My Awakening

I have been an atheist for 100% of my adult life.  I am not sure how to count my youth and teen years.  I went to church fairly regularly and bible school in the summers from ages 6-10 or so.  And then, my parents got busy with life and raising four kids, and my mom quit going on Sundays.  I got a rejuvenation of sorts between the ages or 13-15, only to eventually do some research and decide the bible just had too many inconsistancies, and then it was over.  I made up my mind that God doesn’t exist and moved on.

For the past 25 years or so, I have just lived my life, not really caring if others want to believe in God, Buddha, Allah, or whomever.  Yet I did continue to have a passive interest in ancient history, and even took elective classes in college in the subject.  And while I never advertised my beliefs, if someone wanted to have a good discussion I was always up for it.  Along the way I am sure I lost a couple of promising relationships because of my beliefs, and then ironically, as regular readers know, I married possibly the most religious person I ever even dated.  Even after marrying a devout theist, I still continued to live and let live–what’s the harm in using a book to teach children morals?  Sure any child doing a little research can find problems with the Noah story as they do with the Santa story, but we tell them Noah did exist and the world did have a massive flood even though evidence shows different. 

Then along comes the internet, and now you can research and find opinions of thousands of people about religion, atheism, and the bible.  As some know, when I started this blog, it was just a blog about life in general, a diary of sorts.  And then I did a post about my atheistic beliefs and did tag search and found hundreds of other bloggers with similar beliefs as mine.  And gradually my belief system is changing.  Not my belief (or non-belief if you prefer) in god, but in how religions should be perceived.

I now pay attention to religion, where before I didn’t really care.  I find myself thinking about religion more than I ever have in my life.  I read articles about it.  I eavesdrop when I hear people discussing church.  I marvel at the new million dollar churches in my neighborhood.  I wonder what our local and national government is going to do to pander to the religious right.  And this is someone who has on more than one occasion punched the Republican ticket in the booth!

So, what is the next step?  To be honest, I am not sure.  One thing is for certain, the more blogs that are out there discussing these things, then the more likely someone googling Noah’s Ark will come across one of us.  And then they get to reading.  Sure, if they are a indoctrined devout theist, nothing will probably change.  But we can show the doubting holiday worshippers and agnostics that there are thousands of people out there just like them.  And maybe 30 years from now I can look back at this blog and say I was in at the beginning.  Or my kids can use this at the insanity hearings before they put me away.

Are You Lonely?

This is an advertisement in my local paper today.  I am tempted just to post this and nothing else, but I will comment.

I know it’s just an ad, and six months ago I would never have even looked at it.  But I read it, and the first thing that popped into my mind was loneliness is not a disease.  After a little deeper thought, I started to wonder, who is this church’s target and why?  This is one of the largest churches in town, yet they have to proscelytize this way? 

” …showing up in teenagers, singles, widows, just about anyone whose lives it can slowly destroy”

This just seems to target, for a lack of better words, the weak.  A person who may be more susceptable to believing in a mythical being.  If a person is indoctrinated early like my wife, it becomes very difficult for them not to believe, so the churches already have them.   Who else to target?  I know!  A widow or a single person feeling alone!  Yeah, write an ad, get on it! 

I guess I have just turned into a cynic.

And I know HeIsSailing posted another of this same churches ads on one of his articles on de-conversion that basically used an attractive woman to get new members but in my brief search over there I couldn’t find it.  If anyone knows the post please link it back.

Religion and the Workplace

I know I am not the first to bring this up and I will be far from the last, but it is amazing to me how much religion permeates my job.  In one of my early posts when this blog wasn’t even really a full blown atheism/religion blog, and I wasn’t even getting near the number of daily hits that I get now, a small discussion developed about religion and work and the possibility of discrimination.  I don’t believe I am or can be discriminated against in the traditional ways that have oppressed many people in the past.  The last thing a white male in the US can scream about is that.  But there are some issues with religion. 

But consider this.  I have been living more in hotels the past month (thus my lack of new posts) than at home.  When I go to one of our remote offices they usually set me up in an office, usually a cubicle of sorts.  The one I had to go to in Amarillo, Texas had a poster above my workstation similar to this:

Now, my choices are to just do my work and just deal with the fact that I write a blog that is predominantly about my religious non-beliefs or to take the poster down and cause me problems in an office where everyone generally likes me.  So I chose to be a hypocrite and just grin and bear it.  What choice do I really have?  What good could come of me making a stink about it?  One of the best workers there often talks of church and her grandkids singing in the choir.  Obviously there is a good chance we know who hung the poster up.

