Think about it

Ralph Cossa is right. Even I thought, when I heard about the no-so-secret meeting, that the timing couldn't have been much worse.

Staying alive isn't as easy as it looks. There are a lot of pressures on women in poor countries. And on little girls, as well.

Will bin Laden slip through our fingers while we grapple with the mess we've made in Iraq?

Ten propositions for the Democratic Party from Walter Cronkite.

On the way to work this morning, I heard on the news that by the end of this decade (I believe it was), 1 in 37 citizens of this country will be in prison or have been in prison at some time in their lives. We spend more on weapons, MD or otherwise, than any other country in the world, and we're planning new ones all the time, our crime rate is appalling, we lock up a larger percentage of our population than anyone else. Our schools are failing, mostly for lack of money.

I don't know, okay? Some days I have just the tiniest suspicion that this isn't exactly what the Founding Fathers had in mind, you know?

Warning. Rant about religion comes next.

Plagarism in the pulpit! How ungodly.

Kind of makes you wonder exactly how much a minister actually believes in what he's preaching when he stands up there mouthing stolen words, doesn't it?

I'm sorry, but I'm hoping this much-publicized "wave" of religious feeling in this country is like the last flare-up of a dying campfire. Just a momentary aberration, in other words. I attribute a fair share of it to people shocked (Shocked, I tell you!) to discover that the USofA is, in fact, pretty darned unpopular with a large chunk of the planet.

Can we get past the perception that words penned centuries ago by men with agendas to fulfill and repeatedly translated and "adjusted" by equally agenda-driven men since that time, are actually words spoken by a mythical, omnipotent deity who has a Master Plan by which the human race, or at least favored portions of it, are going to be wallowing in houris and booze for all eternity providing they die in a sufficiently bloody fashion? Or that the favored will be strumming harps, nibbling manna, and admiring the heavenly weather for eons to come?*

Quite frankly, you people are becoming an embarrassment to those of us who have chosen to grow up and accept that the devil did not, in fact, make us do it. Each of us is responsible for ourselves and, to a significant extent, our neighbors. Teach your children well, in fact, because some day they will be the arbiters of morality and justice in this world.

The major nations of this world have the means to wipe out warfare, hunger, and (to a large extent) disease on this planet. Can we forget about defending the superstitions of our ten-generations-ago ancestors and move forward with some work that's actually worth doing?

*Normally I try to avoid ranting on this subject, but our secular government has become so riddled with people determined to turn back the tide of social progress in this country, while ignoring those tenets of their faith they find inconvenient ("Thou shalt not kill," anyone?) that it's becoming increasingly difficult to follow politics in this country without finding myself mired down in the outdated pronouncements of an irrelevant superstition.

So, for the two of you who didn't leave mad after that little rant, go read this and consider the ways that we've gone astray from the ideals of equality and tolerance that many of us cherish, aside from the question of religion. I've read this one three times and still find food for new thought in it each time I come back to it.