VARIOUS ECSTASIES: 12/01/2004

WHAT DO THESE TWO MEN HAVE IN COMMON WITH OSAMA BIN LADEN?

(picture from CBN)

Charter member of THE 666 CLUB!

(photo Natalee Waters Power/Metro)

AN AMUSING QUIZ

This is a rather amusing item from http://www.godlessgeeks.com/LINKS/Quiz_JPO.htm.

Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden have a lot in common. Grab a pen or pencil and piece of paper, number it from 1 to 11, take the quiz... and see if you can identify statements by each of these “leaders.”

1. In today’s wars, there are no morals, and it is clear that mankind has descended to the lowest degrees of decadence and oppression.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

2. America is polluting the whole world.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

3. The government is committed to supporting God’s religion, the country remains a strong bulwark for religion, and the people are among the most protective of God’s religion, and the keenest to fulfill His laws.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

4. One-world opinion is taking the side of the Palestinians, not the side of Israel.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

5. There will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

6. The government does not cease to cry over matters affecting religion, without making any serious effort to serve the interests of the religious community.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

7. We are on the brink of our destruction, and if we do not awaken now, it will be too late. We have been victimized by traitorous behavior on the part of our leaders.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

8. If I could just get a nuclear device inside Foggy Bottom [State Department's Washington headquarters], I think that's the answer.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

9. The media strives to keep the people occupied with minor matters, and to stir their emotions and desires until corruption becomes widespread among believers.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

10. There is no way that a United Nations, treaties, or any other human instrument can bring about peace. Such things mean nothing when one nation desires the land and resources of another.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

11. We have allowed rampant secularism… We have insulted God at the highest levels of government.
o Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson o Osama bin Laden

ANSWERS:
1. Osama bin Laden
2. Pat Robertson
3. Osama bin Laden
4. Jerry Falwell
5. Pat Robertson
6. Osama bin Laden
7. Jerry Falwell
8. Pat Robertson
9. Osama bin Laden
10. Pat Robertson
11. Pat Robertson

I got 8 out of 11 correct, which is 73%. Not bad, I suppose. How did you do? While just about all of these comments might be attributable to Osama Bin Laden, I wasn't at all surprised about Pat Robertson's "Foggy Bottom" comment... and that 7 of the 11 quotes were from Falwell or Robertson.

Maybe Reverend Pat should name his TV show "The 666 Club".

GEORGE CARLIN SPEAKS

"This is a little prayer dedicated to the separation of church and state. I guess if they are going to force those kids to pray in schools they might as well have a nice prayer like this: Our Father who art in heaven, and to the republic for which it stands, thy kingdom come, one nation indivisible as in heaven, give us this day as we forgive those who so proudly we hail. Crown thy good into temptation but deliver us from the twilight's last gleaming. Amen and Awomen."- George Carlin, Saturday Night Live

"When it comes to God's existence, I'm not an atheist and I'm not an agnostic. I'm an acrostic. The whole thing puzzles me."- George Carlin, When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?

"I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."- George Carlin

A JOKE FROM EMO PHILLIPS

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off.

So I ran over and said "stop! don't do it!"

"Why shouldn't I?" he said.

I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"

He said, "Like what?"

I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"

He said, "Religious."

I said, "Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?"

He said, "Christian."

I said, "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?"

He said, "Protestant."

I said, "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?"

He said, "Baptist!"

I said, "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?"

He said, "Baptist Church of God!"

I said, "Me too! Are you original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?"

He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God!"

I said, "Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?"

He said, "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!"

I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.

GEORGE's CHECKUP

An elderly couple had their periodical checkup with their doctor.The husband was called in first for review of health problems.

"How is everything going with you, George?" the doctor asked.

"Very good, thanks. . . but I gotta tell you, Doc, last night I got up to pee and God turned the bathroom light on for me."

"Wow, George, that's some story. . . "

A little later, the Doctor called George's wife in for consultation, and he asked how things were going with her.

"It sounds as if you are holding your own," the doctor summed up after hearing her very common complaints. "However, is George having any problems out of the ordinary?"

She replied in the negative.

"I must tell you that he thinks God may have turned the bathroom light on for him this morning."

"Oh no," she exclaimed. "He peed in the refrigerator again."