I guess I didn’t realize it but Amarillo must be on the edge of the Bible belt.  One day we go to lunch and at the restaurant waiting area where normally you see Apartment finders or a singles scene paper there is a guide to the Christian businesses in the area.  I assume this is to encourage people or other businesses to do work together.  Yet, whenever I see things like this now I tend to think what happens to the other people?  What if an non-believer, not necessarily an atheist, but say a Muslim or Jewish person opens a business in the area?  Are they allowed to put out a Jewish flyer?  Obviously even if they did I doubt it would help in this particular city.  If you are a business owner and not a Christian best to pretend methinks.  And if it is this way there I couldn’t imagine how it is in the meat of the Bible belt.

These problems of religion in my workplace is hardly a thing that makes my job unbearable.  In actuality I work for a great company with a great owner and a lot of good people to work beside.  But I have to admit it can get uncomfortable when you get surrounded by people you know have vast differences in beliefs than myself.  Eventually the topic of religion and “What church do you attend?” comes up.  Do you spout off some Hitchens or just go with the flow.  So far I have been going with the flow, but I am starting to think I am not doing the right thing…

I am not a monkey!

This is one of my wife’s biggest arguments.  She will often tell me that she isn’t a decendant of a monkey, but I can be if I want to.

The Watchtower Society has printed a number of articles in their Watchtower pamphlet, as well as a book on Creation vs Evolution.  A summary of their beliefs are here.  A couple of excerpts:

Would you be happy to go through life with no purpose other than to eat, sleep, and reproduce? The thought repels even dedicated evolutionists. “Modern man, this enlightened skeptic and agnostic,” writes evolutionist T. Dobzhansky, “cannot refrain from at least secretly wondering about the old questions: Does my life have some meaning and purpose over and above keeping myself alive and continuing the chain of living? Does the universe in which I live have some meaning?”

And then they go on to quote some scientists:

Evolutionist Michael C. Corballis observes that “there is a striking discontinuity between humans and the other primates . . . ‘Our brain is three times as large as we would expect for a primate of our build.‘” And neurologist Richard M. Restak explains: “The [human] brain is the only organ in the known universe that seeks to understand itself.”

And that’s just a brief summation, but you get the idea.

This is a very common debate tactic when going arguing against Jehovah’s Witnesses, and I am sure many other Christian religions.  The “Many scientists have doubts about evolution,” “The gap between apes and man,” etc.  Talk origins does an excellent job of breaking down each of these arguments and many others, and I am paraphrasing from there.

The main argument is that as high as 5% (some articles claim higher) of scientists do not believe in evolution.  That number is already pretty low, yet goes down to a whopping 0.15% when you only poll scientists in the relevant earth and life sciences.  And this is in the US, where there is a higher percentage of creationists.

On the gap theory, it took MILLIONS OF YEARS for men to fully evolve from apes.  Creationists have been arguing the absence of fossils for decades, yet each year more and more fossils are found, with a gradual increase in brain size leading up to humans.

So a brief answer to my wife and other creationists:  No, you are not a monkey.  You are however a couple of chromosomes away from being one.  And that’s ok, it doesn’t make us apes.  It makes us the evolutionary descendants of apes.

To me, the Theory of Evolution came easily and at a young age.  I couldn’t understand why there was even a big debate about it.  The evidence is pretty cut and dry.  Yet, here we are 25 years after I knew evolution is what happened, and there are very big debates about it on TV, the internet, and in our daily lives.  Intelligent people try and use a book written by men more than 2000 years ago trying to understand the meaning of life and force it to fit their need of a God and afterlife.  For a reality check on this see this old post by pharyngula, one of the best I have read.

Lastly, think about this.  The airplane was invented just over 100 years ago by the Wright brothers.  60+ years after that we managed to get to the moon.  Another 40 years later we have crawlers on Mars and probes leaving our solar system.  Where will be in another 100 years?  How about 2000 years?  It’s not going to happen in my lifetime but eventually we will have enough knowledge to finally rid ourselves of the tales written long ago.

And the people wandering the earth then will be saying “I didn’t evolve from a human!”

Behind Enemy Lines

I have been on the road the past few days so no new posts lately, but here is what has been going on. 

My wife and her family went to the Southwest Jehovah’s Witness convention this past week.  Normally they go to Arizona, but this year they went to New Mexico.  Since my company has offices there that I needed to go to anyway, I travelled with them this year, although obviously I didn’t go to the convention itself.

