Sonuvab…
Everytime I hear someone talk about a template, I cringe. Templates aren't the customization panacea they are often touted to be. You may notice that I've been tinkering. My apologies if things look like crap while I try and get the CSS to do what I want it to and not what it was designed to.
Square pegs and round holes? Solution: bigger hammer.
Here goes nothing
OK. I finally decided to go with a "real" blog instead of hand coded pages cobbled together by yours truly. I've been blogging for several years now. I guess it's time to officially join the blogosphere.
You can still access the old blog here, I hope. I'll have to make sure it still works. I'll start getting the old posts in here. The real trick will be getting this looking like it used to. Could be a real adventure. One blogging friend used to curse blog templates regularly and with no small amount of passion.
Wherefore Pride?
A certainly fabulous and possibly perfect rant by Joe.My.God on the meaning of Gay Pride celebrations today. You go, girl.
Priceless
In response to a friend's inquiry after his/her safety (), one Londoner replied:
Yes, tin helmet firmly affixed on bean, sandbags at the door, sticky tape on the windows, but the kettle is on and we'll soon have steaming mugs of sweet tea to hand. Don't panic!
Label Queens Redux
I was at a BBQ over the weekend. The topic of discussion eventually turned to religion. Being the "new kid" at this particular event, attention focused on me and I was asked about my beliefs, specifically if I am Christian. I said that, more or less, I still am. He who posed the question said that he was more of an atheist now.
I didn't think much of it at the time, but since then I've been giving it a lot of thought. I started to wonder about the necessity people feel to classify and label everything, this time within a religious context: Christian, atheist, Buddhist, Catholic, Episcopalian. I suppose if I were to try and articulate my feelings about God I would end up sounding more agnostic than anything else. Do I believe in God? I do. Fervently. Do I believe that I can commune with the Divine? I do. Very much so. And that is about where my certainty ends. People often pose questions like: "Do you believe God is a physical being?" "Do you believe God is Male? Female? Asexual? Androgynous?" "Do believe God is more an inanimate force that life creates and by which it is bound together?" I'm not sure my answers to those kinds of questions is "I don't know" as much as it is "I don't care."
It seems unbelievably arrogant to me for anyone to claim they know what God is, or who God is. Hell, most of us don't even understand each other very well. How can we possibly believe we understand or know the mind of God? I feel His love for me. I feel His guidance in my life. What more do I need to know? I tend to believe God is beyond our ability to truly comprehend. If we think we have Him figured out, we're probably wrong, at least in part if not completely.
In some ways, this obsession that people seem to have with defining who God is, what God thinks and what God says just seems odd to me. Humans seem to have a built in fear of the unknown. That can be a good thing. It is the need to understand our Universe that drives our quest for knowledge. I tend to think that was a gift. The joy for me is in the journey, the discovery. Without exception discarding an old way of thinking for something newly discovered has improved my life and my understanding.
But, like most of the gifts of God, man has managed to screw it up. Instead of embracing the unknown and driving ourselves to greater heights, man has devised boxes, some of them very impressive and beautiful, within which he can hide, wherein he need not fear or face the unknown because all the answers he wants are inside his box. If it is outside of the box, he doesn't want to know about it, or dismisses it as false and dangerous.
Some may note that I have used the masculine when referring to God. I do tend to think of God that way. I'm sure that is a result of my Christian upbringing. However, my world will not end if God isn't male. I'm even willing to admit the atheists might be right. Maybe death is the end. Does that possibility bother me? No. Probably because I don't really believe it. I have questioned everything about my faith and my beliefs. All of it has come under fire at one time or another. Some of it did not survive the shelling, and yet, the idea that this life is it, that there is nothing more just doesn't feel right. But what exactly that more is doesn't concern me. My life is here. I am here. This is my reality right now. What comes later will come in due course of time. As the old saying goes, I'll cross that bridge when I get there.
It seems to me this is the faith that I was always told in church that I should be striving for, the peace of mind that you are on the right track, living life without fear. One religious leader once said that faith and fear cannot coexist. And yet, what do the righteous often call themselves? God-fearing. Odd.
Now, if I could just achieve the same kind of faith and tranquility where my love life is concerned, I'll have it made.
Complex Nuance
Today in the Opinion Journal, Joseph Leconte made the interesting classification of the use of condoms in fighting AIDS as a complex social issue, right up there with embryonic cloning. Complex? Cloning does introduce questions about the course of society, that will require some deep thinking to address. Condom use, on the other hand, helps prevent the spread of a ruthless killer. Seems pretty straight forward to me. It only becomes complex for religious conservatives who tend to find reality too complex to deal with in the first place.
Condoms are an anathema to religious conservatives. Issue number one is the tacit approval of "the homosexual lifestyle" if we encourage condom use in gay men. While I'm sure there are still many who think fags deserve to get AIDS and die, publicly expressing such sentiment is (finally) becoming less and less acceptable. Most Americans can see and are uncomfortable with the blatant hatred in that view. Hence, the GOP's attempt to make nice with "compassionate conservatism."
Issue number two is condoms allow far to many people to be having sex. Preaching abstinence from the pulpit is all well and good, but that is faith and morals. Government needs to be concerned with reality. It is beyond naive to assume that restricting condom access will stop people, teenagers among them, from having sex, or that discussing condoms will increase the incidence of unsanctioned sex. If people want to have sex they are going to have sex. End of story. In fact, there already seems to be a subculture developing among teens to opt for anal sex since it is without the risks of pregnancy generally associated with vaginal sex. As an added bonus, the girl can still claim to be a virgin. One wonders if teens still perform special ops to obtain condoms for their "safe" sex. It's almost an inevitability that someone's daughter is going to end up HIV+ because she permitted anal sex with some boy who, because of continued oppressive attitudes toward homosexuals, is trying to "prove" he's straight.