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WOW! WILLIAM KRISTOL IS A RIGHT-WING COLUMNIST WHO DOESN'T LIKE RUMSFELD...

Photo: Master Sgt. James M. Bowman / U.S. Air Force via Reuters
Defense Donald Rumsfeld awards a Purple Heart to Army Sgt. Chris Scott of the 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, as he recuperates in a medical facility near Mosul, Iraq, on Friday.

Nowadays I like to say: "As you know, you go to war with the President and Secretary of Defense you have. They're not the President of Secretary of Defense you might want or wish to have at a later time."

(Note : The author of the piece, William Kristol, is a well-known right wing columnist and TV commentator. His attack on Rumsfeld, though warranted, seems to completely exonerate George W Bush of any blame in the whole Iraqi fiasco. Whatever happened to "The Buck Stops Here"? Can you imagine the media castigating any of Bill Clinton's cabinet members while letting Clinton off the hook for anything? It smacks of a diversionary tactic to me: Rumsfeld being the scapegoat while Bush comes across as the war hero. I actually agree with much of what Kristol has to say. I just don't think he carries the article far enough, to what should be the logical conclusion... that if Bush keeps Rumsfeld on, could it be they have similar attitudes? I think it's highly likely. Or, there could be other reasons besides not wanting to change things until after the Iraqi election.)

By William Kristol
Washington Post
12-17-04

"As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They're not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.''
-- Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Actually, we have a pretty terrific Army. It's performed a lot better in this war than the secretary of defense has. President Bush has nonetheless decided to stick for now with the defense secretary we have, perhaps because he doesn't want to make a change until after the Jan. 30 Iraqi elections. But surely Don Rumsfeld is not the defense secretary Bush should want to have for the remainder of his second term.

Contrast the magnificent performance of our soldiers with the arrogant buck-passing of Rumsfeld. Begin with the rest of his answer to Spec. Thomas Wilson of the Tennessee Army National Guard:

``Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe -- it's a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously, but a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment. I can assure you that General Schoomaker and the leadership in the Army and certainly General Whitcomb are sensitive to the fact that not every vehicle has the degree of armor that would be desirable for it to have, but that they're working at it at a good clip.''

So the Army is in charge. ``They'' are working at it. Rumsfeld? He happens to hang out in the same building: ``I've talked a great deal about this with a team of people who've been working on it hard at the Pentagon. ... And that is what the Army has been working on.'' Not ``that is what we have been working on.'' Rather, ``that is what the Army has been working on.'' The buck stops with the Army.

At least the topic of those conversations in the Pentagon isn't boring. Indeed, Rumsfeld assured the troops who have been cobbling together their own armor, ``It's interesting.'' In fact, ``if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored humvee and it can be blown up.'' Good point. Why have armor at all? Incidentally, can you imagine if John Kerry had made such a statement a couple of months ago? It would have been (rightly) a topic of scorn and derision among my fellow conservatives, and not just among conservatives.

Perhaps Rumsfeld simply had a bad day. But then, what about his statement earlier last week, when asked about troop levels? ``The big debate about the number of troops is one of those things that's really out of my control.'' Really? Well, ``the number of troops we had for the invasion was the number of troops that General Franks and General Abizaid wanted.''

Leave aside the fact that the issue is not ``the number of troops we had for the invasion'' but rather the number of troops we have had for postwar stabilization. Leave aside the fact that Gen. Tommy Franks had projected he would need a quarter-million troops on the ground for that task -- and that his civilian superiors had mistakenly promised him tens of thousands of international troops would be available. Leave aside the fact that Rumsfeld has only grudgingly and belatedly been willing to adjust even a little bit to realities on the ground since April 2003. And leave aside the fact that if our generals have been under pressure not to request more troops in Iraq for fear of stretching the military too thin, this is a consequence of Rumsfeld's refusal to increase the size of the military after Sept. 11.

In any case, decisions on troop levels in the American system of government are not made by any general or set of generals but by the civilian leadership of the war effort. Rumsfeld acknowledged this last week, after a fashion: ``I mean, everyone likes to assign responsibility to the top person and I guess that's fine.'' Except he fails to take responsibility.

All defense secretaries in wartime have, needless to say, made misjudgments. Some have stubbornly persisted in their misjudgments. But have any so breezily dodged responsibility and so glibly passed the buck?