From talking to my wife about this one and previous conventions, it reminds me of my previous work where I was in sales where I was a rep, trainer, manager, and owner over a period of 15 years.  From what I understand they do their baptisms at the conventions but also discuss the members commitment to the Society.  Mostly by adhering to the JW rules and continuing to get new members.  Sounds like a lot of motivational speaking to me.

The hotel we stayed at probably consisted of 80% Jehovah’s Witnesses for the days we were there.  One thing I noticed:  A large percentage of Jehovah’s Witnesses are not like my wife’s family.  I am sure they are similar in their basic beliefs about their religion, but my wife’s family, especially her mother and older sister and her husband, are, for a lack of a better word, die hard Witnesses.  They frown upon anything ”worldly.”  They home school their kids and have no intention of sending them to college.   They do not participate in any holidays.  Their kids are fully indoctrined and often criticize my kids (their cousins) about them doing bad things (i.e. birthdays, 4th of July).  In talking with some of the other Witnesses, while a few are fully immersed like my in-laws, I get the impression many are very similar to the majority of members of the other Christian religions:  Get through life during the week and worship on Sunday.

My main point is what many people already know.  Had my mother in law been visited by a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints, she would have been as devout with them as she is with The Truth and I would have a blog about being married to a Mormon right now.  Had she come across a proselytizing Pentacostal I would be discussing the idiocy of speaking in tongues rather than the issues of blood transfusions.  I think people want to believe and will become part of any belief system that is around them.  I have seen some argue that the desire for such beliefs is the reason there must be a supreme being, but that is another topic for another day. 

To once again give my wife credit.  She has raised our children with her spiritual beliefs, yet she allows me to expose them to the real world–and this is very much against what her family and congregation would recommend.  She not only encourages them to get good grades, she is actually indoctrinating them that they WILL go to college and get degrees.  My kids have friends that come over regularly that are not Witnesses.  While at times I want to be more aggressive in not allowing my children to get as involved with the Witnesses as they are, they are being fully exposed to both sides and will be able to make educated decisions, rather than just follow along because everyone they know has the same beliefs.

So, while the situation isn’t what I would consider ideal, at least my kids will see both sides and get evidence from me about what the real Truth is.

Dentist found slain with wife was ‘a good Christian’

This is a headline on the front page of my newspaper today.  a brief excerpt:

Police on Monday identified the couple involved in Sunday’s apparent murder-suicide in an upscale West Side neighborhood as a long-time dentist and his younger wife of seven years — a part-time criminal justice professor at the University of Texas at El Paso.

Officials believe Walter Dale Eastman, 49, shot his wife, Joni Eastman, 29, and then turned the gun on himself about 1:15 p.m. Sunday.

The whole article is here.  (edit:this link no longer works, the El Paso Times has archived this article)  The story is similar to many I am sure most of us have heard.  A seemingly normal person kills his wife and then himself.  Luckily this time the children were spared.  I get sick to my stomach when individuals kill off their children, wife, and then themselves.  You would hope in this day and age people would get professional help, but obviously that doesn’t happen.  I just wish people that are going to kill themselves wouldn’t kill others in the process.

I wasn’t going to do another post this week, but I am eating lunch, reading this article, and wondering if I did something like that would they say ‘a good atheist’ slayed his wife and them himself?  Honey, if you are reading this, you have nothing to worry about, you are stuck with me forever.     First, I would imagine true Christian’s would be at least a little offended by the headline also, wouldn’t they?  A ‘good Christian’ wouldn’t slay his wife and then kill himself.  And what about the wife’s family?  How good do they think he is?  If you read the article the quote is attributed to an old high school friend who was still a patient of his because he went to church and participated in Easter and Christmas plays.  Once again, does this make him a Christian?  Let alone a good one.  Why does the newspaper sensationalize his supposed religion based on a brief quote? 

And truthfully, I shouldn’t take it out on my local paper, because we have all seen similar attributes placed on people who have done similar things, whether in your own paper, the local or national news, or shows like 48 Hours.  Obviously the loosely based fact that one is a Christian (or any religion) doesn’t seem to really have any effect on whether one decides to do terrible things.  I hope one day the media will just label people based on their actions rather than what religion they are supposedly in.

Is It Mandatory That Atheist = Liberal?

A slight change of topic. 

