You beat this atheist to calling Heather on that oxymoronic nonesense about atheist's longing for some supernatural Mr. Fixit.

Rhetorical question: Why do theists speak of atheists as if we were Borgs?

"nonsense"! I have no idea where that third "e" came from.

May your evening be as fine as mine.

I'm going to a party tonight where the beer will not be green, and the songs we sing will be from Ireland, >i>not Tinpan Alley.

My husband and I have been camping since the '50s, first in a heavy canvas tent and later in the easy up and down igloos. Over the years we watched the increase of RVs turn lovely camp grounds into aluminum slums.

I'm no Luddite, but for the life of me, I don't understand why one has to take the equivalent of a small cottage along with him to enjoy the great outdoors.

Like LeeX, I've watched the decline of journalism in Detroit's newspapers, particularly the Free Press I've been a reader of the Freep since the 1940's, when I was a reporter for my high school newspaper. Like SocraticGadfly the decline in quality became apparent to me in the late 80s. Once a Knight Ridder paper from 1940 to 1987, it got sold down the river to Gannett, the largest media company in the US. (During the run-up to the Iraqi invasion Knight Ridder AKA McClatchy did a fine job of reporting upstream against the mainstream on WMD, but - alas - by that time they no longer owned the Freep.)

In 1995 there was a strike that lasted two and a half years. Gannett was locked in a rule-or-ruin battle with the several unions that joined in support of the Teamsters. I stopped taking the paper during the strike, during which the quality declined and never recovered. The paper became thinner and shallower than ever after a "settlement", wherein courts found the management had not bargained in good faith. Most of the news is AP pasteup, and routine sports news gets on page A1. Local news in Section B for a tri-county area usually lacks any in-depth coverage.

Although The Freep will continue to be a daily, home delivery will be only three days a week. Not even the recent investigative reporting that brought down our mayor can save this paper; it can at most hold off its inevitable death.

They come out of the Catholic Worker tradition. As an atheist, there's no one I would rather have at my side in the ongoing issue of separation of church and state that those Catholics with many hash marks on their sleeves from their admirable struggle for social and economic justice.

Your pastors joke was expressed hundreds of years ago as "[Blaise] Pascal's Wager." Check it out.

Gays and lesbians and marriage, oh my! Be afraid. Very afraid.

"I would believe that any mandatory requirement for community service would be utterly fraught with government endoctrination."

Many school systems - where, by law, attendance is mandatory until age 16 or some similar criteria - require a course equivalent in hours of community service in order to graduate.

What in the hell is your concept of community service? Being forcefully sent from urban centers to rural cooperative farms to be deprogrammed from running dog, subversive beliefs in socialist government entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security?

Seriously, I'd like to hear a detailed account of your understanding of what you believe "community service" to be. I am also curious to know what you mean by "government indoctrination". I assume that you are using "indoctrination" as a perjorative term; so tell us: what authoritative doctrine would our government be promoting?

I agree with you that the South's economy has had an influence on its culture. But the cultures of the original English settlers are a major influence also. There is a classic book on American regionalism: Albion's Seed, by David Hackett Fischer. The author's premise is that the English colonies were settled by people from regions that differed significantly. The sttlers from the southeast of England, for example, were the Puritans who brought a culture of literacy and relative economic equity to New England. The South, on the other hand, was settled by convicts, indentured servants, slaves and titled aristocracy. This was a rigidly heirarchial society, with its wealth and land holdings concentrated among a few, powerful families. Literacy and formal education for the lower classes were not fostered, and social and economic mobility was difficult to achieve.

Fischer makes a strong case that many of the folkways of the four founding English-speaking cultures are still there. (The other two are the highlanders from the England-Scotland border who settled in Appalachia, and the Quakers who settled Pennsylvania)

Fountainhead's a piece of shit too

I struggled though that book in college. The I found out it had some kind of philosophical message. I just though it was a really crappy novel. Big waste of time.

A true story. Back in the 50s, a friend told me that while he was in New York he went to a meeting in someone's apartment where Ayn Rand was the featured guest. Some woman described a scene in The Fountainhead where the protagonist rapes a women when they first meet, whereupon she falls in love with him. "What kind of woman would want to be raped," she asked Rand.

"I would," Rand replied.

Johnnyd, What sort of high school would inflict on you such turgid prose and wretchedly constructed plot?

Arghhh. I meant college, not high school.