In Sunday's New York Times, John F. Burns quoted from the weekly letter to the families of his troops by Lt. Col. Mark A. Smith, an Indiana state trooper who now commands the 2nd Battalion, 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, stationed just south of Baghdad:

``Ask yourself, how in a land of extremes, during times of insanity, constantly barraged by violence, and living in conditions comparable to the stone ages, your marines can maintain their positive attitude, their high spirit, and their abundance of compassion?'' Col. Smith's answer:

``They defend a nation unique in all of history: One of principle, not personality; one of the rule of law, not landed gentry; one where rights matter, not privilege or religion or color or creed. ... They are United States Marines, representing all that is best in soldierly virtues.''

These soldiers deserve a better defense secretary than the one we have.

THIS GOES BEYOND POLITICS

I believe supporting American troops goes beyond whether or not we agree on why they are there. It is possible to be rooting for the troops while at the same time disagreeing with the Bush administration's reasons for putting them there. I have no issue with the military; my gripe is with the President and those with whom he has surrounded himself.

If you have a local group sending care packages to our troops, please take part.

While we may be tempted to feel pity for them, being in harm's way and all, I know the two guys pictured below, enough to know they probably wouldn't want us to feel that way. I believe they would want us to be proud of them. I am proud of them, and I am glad they are both serving, along with other brave folks I know.

Mat is our local high school Vice Principal. He is currently in Kuwait awaiting his unit's move to Kirkuk.

Jesse is the son of my dear late friend Jack. Jesse is serving in Iraq. This is a Christmas Eve photo of him on patrol for insurgents.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

They never let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.

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HERE'S A CHRISTIAN WHO DOESN'T LIKE THE "RELIGIOUS RIGHT"...

This article was pointed out to me by JFM of The Dirty South at http://thedirtysouth.blogspot.com/:

I Am A Conservative Christian, And The Religious Right Scares Me, Too
By Chuck Baldwin
The Covenant News ~ December 15, 2004

For those readers who are unfamiliar with my biography, let me here provide a thumbnail sketch of my conservative bona fides:I attended, graduated, or received degrees from fundamentalist Christian schools such as Midwestern Baptist College in Pontiac, Michigan, Thomas Road Bible Institute (now known as Liberty Bible Institute at Liberty University) in Lynchburg, Virginia, Christian Bible College in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, and Trinity Baptist College in Jacksonville, Florida.

I am currently in my thirtieth year as the Senior Pastor of the Crossroad Baptist Church (Independent) in Pensacola, Florida. I was the Executive Director of the Florida Moral Majority in the early 1980's. I was an active member of the local Christian Coalition.

I have marched and protested against abortion clinics. I have led several pro-life rallies and even led our church to construct A Memorial To Aborted Babies. I have conducted small and large (some drawing crowds numbering in the thousands) pro-life, pro-family rallies and meetings in the Pensacola area and in many towns and cities across the state of Florida.

When Ronald Reagan was running for President, I helped Dr. Jerry Falwell register more than fifty thousand new conservative voters in my state. I have attended White House functions with former President Reagan and former Vice President George H.W. Bush.

I supported and defended Chief Justice Roy Moore and his fight to display a Ten Commandments monument at a pro-Ten Commandments rally in Montgomery, Alabama and even on national television.

I am an annual member of the National Rifle Association and a life member of Gun Owners of America. I have been the featured speaker at several pro-Second Amendment rallies.

No one can honestly question my commitment to pro-life, pro-family, conservative causes. That being said, the Religious Right, as it now exists, scares me.

For one reason, on the whole, the Religious Right has obviously and patently become little more than a propaganda machine for the Republican Party in general and for President G.W. Bush in particular. This is in spite of the fact that both Bush and the Republican Party in Washington, D.C., have routinely ignored and even trampled the very principles which the Religious Right claims to represent.

Therefore, no longer does the Religious Right represent conservative, Christian values. Instead, they represent their own self-serving interests at the expense of those values.

It also appears painfully obvious to me that in order to sit at the king's table, the Religious Right is willing to compromise any principle, no matter how sacred. As such, it has become a hollow movement. Sadly, the Religious Right is now a movement without a cause, except the cause of advancing the Republican Party.

