Let's see here. Surely the majority of states in America would not ban gay marriage without good reason, right?  So let's go through those reasons briefly.

1. The majority of the population is Christian. Christianity forbids it.
- Well, our government isn't Christian and can't make laws based on religion of any sort, so that argument fails. Next try?

2. Gay marriage is not traditional. Homosexuals have never been able to marry before, so we have no moral/legal obligation to allow them to marry now.
- Well, at one point it was tradition for law to prohibit women from voting, allow the enslavement of Africans, and to keep people of different races from marrying. Tradition sucks, tradition changes. This is the story of America.

3. Children in families with gay parents will probably turn out gay.
- Cough cough...there is nothing wrong with being gay. And anyway, gay parents do not raise gay children any more frequently than straight parents do.

4. Children in families with gay parents don't develop normally.
- There is absolutely no evidence of this.

Religion and tradition are the only two arguments I ever hear against homosexuals. These arguments were also used against desegregation, women's suffrage, and the abolition of slavery. Thankfully, despite the best efforts of the bigoted, these arguments did not ultimately succeed.

Instead, most of the bigots of America adjusted to their losses and moved on. They learned to ignore the parts of the bible which endorsed slavery and the oppression of women. They openly acknowledge the evils of racism and have learned to appreciate women's abilities outside of the kitchen.

But when it comes to the oppression of homosexuals, they still cling to their last remaining prejudices. They claim that traditional marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman- even though for most of history marriage has been treated as a business deal. Daughters were sold for livestock, and women were raped on their wedding nights by men they had just met.

They invoke the Bible, where Lot was rewarded by God for protecting the angels from homosexual rape. Conveniently these people forget that Lot was only able to protect the angels by offering his two young daughters up for gang rape. Which begs the question, why is this book still seen as a legitimate source for governance in a country as intelligent as ours?

Instead of learning from history, many of our people insist on repeating it. Why why why...? I just don't understand.

I Finished an Incredible Book Today...

"And now they were in number one crematorium...so shaken was I by the situation, about which I was powerless to do anything at all, that I suddenly felt myself spinning close to the edge of madness. By whose will had such evil, such a succession of horrors been made to descend upon our wretched people? Could this be the will of God? No; I could not believe it."

- Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's eyewitness account of genocide at Auschwitz. When I read it, I was reminded of the biblical vision of hell. These people suffered fire and torment for worshiping the wrong God.

How can anyone pray to a God who ensures the existence a second Holocaust in the afterlife? I cannot stand the thought, and I would hope that any individual with the slightest sense of compassion would agree with me, and at least renounce this one tenet that is so widely accepted in our religious culture.

"Standing there alone, on the top step of this, their last brief voyage on earth, I felt it my duty to pause and think of them for a moment with heartfelt compassion..."

"In slow succession the truck rolled up and dumped the women, who had already been stripped of their clothes, at the top of the stairway leading down into the gas chamber. From there they were quickly pushed below. They all knew where they were going, but the rigors of their four months captivity, the corporal punishment they had been made to endure, and the disintegration of their nervous systems, had reduced them to such a point that they were no longer capable of putting up any resistance, or even of feeling pain. They were herded passively into the gas chambers. Weary of being hunted and persecuted, of living in constant fear, they dumbly awaited the hand of the sure physician, Death. For them life had lost all meaning and purpose. To prolong it would merely have prolonged their suffering."

"Mussfeld was today's killer on duty. Standing near the ovens, wearing rubber gloves, he held his weapon with a steady hand. One by one the bodies fell, each yielding his place to the next in line. Within a few minutes he had "tumbled" -that was the term used in general usage- the eighty men. Half an hour later they had all been cremated. Later Mussfeld paid me a visit and asked me to give him a physical check up. He suffered from heart trouble and severe headaches. I checked his blood pressure, took his pulse, listened to his heart with a stethoscope. His pulse was slightly high. I gave him my opinion: his condition was no doubt the result of the little job he had just performed in the furnace room. I had wanted to reassure him, but the result was just the opposite. He became indignant, got up and said: 'Your diagnosis is incorrect. It doesn't bother me any more to kill 100 men than it does to kill 5. If I'm upset, it's merely because I drink too much.'"

For awhile there last summer it seemed like it rained every night. The thunder called out to me, shaking my bed and tearing me from my slumber. I would call out questions in my dreams, and open my eyes a second later to the sound of gentle ripples or angry crackling. It was the only time I ever felt like God was speaking directly with me, but by that point all I could think was "Is that all you can do? Is my soul really worth that little to you?"

And after it was over, the feeling was so strange. It was like I'd been fearfully creeping towards a pit of fire for the past several months, but once I finally fell in, the fire disappeared. Like bracing myself for the worst pain imaginable, but nothing happens. I felt completely unburdened, and free.

The Conservative Attack on Education

Rick Santorum recently voiced his opinion that Obama's encouragement of higher education is a tactic to brainwash children into becoming liberals. He accused Universities of being guilty of "indoctrination" and encouraged his followers to stop funding such institutions.

I find it astounding that there is a portion of our population that genuinely believes this conspiracy theory. To these individuals, it makes more sense to believe that experts in various academic fields arbitrarily decided to doctor their research so that it would consistently support left wing perspectives.

The true source of their anger at education is sparked by their frustration with the fact that issues which are examined objectively with honesty and rigor tend to agree with a progressive perspective rather than traditional conservative perspectives.

If ultra conservatives had it their way, Universities would uphold traditional claims-even though these claims cannot be substantiated by evidence or research. But if this were the case, wouldn't the purpose of Universities as truth finders become obsolete?