In a large percentage of the atheist related blogs I read the writers are often liberal, anti-Bush, etc.  And for obvious reasons the more religious blogs are conservative.  I am not a big political person, but I do have some concerns.

Up until recently I have voted mostly Republican.  Now before I lose all my new blogging friends let me explain.  I owned my own business throughout most of the 1990’s.  My wife runs a business owned by her family.  And while I have always known the conservatives are going to pander to the religious I really didn’t give it a lot of thought back then.  When you own or run a small business there are many times you are just getting by, and the last thing I wanted was mandatory minimum wage hikes or mandatory health care for part time employees.  And this was always a danger with the Democrats.  It is difficult enough running a business without having the government telling you you have to adhere to certain laws and pay people certain amounts no matter their job skills.

Even though I no longer run a business, I still find it hard to agree with the liberals on the business end of everything.  I guess I am still suffering from the indoctrination of the self employed.  I am pro choice, pro stem cell research, pro complete separation of church and state.  Yet I am also pro have a gun (legally of course), pro death penalty, pro letting the states set wage and other business regulation laws, pro military (but not necessarily pro the current war we are in).  So I am currently about as middling as you can get. 

One problem that I think is actually pretty serious however, is the Supreme Court.  If the GOP wins the presidency next year, that is a pretty big concern to me.  They are already leaning right and it could become over abundant if the next one or two justices are selected by a Republican president.  Yet I don’t see a Democratic candidate I like.  Edwards seems to have the lead, but I don’t really like his Health Care Plan.  If Clinton gets the nod, I won’t vote for her.  I just don’t like her, sorry.  I would vote for Bill Richardson, but I don’t think he is going to get enough support to get the nomination.  I don’t really like any of the GOP candidates either except for Giuliani (and I don’t love him).

So, at this point, unless I can be convinced in the next 18 months or so, if it is Edwards or Clinton vs. Giuliani, I would vote for Giuliani, despite my concerns about the conservatism in the Supreme Court.  Any advice attempting to sway my vote for the next year and a half will be appreciated.

A Blood Problem

I have been working on this topic for a couple of weeks, but a post by The Spanish Inquisitor about Indoctrination jump started me to finish this post.

One of the biggest arguments my wife and I have ever had was about blood transfusions.  As previously mentioned, my wife had gotten out of The Truth when we were first together.  By the time she was pregnant with our second child she was once again involved in her religion.  I was still new to JW’s and what they believed, and one day she made a passing statement that if anything happened in delivery that she couldn’t have a blood transfusion.  This was the first time I had heard this and it was baffling to me.  She brought home some literature for me to read about it, and it is still as baffling to me today as it was then.

The Bible verses they claim support this belief are Genesis 9:4, Leviticus 17:12-14, Acts 15:20 & 29, and Acts 21:25.

Now, I am not the expert of the Bible that some on a number of blogs I read are.  I am not a reformed Christian that read the Bible for a number of years before realizing I didn’t believe it.  I read it when I was younger and decided I didn’t believe in it, and rarely picked it up after that, until I met my wife. 

First and foremost, I don’t believe the Bible so no matter how many verses she would show me I would disagree.  But to me, even if I was a Christian, it seems obvious to me that the verses are talking about different things occuring in a much older and different world. 

Gen 9:4 “But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat“–seems to say that you cannot eat meat with blood, or basically eat raw meat.

Lev 17:12-14 “You shall eat the blood of no manner of flesh“–where they get this to mean blood transfusions I have no idea, and while it says flesh, which by itself in our terms today would seem to mean human, the verse before is talking of beast and fowl, which clearly implies (to me anyway) when you hunt you must cook the meat. 

Acts 15: 20 & 29; 21:25 ”Abstain from blood“–This is very vague.  But two thousand years ago, blood transfusions were not even thought of.  Taken into that context with the verses from the OT, it seems to be a reinforcement to not consume animal blood.

From these verses the main point that gets across to me is the consumption of blood.  If you go to the Watchtower website they have an absurd article discussing the history of blood transfusions.  They probably had a lot of support during the 80’s and 90’s with many news stories of tainted blood with AIDS and hepatitis.  And, without belittling the people effected by these tragedies, many lives are saved by blood transfusions every day.  The Watchtower Society was also against organ transplants for a number of years, claiming it bordered on cannibalism.  Yet, in 1980 they quietly revoked that decision and now even praise it.  Some JW’s are coming out against the blood transfusion decision and are trying to get them to change their ways.  If you are a JW and you question these issues I highly recommend this site.