Beyond that, the Religious Right is actively assisting those who would destroy our freedoms. On the whole, the Religious Right comports with those within the Bush administration and within the Republican Party who, in the name of "fighting terrorism," are actually terrorizing constitutional protections of our liberties.

The Religious Right offered virtually no resistance to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the passage of the Patriot Act, or the recently created position of National Intelligence Director. Neither did the Religious Right offer even a whimper of protest as President Bush and Republicans in Congress created a first-ever national ID card in the new intelligence bill, which eerily has more in common with early Twentieth Century German and Russian intelligence institutions than anything envisioned by America's Founding Fathers.

Another disconcerting feature of today's Religious Right is its attempt to Christianize political entities which it supports and to demonize political entities which it opposes. This trend is especially scary.

When people are told that they are voting "Christian" by voting for Republican Party candidates, it is being intimated that they are voting non-Christian by voting for any other candidate. This is not only silly on its face, it is downright dangerous!

I don't remember anyone saying people voted "Christian" when they elected the outspoken Christian candidate, Jimmy Carter, President. Yet, Carter, in his personal life, demonstrated as much, if not more, Christianity than does George W. Bush. If you recall, Carter even taught Sunday School in a Southern Baptist Church while President.

However, in spite of the fact that President Bush and the Republican Party in Washington, D.C., have repeatedly supported copious unchristian (not to mention unconstitutional) programs and policies, Christians act as if Bush and his fellow Republicans have ushered in the Millennial Kingdom.

More than that, the Religious Right appears to believe that G.W. Bush is the anointed vicar of Christ. But instead of wearing the garb of a religious leader, he wears the shroud of a politico and a military commander-in-chief.

As such, in the minds of the Religious Right, Bush's war in Iraq is a holy crusade. America is fast taking on the shape of the old Holy Roman Empire and President Bush is quickly morphing into a modern day Caesar.

The willingness of the Religious Right to give President Bush king-like subservience is easily seen in the way they demonize anyone who dares to oppose him. This is very unnerving.

Are we heading for a modern day religious inquisition, this one led not by the Catholic Church but by the Religious Right? Are we witnessing the type of marriage between Church and State that America's founders originally feared?

I used to believe that liberals were paranoid for being fearful of conservative Christians gaining political power. Now, I share their trepidation.

Of course, the sad truth is, neither George W. Bush nor the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. represents genuine Christian or even conservative principles. If they did, they would take their oaths to the Constitution seriously and then neither liberals nor conservatives would have anything to fear, for the U.S. Constitution protects the rights and freedoms of all men.

Unfortunately, when the seed of Bush's unconstitutional policies come to fruition, it will produce large scale fallout economically, socially, and politically. And sadder still will be that, instead of blaming Bush's infidelity to constitutional government and conservative principles, people will blame Christianity and conservatism itself. The result of this miscalculation will doubtless be a massive tide of support for more and greater unconstitutional government, but only under a different name.

ARE THE HAMSTERS SATANIC?

I always suspected the Hamster Dance website was an evil thing. Now there is proof:

http://greymatter.org/satanichamsterdance/

I laughed so hard at this I was literally gasping for air.

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LUNCH MONEY

Mr. Bush and his group seem to operate, as William F. Buckley might have once said in a TV ad for National Review, from "a decidedly different set of priorities". Here is an article illustrative of that concept.

Bush Eating GI's Lunch
By Ken Bode
Fort Wayne Indy Star
12-16-04

This past week the headlines in the news fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Each news story added another dimension to the emerging picture of war policy that is increasingly costly and incompetent.

Start with the centerpiece, the Q & A in Kuwait with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and 2,300 National Guard soldiers soon to be headed to Iraq. Among his fellow troops, Tennessean Thomas Wilson's query about why they had to scrounge through landfills to find armor for their trucks and Humvees was right on the money.

Rumsfeld's reply: "You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." Those words will certainly be in the first paragraph of his obituary.
For families of National Guard serving in Iraq, Wilson's question came as no surprise. They have been hearing from their sons and daughters about equipment deficiencies since the war began. But the question uncovered the sad fact that less than one-third of the 19,389 Humvees in Iraq are fully armored. Once the insurgency hit, the Army found it needed 35 times the number of armored Humvees than originally planned.

Letters to the editor asked: "Shouldn't they have considered the Army they had before the war?" And: "Did Rumsfeld have nothing to do with planning for the war?"

