Mormon Blogs

I was taking a look at some other blogs earlier today to get a better sense of what some other people are saying. So that no equivocations may be made, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (popularly known in the media as "Mormons"). Mormon blogs have piqued my interest recently, and I became familiar with Brother Matsby's "My Religious Blog." It led me down the rabbit hole into a compendium of LDS blogs about children, marriage, and life at BYU (generally).

No comprehensive evaluation of the blog quality and content has been taken, but after one blog about how cute someone's kids are, I started to get bored. My dissociative personality order has arisen again: my nascent editor-self wanted to critique many of these blogs for craft and content. A few points about these people stood out to me, which I repeat below.

Someone thought everyone else appreciated her quality of "telling it like it is and appreciating [her] for it." Another person said she was a good driver, yet she had been in multiple accidents. A slightly more interesting blog critiques the U.S. government and says that his blog is the place where reason, rationality, and politics meet, but it makes swathing assumptions about people that would not be acceptable at a Californian liberal arts college and distorts the terms "common sense" and "reason."

This motions to the discrepancies between self-perception and how the self is perceived by others. Various ideas in my head are resounding about the spotlight effect and the individual's aggrandized view of self-importance, but I cannot critique more. I do the same thing myself. I want to resent these blogs because they're Mormons writing about themselves. Whether I don't like it because they're normal people trying to write about themselves, that they're not talking about religion, or that their writing gives Mormons a "bad intellectual name," I don't know. I want to distinguish myself from them; although Mormons have been officially encouraged to gain education by our Church leaders, an intellectual tradition still seems far from being realized. I feel that education is a means to an end for many Mormons - that end being a job. Sometimes, I feel that tug, too, to give up my intellectual pursuits and get a job because intellectual work is exhausting, and it's difficult to see sometimes what I am creating and producing.

However, I cannot remain in my caustic little bubble for long. I am touched by the endearing "list of things I will do" this year or throughout the course of my life; that reminds me of what my brother does, and what I have done as well. The irascible double-standard is encoded in my thought processes just as much as it is in anyone else's. I castigate the girl who's gotten into three car accidents while claiming still to be a good driver, but I accept the dreamer who wants to do a hundred improbable things before he dies. Perhaps because dreams are outside of the realm of the rational and go to the core of the individual's psyche. How can I judge the core of an individual? And despite our politics and intellects, dreams are something we all have in common.