No, there will be no virgins sacrificed here. As I explain on my Flickr profile, if there is a recognition of evil to be found in the title of my blog, it is a mournful recognition. Depravity is nothing to celebrate, and yet one can find it being celebrated every day, by those who would disguise it as virtue and seek praise for this disgraceful action.

"'The Abyss' was, in part, a reference to the first passage in Genesis:

'In the beginning, when G-d created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters.


Then G-d said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light. G-d saw how good the light was. G-d then separated the light from the darkness.'

The words "the deep" are sometimes used, instead, in translation, but the meaning is the same. An unfathomably deep sea.

...

Why was my blog named the Abyss? In the short run, the reason for the use of the name was a simple one - a mild self-deprecating joke about the fact my blog's most notable decorative feature in its original location was its use of negative space (an abyss is a large void). This was something that required a little patience on the system where the blog started, which was set to strip away most HTML formatting, and so seemed an especially good name for the blog back when it had just started. The Abyss didn't have the stereotypical blocky look of blogs at that location.

This account has gained a little history of its own, in the time since I first set it up, as a result of my having encountered the anti-terrorism groups, with the perhaps surprising result that rather than spinning the Flickr account off of the blog, I've spun the blog off of the Flickr account. The significance of the name has changed altogether, as I've set up a new blog associated with this account. Before, I was riffing off of some of the themes suggested by the opening passages of Genesis ... now, something different, but the name still fits. Which is a good thing, because I'm come to be known by that name, and changing it now might create a little confusion.

One can, incredibly, find apologists for terrorism and religious fanaticism these days, actual Al Quaeda lovers, the word "postmodernism" at times seeming all too fitting a name for what passes for their philosophy, as one watches the thinking of some of the self-proclaimed "progressives" slide back into the Middle Ages. "The Abyss", now, refers to an Abyss into which I see Western society sliding as people let themselves lose sight of what they so very recently knew to be common sense and common decency."