Rumsfeld also noted that you "can have all the armor in the world" on a vehicle and it still can be blown up. But Wilson's question had a profound result. The Pentagon suddenly announced it found $4.1 billion, immediately earmarked to armor up Humvees.

Then there was the story of the six Ohio reservists who were court marshaled for cannibalizing abandoned Army vehicles in Kuwait. When a convoy is moving, the policy is to abandon any vehicle that would take more than 30 minutes to fix. These soldiers took parts from two abandoned tractor-trailers to fix their own vehicles so they could carry out their mission in Iraq. You might think they would get a commendation for ingenuity. No, they were convicted of theft and destruction of Army property. They got jail for six months. That takes us to those who did get commendations this week. President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three of the central architects of the Iraq war.

One went to retired CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenet, who tried but failed to produce intelligence proving that Saddam had WMD, and produced very little about al-Qaida before 9/11.

Another went to Gen. Tommy Franks, who planned for the invasion but failed to plan at all for any insurgency. Then Franks took early retirement while his war was still going on. What general does that?

The final medal was awarded to L. Paul Bremer, who helped feed the insurgency by disbanding the entire Iraqi army, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of armed, unemployed troops who hated the U.S. Well done!

Thus President Bush puts an official stamp of success on a war whose endgame grows more uncertain day by day. The people who know that best are the families of the reservists who drive most of the unarmored trucks and Humvees.

President Bush said, "As I have told many families I met with, we're doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones in a mission that is vital and important." In fact, until Wilson's question, we obviously were not.

That brings us to the final headline: "At Bush Inauguration, Lunch Will Set You Back $250,000."

This is a lunch with Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, obviously exclusive to the high tax brackets. There will also be a "Salute To Those Who Serve," with free tickets for the military.
The arithmetic is too tempting. It costs $25,000 to fully armor a Humvee. Each $250,000 lunch ticket could go straight to equipping 10 vehicles, so our reservists and Guards in Iraq won't have to ride around with homemade sandbags on the floor.

Do it, Mr. Bush. Donate your lunch money to the troops.

WHICH ENEMY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ARE YOU? APPARENTLY, I AM A...

I guess I have always kind of suspected this...

According to my quiz results from http://robertandtim.topcities.com/ I am a heretic. If you go there and take quiz #2 you will be having a good time.

IS ROCK AND ROLL SATANIC?

(Photo by Barry Grant. Found at http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF0405/Kaye/Kaye.html )

WHERE DOES IT GO FROM HERE?

Thirty years ago I can remember when most fundamentalist Christians thought rock and roll was the Devil’s own music. If you wanted to buy Christian music, it was usually stuff like Guy and Ralna , or the Gaithers. A few brave singers and musicians defied the dogma and started making some weak-sounding but heartfelt Christian folk-music styled albums.

What happened? Today “Contemporary Christian Music” is a huge money-maker. The production values have gone way up, and the music itself is often tasteful. An example of such a musical endeavor is the Hillsongs group. Artists such as Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith and others have helped close the quality gap between secular and Christian pop/rock to the point where someone driving along searching for music on the radio might find something catchy, and at first listen it would sound just like some of his or her favorite pop or rock artists. It would only be upon closer listen that we would discover the song’s lyrics, which would be the profession of love for Jesus. A number of Christian musicians, including th epopular Stryper, are playing heavy metal! You've come a long way, Baby!

Many fundamentalist Christian churches have their own bands, and the music is often electric. Church services I have seen tend toward lots of participants standing up with their hands in the air, joyfully singing along with lyrics that are posted on the front wall of the sanctuary via an overhead projector. Before a more traditional “church service” begins, if it even does, there can be an hour or more of such jubilation. This brings in lots of young people. At the services I attended, the congregations tended to be in the birth-to-50 age range... very few elderly folks.

I find it both amusing and frightening that fundamentalist Christianity has co-opted rock and roll, something it considered satanic a short time ago. What other things could such a co-optive approach suggest? If churches consider public schools satanic, will they eventually integrate themselves into our system of education? Sure! How about government, which seems to be a Big Satan to many believers nowadays? I think we are already seeing a gradual blurring of the church/state lines.

