An excellent quote from the SJ Mercury

That's the San Jose Mercury; I'm assuming that it's a newspaper, but I don't have a URL. Hmmm, it's an "A" and not an "am", I guess it's pronounced YewAreEll, huh?

Faith is such a funny thing.

No, not funny hah-hah. Funny as in rip-your-eyes-out funny.

"All you have to do is have faith!"

"Have faith, and you will believe the bullshit that I am going to tell you, and you will be happy, happy, happy and on top of that you will have everlasting life!"

"O'yeah, and while you're at it, please give god at least ten percent of everything you have. It's OK, I'll take it to god for you, you don't want to bother him. It might piss him off."

"O'yeah, god likes big, beautiful churches. It makes him happy, and he likes the smell of goats and bulls and, in some cases, virgins, burning in sacrifice too. Y'know, we really need more than just your ten percent, you need to go convince twenty other people to give us money too. Yeah, they'll be saved, just like you are."

Faith.

Faith has never killed anyone, never.

It has, however, given rise to institutions that have. I don't need to name them, you know them, they reside in your communities, in your hearts.

Faith frequently teams up with hate, more frequently than hope.

Hate, hate that person who doesn't believe the way you do. The person that looks different, that speaks different, that thinks different, that worships different.

That lives in a different country, has a different couture.

Tolerance has always, always been preached by religions not in power.

But when they get the power... look out.

For there's suddenly hate.

And killing.

Inevitably.

Historically, that's the way it's worked.

And I'm afraid, sore afraid, for the United States.

They are close, so close, to realizing their goals.

We have a constitution which does not allow the majorities to kill the minorities.

And that constitution is hanging by a thread.

When I was but a kid, there was a lot of talk about a racial uprising, the white people would kill all of the black people, or send them back to Africa.

It didn't happen, of course, and right now, racially, the United states is about as close to perfection as you can reasonably get.

But the conservatives, the religious right, have some anti-constitutional trick up their sleeves. A really good example of this is the appointment by BabyBush of a right-wing bigot to the US court of appeals against the wishes of the people... the people being represented by our senators.

This is a victory by the religious right, and this is an example of the tactics that they will use to take over the judiciary.

If they have control of the executive, the legislative and the judicial branches of our government?

Nothing good can come of that, nothing good at all.

Forget the constitution. Forget the laws.

Forget freedom.

The bill of rights? Uh, I think that that's getting in the way of, uh, protecting our freedoms. After all we have the department of homeland security to take care of that, yeah.

Tom Ridge is not even the worst of them.

OK, enough gloom and doom here.

I got up about 10:00 or so, enjoyed a coupla football games, diddling on the web, playing music... and I ordered a tuner and a mike from Musicials friend, now I gotta get serious about producing some really amateurish music, heh.

And I'm gonna get to bed early tonight, next week is my early week, gotta get prepared, heh.