wantobe's blog

Dave and Pat are clients of mine. I started working on their computers two years ago when Dave was still on the winning side of his battle with Leukemia. Lately, things have turned for the worse for him; I received the following email, and though I don't think he's died yet, I believe that may be in name only.

Dear Family and Friends,

By now most of you are aware of what my situation and circumstances are. Those who are not can ask Pat and she will fill you in. Originally, I had wanted to send a personalized message to each one of you, but I quickly recognized what an impossible and enormous task that would be.

I have come to realize that every person who has passed through my life, every person that I have had contact with, has had something to teach me, some gift to give. This includes people who have had harsh lessons to bring as well as those that have been more pleasant.

Christian Trejbal is a columnist for my local paper, The Roanoke Times, and he recently wrote an editorial on "Where we vote affects how we vote". In short, he thinks voting should not take place in churches. It's not a bad column, and he brings up some good points, but I disagreed with one aspect of it. He wrote that, along with believers in other faiths, Atheists will feel uncomfortable voting in a church because of the crosses, the messages they see, etc.

I'm a space nerd, which means I love reading about what space geeks have discovered about our universe, and looking at the pretty pictures NASA releases. The Hubble Ultra Deep Space photo has been around for a few years now, so most of you probably have heard about it and seen it, but just for a refresher, here are some images. I've made the widest angel view of the image my desktop background. (As I said, a space nerd as opposed to a space geek.) And this YouTube video provides for a better perspective of just how small a slice of the sky these pictures are taken from.

Think about it: over 10,000 galaxies in what I think has been described as 1/170,000th of the sky. Each galaxy has between 100,000 and 100 billion stars, with varying numbers of planets. How utterly foolish it is to think that this big, wondrous universe was set in motion by a petty, belligerent war-god who gets pissed off if you touch a woman who's on her period or have sex before being married in his name.

I wasn't going to write anything about this, because I just assumed one of the many people here who write much, much better than I do would address it better than I ever could. I haven't seen anything yet, so what the hell.

That something is wrong with Jim Adkisson, who shot up a Tennessee Unitarian Church this weekend during a childrens' production of "Annie" (why that is important is beyond me, but it tugs the heartstrings, right?) is indisputable. According to the above story, and to this one, Adkisson left a note in his truck that indicated he committed the shootings because of the Church's liberal policies (they want teh gays to have rights, dammit).

This is tragic, and my first thought when I heard about it Sunday afternoon, before any real information had been released, was to hope to Clcakdi that the shooter wasn't someone the Fundamentalists could make into an Evil Atheist. When the above articles came out, I thought "Okay, wish granted apparently." Regardless of Adkisson's religious views, shooting up a church because of their liberal views doesn't sound like something an Atheist would do.

But not so fast. Despite what Adkisson himself wrote, there's now a little something for the Religious Right to cling to. His neighbors say he "questioned Christianity", and one neighbor is quoted as saying Adkission "almost became angry" over a mention of the neighbor's daughter graduating from Bible college.

Now normally I wouldn't get too worked up over this; the shooter has explained his own actions, and the last story quoted is essentially just reporting information gleaned from talking to the shooter's neighbors. Nothing unusual there, and cases like this, when they make national news, tend to get over-reported to the point where every wanna-be psychiatrist and his brother wants to put their $0.02 US in.

But click on that last link and take a look in the title bar. It says "Neighbors: Accused shooter everyone's friend, questioned Christianity..." Fair enough, but now take a look at the actual URL in the address bar. It includes "neighbors-accused-shooter-everyones-friend-hated-c", with the 'c' presumably truncated from "Christianity." How long do you suppose it will be before "hated Christians" becomes the RR's favorite adjective when talking about this? Can't you just hear Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham blaming this on America moving away from Christian values? I guarantee some prominent, conservative talking head will start calling Adkisson an Atheist before it's all over.

Despite my misgivings about his economic policies, I've pretty much decided I'm going to vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming election. My business partner makes a strong case for McCain, but franky, I'm tired of old, white guys running the country.

But then I read a story like this, and it makes me wonder if there really is any point in voting for anyone.

On the second day of a weeklong tour intended to highlight his values, Mr. Obama traveled to the battleground state of Ohio on Tuesday to present his proposal to get religious charities more involved in government programs.

This is my first original post, so I hope I get the damned thing right.

Did you know that the Texas Supreme Court takes separation of Church and State very seriously? They do, really. In fact, they take SoCS so seriously that they ruled that they couldn't let a church be punished for abusing a girl because "the case unconstitutionally entangled the court in religious matters."

In a 6-3 decision, the justices found that a lower court erred when it said the Pleasant Glade Assembly of God's First Amendment rights regarding freedom of religion did not prevent the church from being held liable for mental distress triggered by a "hyper-spiritualistic environment."

So the Church's freedom of religion does mean that they can get away with abusing a girl (they call it "exorcism"), cutting and bruising her, and scaring the hell out of her (no pun intended). Ruling otherwise infringes not only on their rights, but "entangles the court in religious matters."