But education and government are broad topics. What if we get more specific? How about other things, like fashion? We’ve all seen what has happened with fashion in the fundamentalist Muslim world. What could happen with food? Medicine? Advertising?

Hollywood and television look like good candidates for a fundamentalist takeover. I rarely watch prime-time network TV programming, but it seems like there have been a few Christianity-influenced shows recently, like Joan of Arcadia and a couple about angels. These shows are striking a chord with the “it’s about time” crowd which likes to blame TV and movies for many of our societal ills. Given the immense popularity of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ”, I’m looking for Hollywood to produce more films based on events depicted in the Bible, which after all contains a lot of violence and that could lend itself to good action sequences. There are parts of the Bible that would lend themselves to romance too. Comedy? I doubt it... But if the fundamentalists can get it to where about a fourth of our TV shows and movies have a highly-visible Christian influence, they will be having a good time.

What about the rest of us? Will WE be having a good time?

Here are a few links to interesting articles about Christianity and Rock music:

http://www.aliciapatterson.org/APF0405/Kaye/Kaye.html

http://www.bibletruths.org/living/RockMusic.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Rhodes/7895/gosrock.htm

"CANCEL MY SUBSCRIPTION TO THE RESURRECTION." - Jim Morrison

AND MY SUBSCRIPTION TO TIME MAGAZINE.

I hear the sound of weepy violins.

(www.northernsun.com)

QUOTES ON RELIGION FROM THE CRANKY H.L. MENCKEN

H.L. Mencken had lots of thoughts about religion, and he has been rather unpopular among those who think of themselves as people of faith. Anyway, here are some collected Mencken quotes about religion:

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Not by accident, you may be sure, do the Christian Scriptures make the father of knowledge a serpent --- slimy, sneaking and abominable.

Imagine the Creator as a low comedian, and at once the world becomes explicable.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass; he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. One seldom discovers a true believer that is worth knowing.

Creator - A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh.

Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods. If such a board actually exists it operates precisely like the board of a corporation that is losing money.

The believing mind is externally impervious to evidence. The most that can be accomplished with it is to induce it to substitute one delusion for another. It rejects all overt evidence as wicked...

Why assume so glibly that the God who presumably created the universe is still running it? It is certainly perfectly conceivable that He may have finished it and then turned it over to lesser gods to operate. In the same way many human institutions are turned over to grossly inferior men. This is true, for example, of most universities, and of all great newspapers.

The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the Devil.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities.

The Christian church, in its attitude toward science, shows the mind of a more or less enlightened man of the Thirteenth Century. It no longer believes that the earth is flat, but it is still convinced that prayer can cure after medicine fails.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
Immorality: The morality of those who are having a better time.

Well, I tell you, if I have been wrong in my agnosticism, when I die I'll walk up to God in a manly way and say, Sir, I made an honest mistake.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

...the great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom respectable. No virtuous man--that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense--has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading...

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.

SOME INFORMATION ABOUT WHERE I LIVE, WITH PHOTOS (see below)

La Grande is home to Eastern Oregon University, a state college offering graduate programs.

Our town is the county seat of Union County. The local economy revolves around timber and agriculture.

We have one high school (La Grande High), one middle school, four elementary schools, and three private schools.

Nearby attractions (within 2-3 hours drive) include Hell’s Canyon, the Wallowa Mountains (including the Eagle Cap Wilderness), Lehman Hot Springs, seasonal steelhead fishing in the Grande Ronde River, the annual Pendleton Roundup, Anthony Lakes and Spout Springs ski areas, Tamastsllikt Cultural Institute, and the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center and Overlook. There are more opportunities for fishing, hunting, hiking, backpacking and outdoor pursuits than one could count.

The Grande Ronde Valley measures approximately 15 miles east to west by 20 miles north to south. This is the largest completely enclosed circular valley in the world. It is rimmed by the Blue and Wallowa Mountains. Our farmers grow wheat, alfalfa, canola, mint, rye, barley, and peas among other things. The valley is surrounded by forested mountains which rise anywhere from 1,000 to 4,500 feet above the valley floor.

Northeast Oregon

I live in La Grande, a small town of about 13,000 people, nestled in the Grande Ronde Valley in the Blue Mountains of northeast Oregon. The town is situated along Interstate 84, and is 4 hours from Portland, 5 hours from Seattle and 2.5 hours from Boise.