This brings me back to the main focus of this post.  At the time, I could not convince my wife in a worse case scenario to get a blood transfusion.  This was a little worrisome.  Even though realistically blood transfusions are rare, one of the more common instances where they are performed is on mothers during a baby’s delivery.  Fortunately, we found a doctor who was willing to go a bloodless route if necessary, and it was unneeded anyway.  But now there is the next argument.  What happens if one of our children ever need a transfusion?  Once again, statistically they will probably not need one as a youth, if ever.  But as a parent, you always have it in the back of your mind.  What if?  And the last thing you want is a husband and wife having a throw down argument in the middle of a hospital.  After some research I found that until the age of 12, most states will get a court order if needed in such situations to allow hospitals to get blood transfusions.  But even before I layed that out, my wife conceded if the situation were to ever happen, she would allow the transfusions until they were baptised in the Truth, and then it would be up to them.  Another small victory for me.  And because of the non-chalance of this writing, it may seem as if this was an easy win, but this was a large fight with a lot of screaming.  By my wife of course, I am a mellow easy going dude 

However this still brings up some issues I may have in the future with my wife and children.  The Indoctrination post mentioned above got me thinking about it.  Am I doing my children a disservice by not being more proactive in their early religious development?  While my wife has conceded some points, my children are still being raised as JW’s even if they have an atheist dad.  I haven’t previously had a large problems with it.  My wife and her family are very good moral people, and I think The Truth does help them with that to some extent.  I always thought I could kind of show my children my beliefs as they got older and could understand more.  Yet, the longer this goes the harder that gets. 

They Say It’s Your Birthday

It’s my birthday too!

Actually my birthday was yesterday.  I am now one year away from the big 4-0.  I am getting old.  Since I had to work late yesterday my wife is getting me a cake and cooking me a dinner for my birthday tonight.  Now, to the average person reading, this may not seem like such a big deal.  But to anyone who has read some of my previous posts and know that my wife is a Jehovah’s Witness and also knows that JW’s don’t celebrate birthdays would realize this is a pretty big deal.

A quick recap.  When my wife and I were dating we ended up living together before we were married.  She was disfellowshipped from The Truth.  After we were married, she let me know she wanted to get re-instated in her religion.  I knew virtually nothing about JW’s, and I of course told her it was fine with me, whatever made her happy.  I knew the odds were no matter who I married there was a good chance of them being religious, but I didn’t know anything about her religion at the time.

I would soon find out.  We had a lot of problems the first couple of years of our marriage.  JW’s do not celebrate any holidays.  We had children, and I told her that the day my kids were born one of the best days of my life, and I am going to celebrate it with them whether she liked it or not.  This was the old internet days with dial up, but there were a few websites discussing religions, and I found one really good one about Witnesses.  I also read Kingdom of the Cults, which is really a book showing how JW’s, Mormons, and 7th Day Adventists are the wrong religion compared to evangelical Christians, but it still had a lot of information about JW’s that I previously did not have.

If anyone has tried to debate with a JW, you know they are pretty knowledgeable in the Bible (at least their version).  They are indoctrined, and keep in mind, my wife was raised in The Truth, which means this was all she knew.  And the Watchtower Society tries to keep it that way.   They are discouraged from reading any other literature.  I was in sales for a long time, and after awhile, you read enough books by Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins and the like and you eventually have an answer to every objection a client may have.  Well, JW’s are the same on the religious objection front.  This is how they get new members by having all of the answers that a person that believes in God but isn’t getting good answers in their own church/congregation.  At first my wife had all of the answers to why we couldn’t celebrate holidays, or even my initial attempts to get her to look at evolution or some conflicts with the Bible.  They have a standard answer to nearly every question, and if you press further, they will refer you to a specific Watchtower article.  To give you an idea how bad it was, my brother was married in a Catholic Church a couple of months after we were married, and she had what came down as an anxiety attack at the rehearsal because she couldn’t stand being in the church.  At the actual wedding she ended up just watching all of the kids in the daycare so she wouldn’t have to be in the pews.

My wife’s mother was 100% involved in The Truth and made sure her kids were as well.  They were pulled out of school when they had and could not participate in numerous events (Christmas parties, anything involving Easter, etc).  Things like that made it very hard to have and maintain friends in school, and she received a lot of discrimination-not to mention that’s the way the Watchtower Society wants it anyway.  She was basically sheltered from the real world.  There was no way I was going to let my kids be raised that way.  I do not mind exposing them to religion, but they need to know about everything out there and not just be exposed to someone’s “Truth.”

