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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (7482)	3/5/2001 5:24:56 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Things are often more complicated than they appear at first. My, you certainly have a motley history. I thought my way out of atheism a couple of years later. I'd be interested in the logic that produces that result. I didn't think it was possible to use logic as a vehicle to get from atheism to theism, only the other direction. I thought you could only get from atheism to theism via emotion. When I was in high school When I was in high school I was still a Catholic. The Catholics in my high school graduation class were threatened with excommunication if we attended our baccalaureate service, which was deemed to be a non-Catholic religious service. I attended. That was the end of Karen, the Catholic. I had already been pretty much turned off by the nuns who were annoyed that I kept asking "why" and who keep repeating "because the Pope said so." I attended a small college with a Methodist affiliation. I selected it because it was the only one of its kind that didn't have required chapel attendance. I went to chapel a few times. I couldn't get past the recitation, "I believe in God..." Felt like a hypocrite. It had been easier to fake it in Latin. Never went back. I did attend a Unitarian service will a schoolmate Easter of my junior year in college. The sermon was about why Christ didn't rise from the dead. I found that refreshing, but I never went back. That was the end of my religious searchings. I've read some about other religions but I just never felt the need for one. No sense spending time and energy on something that doesn't matter. I tend to be impatient with true believers and fundamentalists of all stripes. It seems obvious to me that the mythical Christian deity was created in the image and likeness of mankind. When I first registered to vote after college, I planned to register as a Socialist but my state never asked for a party affiliation. I think I considered myself a Socialist because it was cool, the philosophy seemed kind, and it also seemed more efficient to me for some central authority to figure things out and then tell everyone else how to do things. I thought things were so screwed up that the only way to fix them was to tear everything down and start over. Compromise was anathema because a mixed implementation obviated the opportunity to test the effectiveness of changes. I was married to a John Bircher. I found an article about the new book, Atlas Shrugged, in his Playboy magazine and bought it for him for Christmas thinking he'd like at, capitalist pig that he was. I don't know that he ever got a chance to read it. It had quite an effect on me. I spent 30 years in the Federal bureaucracy so I have never been politically affiliated. No party has ever seemed to represent me, anyway. I was socially liberal and fiscally and constitutionally conservative. My votes have been all over the place. My philosophy is basically libertarian. I'm still a bit of an iconoclast. My training and my work have taught me the value of consensus. The end. I can't match your story. <g> Karen