Initiate the Awesome

So, I've decided to begin blogging again.  I never got into it earlier, but now I think I'd like to give it another try.  My old blog never really had direction, which I think was part of the problem.  I'll leave it up, since I think I had some good thoughts, and I might even post to it again should I have anything that won't fit here.  But I plan to make this a little different, because now I have a theme for my blog.

I've recently come out about my atheism, and I guess now I'm out to the world.  I've been spending a lot of time on r/atheism, and have started to put forward some of my thoughts.  But its a volatile forum, so my posts disappear quickly.  I want to have a place to put down my thoughts and questions about science, religion, atheism, and the wondrous universe in which we live.  And I want to be able to get feedback, read and respond to comments, and maybe get some answers to my many questions.  So this will be, well, that; my atheist, science-loving blog.

I've got some ideas for posts, and my first one will (coming soon) will be about love.  I think love is very important, and a friend recently asked me to think about where love came from.  I've done that thinking, and I want to share my thoughts.  For now, I want to do something I'll probably be doing a lot here: quote Carl Sagan.  So here's a passage from Pale Blue Dot, one that speaks a bit to the theme of my new blog, In Awe of Everything.

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.