An Eclectic Mind

You are not welcome here.

I am not a religious person. In fact, I’m an atheist.

I don’t use this blog to promote my religious (or non-religious) views. While some of my comments may reflect those views, I’m not trying to convince anyone that they should change their views. Religion (or lack thereof) is a personal choice.

By the same token, I don’t expect or want any reader to use the comments feature to try to convince me or any other reader to change their religious views. If you want to preach, go bother some other blogger. Don’t bother me.

Read this carefully: I will delete any comment that attempts to communicate what I or any other person should believe about a higher being. This blog is not a forum for religious debate. Period.

I just had a four-comment exchange going with a reader who found God and evidently looked down on me because I hadn’t. When I told him I wasn’t interested in a religious debate but offered to leave his comments online for others to discuss with him, he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted a debate with me. His final comment — which never appeared here — was a condescending jab at me. I’m inferior in his eyes because I don’t believe that his god is watching over me and controlling my life. This same god, I should mention, is also just standing by while innocent people all over the world suffer from illness, starvation, and the cruelty of others.

God is all powerful and all good? Give me a fucking break.

In the meantime, I think this guy is an idiot for wasting his time preaching religion to the non-religous on the Web.

Well, he blew it and he screwed it up for anyone else with the idea of talking religion here. I won’t tolerate it any more. All of his comments have been removed and you won’t see any others.

You don’t like this policy? Don’t fool yourself into thinking that I care. There are millions of other blogs out there. Go bother someone else.

Why I don’t need to bother.

It might seem as if I have it in for Sarah Palin. I do. She’s severely under-qualified for the position they’re placed her in. As a woman, I’m insulted that they obviously thought they could put any woman who looked good in a skirt in this position to capture the female vote. I don’t agree with the few policies she’s voiced — for example, anti-abortion, even in the case of rape — and I certainly don’t want to see another Evangelical “Christian” anywhere near the White House.

And doesn’t having an unmarried, pregnant teenage daughter say anything about her failings as a mother? (I know it says a lot about abstinence only sex education, as I pointed out here.)

Yet I’ve personally said very few things against her in this blog. Why?

Because I don’t have to. Everyone else is doing it for me. All I have to do is link to the articles, jokes, and videos I find on the Web.

And I’m not even looking for them! They come to me from my friends — including folks who live in Alaska — via e-mail and Twitter. They come to me from as far away as the U.K., Portugal, and New Zealand!

I just sit back and follow the links I get. If I find something I think is worth sharing, I pass it along.

So I have no need to bash Sarah Palin. I’ll let the rest of the world do it for me.

This was so funny, I had to blog it.

In surfing around the Web this evening, I stumbled upon a comment from Tom Wright on a Talking Points Memo reader post regarding tomorrow night’s vice presidential debate:

Beware, Palin’s infuriating verbal squirming may cause Biden’s head to explode.

People making the mistake of trying to understand her unparseable constructions suffer greatly. Only by matching her smile and blank cheerfulness can one withstand the sucking black hole of unreason that is Palin attempting to communicate with words.

He was referring, of course, to all interviews done so far — yes, all three of them — in which Palin has proven again and again that she is completely clueless.

A public service announcement.

Leonardo DiCaprio, will i. am, Tobey Maguire, and Forest Whitaker have created public service announcements to encourage American youth to register to vote. The non-partisan PSAs, produced by DiCaprios Appian Way, were created to engage and inspire young people to register and vote and participate in the upcoming election. Celebrities appearing in the PSAs include: Amy Adams, will.i.am, Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Bacon, Halle Berry, Kate Bosworth, Kevin Connolly, Courteney Cox, Ellen DeGeneres, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jamie Foxx, Jonah Hill, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Kiedis, Ashton Kutcher, Adam Levine, Laura Linney, Eva Longoria, Tobey Maguire, Demi Moore, Natalie Portman, Giovanni Ribisi, Ethan Suplee, Kyra Sedgwick, Michelle Trachtenberg, Usher, and Forest Whitaker.

If the embed won’t work (was having trouble with it), here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vtHwWReGU0

An oldie recycled for current events.

Once again, my friend Tom delivered a good chuckle to my in box. This particular one has been floating around the Web for some time, but it’s best as written here:

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75-year old Texas rancher whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Sarah Palin and her bid to be a heartbeat away from being President.

The old rancher said, “Well, ya know, Palin is a post turtle.”

Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a post turtle was.

The old rancher said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a post turtle.”

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain.

“You know she didn’t get up there by herself, she doesn’t belong up there, she doesn’t know what to do while she is up there, and you just wonder what kind of dumb ass put her up there to begin with.”