My wife, our marriage, and myself have come a long way since then.  All marriages involve some compromise, and ours had plenty.  She finally stood up to some of her family and said, this is who I am married to and we will do some of the things he wants such as birthdays (and we spend Christmas with my family which is out of state).  I have learned a lot about JW’s.  I have went to a number of meetings and almost every Memorial since we have been married.  I agree with very little of their beliefs, but I give them credit as far as the amount of studying they do, and they are one of the few religions that hold their member accountable.  If you do not participate, they will boot you out.  For the most part they are all good people. 

All of that being said, after much persuasion, my wife finally read some of the research I did on JW’s and the Watchtower Society.  The 1914 and 1975 predictions loom large and she finally took some closer looks at it.  I have shown her articles about blood donations, and while she is still iffy on that she is at least listening now, where previously she was unmoveable on that topic. 

My wife is much too emotional and spiritual to be like me and become an athiest, but I think if there was a way out without the repercussions of her family that she would choose another Christian church.  I think the diversity of her spiritualness and my atheism is healthy for both us and the kids.  If my kids choose to stay JW’s and are happy then I will be happy.  But they will at least be aware of other religions and will be exposed to my own free thinking beliefs as well.  For a good deconversion story read a new post from evanescence.

Now, it’s almost time for my cake….

We’re All Doomed I Tell Ya, Doomed!

 

Lo and behold in my Sunday paper there was an article about the world ending in 2012.  And here I was thinking about losing a few pounds to try and lower my cholesterol…

 Some highlights for those not wanting to read the whole thing:

Let’s hope Nostradamus, Edgar Cayce and Jeane Dixon are wrong.

These psychics predicted the world would experience a cataclysmic event — perhaps a meteor strike or a reversal of Earth’s electromagnetic poles — in 2012. That’s the year the Mayan calendar ends.

First I should point out that Nostradamus, Cayce, and Dixon haven’t been too accurate in their predictions that were supposed to have happened in the past 25 years or more.  Cayce predicted the world would start changing in 1958 with cataclysmic consequences by 1998.  And his changes weren’t anything minor-New York and Connecticut buried underwater, the Great Lakes draining into the Gulf.  Most of California underwater.  Hmm, we’re all still here.

I can remember watching the Film, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow when I was about 12 or 13.  It was narrated by Orsen Welles and talked of Armageddon happening during the last part of the 20th century.  This was when I was reading the Bible a lot, as was my best friend at the time.  To say the least this movie scared me straight, and was one of the influences that got me started reading the Bible (the movie not only discussed Nostradamus but also Revelation of the New Testament).  Nostradamus received recognition in the 20th century because of his “prediction” of WWII and mentioning the name “Hister,” which Nostradamus apologists will be ecstatic to tell you is only two (or one sometimes) letters off from naming Hitler.  After researching ol’ Nosty and his predictions, he like so many other “prophets” are very vague and open to interpretation, allowing his name to be continually brought up even though the majority of his predictions proved false.  I even recall a remake of sorts of The Man Who Saw Tomorrow in the early to mid 90’s warning us again about 1999 and the man with the blue turban in the Middle East, I think it was narrated by Charlton Heston the second time around.

I don’t believe Jeane Dixon needs to even be brought up as she was wrong pretty much all the time.

Now, I didn’t know a lot about the Mayan Calendar, and had to do a little research.  Some good info can be found here and on Wikipedia, but truthfully it is still pretty confusing, and this coming from an amateur astronomer.  Bottom line is they predict the world ends in 2012.

 So, do any of us believe the world is going to end in 5+ years?  I would say the overwhelming majority will say no.  And once 2012 passes, then new prophecies will come out with new End of the World dates, or there will be new interpretations of the writings of Cayce and Nostradamus. 

So what does all of this have to do with my normal discussions?  Well, the article peaked my interest while reading my Sunday paper, and that triggered memories of watching different movies and specials about Nostradamus and other prophets/psychics which actually got me more interested in the Bible.  I remember truly being convinced California was going to fall in the ocean and I made a mental note to not consider colleges on the West Coast.  I remember my friend and I reading the Bible, especially Revelation and trying to understand the number 666 and the tribulation.  In the end he became very religious (and still is, even though I rarely see him any longer as we are across the country from each other), and I became an atheist.  It just shows that two intelligent but different people can get two entirely different opinions of the Bible.  Interesting to me, to say the least.

I guess I’ll start that diet after all….