i've had a fairly busy weekend, with little of my usual veg in front of the computer time. some highlights include finally seeing school of rock, spending a day at longwood gardens with my inlaws, and numerous minor-yet-important-to-deal-with-things-that-have-been-hanging-over-my-head-forever-type things. it was nice to actually be home and without houseguests so i was able to deal with this kind of crap. said crap has been building up over the past few weeks i also found out where mrs. noz and i will be in august.
because i was out of the blogging loop, i missed the blogging controversy (that is, not a controversy at all, outside of this small subculture of ours) concerning atrios' comments about religion. normally, i would be inclined to write some long rambling thing about this, but i guess you will have to settle for the summary. in short: i am an atheist--who sometimes gets on the fairly militant side--but i also have plenty of seriously religious friends. some of them even (gasp) christians (e.g.). atrios is right that atheists are one of the few religious groups who can be openly and overtly denigrated by politicians (name another group of people who share a religious belief that the president of the united states would publicly say that he "doesn't know" whether they "should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots"). in that light, i am puzzled when christians talk about how anti-christian this country is/is becoming/has become. no other religion gets pandered to by poliiticians like christianity does in this country. i have a hard time seeing this place as anything but very christian on a basic underlying-assumption-of-everything sort of way.
but there is something to the idea that many liberals (myself included) sometimes exhibit a bias against religious christians, or at least assume that religious christians are conservative. many are. the christian right not only exist but has a substantial number of followers. but there's also a diversity of political opinions. the christian right just gets more press. for example, read the last paragraph of the 6/6/02 entry on sarah's blog. i remember when sarah's sister announced she was born again, and i found that i assumed she would become close minded too. it didn't happen. i went to the sisters wedding and met the couple's friends from their church. they were a surprisingly diverse group of people from all over the world who seemed quite willing to enter into civil discussions. it wasn't what i expected.
...and see HLVictoria's post about the above issue. i went to her blog just after writing this post.