Also, accusing Universities of indoctrination while you parade your own religion around as unquestionable truth reeks of hypocrisy and ignorance. But for some reason, conservatives love it.

Happy Martin Luther King Day

But it seems that I can hear the God of the universe saying, "even though you've done all of that, I was hungry and you fed me not. I was naked and ye clothed me not. The children of my sons and daughters were in need of economic security, and you didn't provide for them. So you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness." This may well be the indictment on America that says in Memphis to the mayor, to the power structure, "If you do it unto the least of these my brethren, you do it unto me."...Martin Luther King, 3/18/68

"As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. "Get out of here, baldy!" they said. "Get out of here, baldy!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty two of the boys.

....And then he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria."

2 Kings 2:23

Obviously, those boys had it coming. Just another day in the Old Testament.

"Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath at the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy." -Wuthering Heights

"Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and the killing fields of Cambodia are not examples of what happens to people when they become too reasonable. To the contrary, these horrors testify to the dangers of political and racial dogmatism. It is time that Christians stop pretending that a rational rejection of faith entails the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. One need not accept anything on insufficient evidence to find the virgin birth of Jesus to be a preposterous idea...I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too desirous of evidence in support of their core beliefs.

While you believe that bringing an end to religion is an impossible goal, it is important to realize that much of the developed world has nearly accomplished it. Norway, Iceland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan, the Netherlands, Denmark, and the United Kingdom are among the least religious societies on earth. According to the UN Human Development Report they are also the healthiest, as indicated by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate, and infant mortality. Insofar as there is a crime problem in Western Europe, it is largely the product of immigration. Seventy percent of the inmates of France's jails, for instance, are Muslim...conversely, the fifty nations now ranked lowest in terms of the United Nations' human development index are unwaveringly religious.

Other analyses paint the same picture: the US is unique among wealthy democracies in its level of religious adherence; it is also uniquely beleaguered by high rates of homicide, abortion, teen pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, and infant mortality. The same comparison holds true within the US itself: Southern and Midwestern states, characterized by the highest levels of religious literalism, are especially plagued by the above indicators of social dysfunction, while the comparatively secular states of the Northeast conform to European norms.

...Of course, correlational data of this sort do not resolve questions of causality- belief in God may or may not lead to societal dysfunction; societal dysfunction may foster a belief in God; each factor may enable the other; or both may spring from some deeper source of mischief. Leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, however, these statistics prove that atheism is compatible with the basic aspirations of a civil society; they also prove, conclusively, that widespread belief in God does not ensure a society's health."

-Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation

A Christian society condemns the torture of Jews during the Holocaust while worshiping a God who intends for Jews to be tortured for all of eternity.

Is there something wrong with this picture?

"We live in an age in which most people believe that mere words- "Jesus," "Allah," "Ram" - can mean the difference between eternal torment and bliss everlasting. Considering the stakes here, it is not surprising that many of us occasionally find it necessary to murder other human beings for using the wrong magic words, or the right ones for the wrong reasons. How can any person presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are free from error? Because the books themselves say so. Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our world...Because most religions offer no valid mechanism by which their core beliefs can be tested and revised, each new generation of believers is condemned to inherit the superstitions and tribal hatreds of its predecessors....The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around untestable propositions found in ancient literature-to say nothing of killing and dying for them- would be impossible to justify. What stops us from finding it impossible now?"

-Sam Harris

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Fallen

"God has been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn't. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at the once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down." - C.S Lewis, A Grief Observed

I'm not a Mac user, and the only Apple product I own is an old iPod. However, I can't seem to escape Steve Jobs quotes this week with his recent passing, and this one in particular inspired me. It was from a speech he gave at a Stanford commencement a few years ago, and can't seem to describe my life more perfectly right now...

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.”

I know I dreamed you a sin and a lie

I have my freedom

But I don't have much time

Faith has been broken

Tears must be cried

Let's do some living before we die.

Wild horses couldn't drag me away

Wild, wild horses,

we'll ride them someday

Honesty We Don't Hear On Sunday Morning

God had to send his son to rescue men

From wrongs committed way back when

On the day we ate from God's tree of sin

And sent ourselves to eternal hell again and again

But we never stop and say

Perhaps this was a cruel joke to play

Why would a loving God put the tree on their path that day?

Like a father who throws his naive children in harms way

Or a sadistic psychopath, preparing for his prey.

And from this we still suffer, everyday.

A Room Called Remember

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts...we cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need- not all the time surely, but from time to time- to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as part of the present,

where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember. The room where, with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have

lived. -Frederick Buechner

"I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently."

-Donald Miller

Why I Dread the Job Hunt

"Tell me what dishonesty means to you."

...This was the first question I heard in a job interview last week, and I couldn't help but laugh as soon as I heard it. It exemplifies what I dread about finding a new job. Despite my clean resume, my solid references, and the fact that I showed up fifteen minutes early, the person on the other side of the table is glaring at me like I am someone who will show up to work 2 hours late and promptly steal half the merchandise.

"I will work you for your paycheck."

...I realize it's a bad economy, but shouldn't supervisors at least attempt to put a positive spin on their management skills? I have never been so turned off to a job in my life.

Last Picnic

Before the fall rains come,
Let’s have one more picnic,
Now that the leaves are turning color
And the grass is still green in places.

Bread, cheese and some black grapes
Ought to be enough,
And a bottle of red wine to toast the crows
Puzzled to find us sitting here.

If it gets cold—and it will—I’ll hold you close.
Night will come early.
We’ll watch the sky, hoping for a full moon
To light our way home.

And if there isn’t one, we’ll put all our trust
In your book of matches
And my sense of direction
As we grope our way in the dark.

-Charles Simic

You can find poetry anywhere these days.

-Tim Martin