spend on it is my own.

Perhaps someone may say "But surely, Socrates, after you have left us you can spend the rest of your life quitely minding your own business?" This is the hardest thing of all to make some of you understand. If I say I cannot "mind my own business," you will not believe that I am serious. If on the other hand I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and that examining both myself and others is really the very best thing a man can do and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me. Nevertheless, gentlemen, that is how it is. – Plato's Dialogues

Ahh, yes. That is indeed how it is.