Welcome

The reason behind the name of this blog is that I am living and writing from inside of a redoubt right now in the Swedish archipelago. It’s quite beautiful here. Right now its pitch black outside, aside from some lights emanating from the islands and some bouts, but at daytime the view is somewhat astonishing. The water shift from blue to green depending on the sun light and the islands are close enough to make it possible to discern the leaves move on their trees. And I am still quite amazed about the fact that a canon ones stood where I now sit, placed there in fear of the Russians or some other possible enemy at the time.

Enough about that, this isn’t a diary – although I do write diary almost every day – and let me introduce you to this blog. The main reason for it is for me to train my English skills. My MS Word helps me a lot with spelling, but I still get it messed up from time to time, and I wouldn’t like to be depended on software to write somewhat good English for the rest of my life. Hence the language I am writing in, but what will I be writing about, you may ask? Well, to make that clear I probably need to say something about my self and my lonely existence here at the redoubt. Let’s get started with my name: Tobias Malm. “Tobias” means “God is good” and I find that rather ironic because I am a full-blown atheist. If I would have been a character in some American movie this would automatically mean that I have suffered some kind of tragedy in my life, something so horrible that the American movie audience can’t be offended by the fact that I have rejected God, because its obviously just because some kind of emotional thing. Well, in reality most atheists – me included – haven’t given up on faith for some sentimental “understandable” reason seen from a believer’s point of view. Instead, I never had faith, in any deity what so ever! God, defined the simplest way, didn’t seem reasonable to assume given the evidence. If I ever had faith in anything, it was reason. (I might write more about having “faith in reason” since its leads up to a very interesting epistemological problem).

Anyhow, I fight for reason and action, in that order. I am a board member in the Swedish humanist youth organization called Young Humanists. Because of my commitment to these kinds of questions and involvement in the humanist movement some of the content on this blog will be critical to irrationalism in all its forms, be it religion or just plain intellectual apathy. Being critical to irrationalism often means you are a supporter of the opposite: rationalism. Hence, I will also write about science and philosophy. I am studying theoretical philosophy right now in Stockholm, at the so called advance level. One of the reasons behind this blog is for me to work up some skills in writing philosophy in English. We will see how that goes. Beside my fight against stupidity and my studies I have a lot of pet projects too, and I will probably write about them as well. Right now I’m working on the following projects (mostly in my head): a couple of novels in Swedish (I am trying to focus at one of them right now), a prelude to my diaries (kind of a summery of my life before I started to turn days in to literature). And then of course: my games and applications. My mother gave me The Games Factory when I was a kid. It’s a program with which you can make games without any programming-skills. So far I have made an ecosystem simulator with it, and one of my game projects it’s a newer version of that. I have also made up some board games I am making playable with The Games Factory. I will be reporting on the progress of those projects here and of course give you the opportunity to download them when they are done!

Some last words about the blog. Its name can also be read as re-doubt, and that is what philosophy is all about: if you think you’re sure, doubt again.