“To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring.” — George Santayana

Like the Minnesota snow, a change of focus can provide renewal.

When I first started Kind Avenue, I intended it to be a place where I promoted kindness, peace, and the joy of everyday life. I planned to share stories of selfless acts of love, courage, and mercy, as well as blog on the difficult task of living out those values in my own life and encouraging others to do the same. I intended on promoting various kind causes, including LGBT rights, animal rights, feminism, and environmentalism, among others. The blog’s name was meant to reflect this focus.

In addition, while not meant to be the primary focus of this site, I also wanted to share the occasional photo, photograph, and/or thought on politics, philosophy, news, atheism, and other hot topics. These weren’t to be the central focus of the blog but just a sporadic diversion from the more important focus on promoting kindness

While I started out on this avenue back in July and August, I quickly lost focus on this site’s mission. I let Kind Avenue devolve into just another atheist blog, covering the banal gamut of academic philosophical arguments, responses to theists, and links to non-theistic books, papers, and YouTube videos. Kindness, meant to be the main course, had become a minor side dish, an occasional diversion from the oh-so-important task of proving there are no gods.

For this, I apologize. While I’m still an atheist–and proud to say it–I know that promoting atheism is trivial at best. There is almost certainly no God. So what. This fact, although academically interesting, won’t love the “unlovable,” promote equality, expose injustice, expand human and animal rights, or even brighten anyone’s day. For me to focus on this topic to the exclusion of the more important ones mentioned above was mistaken, and it’s not gonna happen anymore.

Starting today, Kind Avenue will live up to its name. You’ll see more posts on compassion, activism, caring, joy, and righteous action, and less atheistic pontificating and philosophical navel-gazing. I may start another blog for the subjects of atheism and philosophy, or I might just let these topics die for now.

Ultimately, it is kindness, not atheism or philosophy, that will change the world. As the great thinker Karl Marx said, “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, the point, however, is to change it.”

Stay kind.