Why I follow the blogs I follow...

It struck me today, looking at the list of blogs I follow, how very different my situation is from them.

I commented the other day on one of them, Undercover Kofer (who, by the way, is fascinating to read and has great taste in blog layout to boot), that

There are a lot of Jewish blogs out there. The vast majority, I have found, are highly uncritical -- of Israel, of Judaism, of pretty much everything. And therefore uninteresting. The big exception are the OTD blogs, mostly because they are written by highly intelligent, conflicted, and deeply introspective people. Althgouh I am not orthodox, reading about how others grapple with their own Judaism is fascinating, insightful and inspirational.

I've been thinking about this lately, why these OTD blogs are so interesting...  I think it's because I see in many of their posts the nuts and bolts of the intellectual struggle it takes to reconcile orthodox Judaism and the modern world.  I'm trying to do the same thing, I think, but from a very different direction.  While the orthodox blogs I'm reading describe the difficulty in combining a fundamentally conservative worldview with the modern, liberal society in which we live, I'm trying to reconcile my fundamentally liberal worldview with what I have come to see is the fundamentally conservative nature of religion in general and Judaism in particular.  How can I claim to be liberal, to respect the Other, without in some way inflating myself?  If I say to each his own, then what is the basis for doing things the way I do them or believing the things I believe?  To the extent I place my faith in the ability of human beings to determine their own destiny and to better themselves, then what role have I left for a Higher Power?

I'm not sure who has it harder. 

Well, okay, I think orthodox probably have it harder insofar as the demands of mitzvot observance are greater than the demands of the kind of heshbon hanefesh I'm engaging in.  I can blog or not, but I certainly don't think I'm transgressing you-know-who's will either way.  But the more I look around, the more I read what other RJs write, the more I listen to my fellow congregants in my own ultra-liberal shul...the more I think I have a long, hard road ahead of me:  to discover and practice a Judaism truly consistent with my own beliefs.

How does one do that?