However, if you are not a disbeliever (or are masking your xian DNA), I advise your next post be free of dogma and proseletyzing.  Or that, too, will be deleted.

We have a hard-and-fast rule here:  Thou shall not proselytize.  It’s GifS Commandment #2, which you can read under “On Commenting” (in top box, left sidebar).  Read and obey.  We have no patience with xian drivel - which we’ve all heard before because most of us wasted too many years “in the life”.  In fact, we’ve developed a “give no quarter, take no prisoners” policy on fundamentalism’s visitors.

The Moderators 

Granted, I spent the majority of those years living near DC in a fringe suburb, so I’m a bit removed from it. I went to college in the Hampton Roads area in places where it was easier to hide from the populace, though we have a TON of missionaries that troll the neighborhood where I currently live. Though, I’m getting out to live in the SF Bay Area to go to grad school so I suppose this has a happy ending, haha.

My parents now live near the West Virginia border, but I still haven’t gotten the creepy vibe yet. Everyone is more religious, but not publically so out in the mountains….

I knew Virginia was painfully conservative, but I had never attached “fundie” to its labels in my head. It really shouldn’t surprise me. Especially with the painfully uncomfortable English class in public school where I was informed that atheists are just people who know God exists but for some irrational reason turn their back on him. Thankfully, my teacher changed the subject after that gem escaped Little Miss Redneck’s mouth.

Sigh. I’m not even going to comment on the revisionist history they play down at Mt. Vernon and Colonial Williamsburg. We really should be above that sort of propaganda. =/

The teachers that I have been complete asshole toward me even so I try being reasonable. Christian is another word for asshole.

I hate to say it, but football IS king here, but anything is better than Jeebus. However, to hear the constant droning on about Bear is tedious at best. Bear is not MY personal savior!

//Auburn Grad//War Eagle!!

I suggest, though, that people actually should read history, not just the Rah Rah Our Team’s The Best version you get in school. As Noam Chomsky says, it’s all there, all available. It’s interesting to read the Aurora ( a newspaper operated by one of Benjamin Franklins’ grandsons, he inherited Franklins presses and used them.) in that it gives a quite different view of the time. One of John Marshal’s grand nephews tried to get him to open up and tell the real story about the “Founding Fathers” but Marshal wouldn’t do it. Said they weren’t what the were percieved to be by the public at that time of the revolution and had taken care to be seen as other than they were afterward. He wouldn’t be the guy who stirred up a hornets nest with the truth. Robert Lincoln recieved his fathers presidential papers and is reported to have been found burning them by a freind. The freind remonstrated with him, used the words, “for the sake of history!” R. Lincoln explained that this was why he was burning them: for the sake of history.

Funny, though. I heard people say recently that the Viet Nam experience was irrelavent to what’s going on now. Who cares what happened back then? I get out my copy of “The War of the Flea” and other items, and it could be forty years ago. Same statements, slogans, happenstance. Read Mr. Dooley and you’d swear it was todays headlines. Immigration, imperial war, crime, poverty.

You are probably a lot more educated than I, and you may have noticed that you can’t really abolish superstion. Traditional. My last job in the army was as an air traffic controller. There is a superstion about the rule of three: three accidents (or other occurances) and then the jinx is broken. I told my father this and he mentioned it to a person he knew, a Marine Colonel who commanded an airwing. He told my father that that was idiotic superstition, aircraft had problems because of human factors or wear, and if HE EVER heard ANYONE in his command saying such supersticious horse shit, they’d find out where the bear shit in the buckwheat. He wouldn’t TOLERATE such nonsense. Then he added, “Still, we all breathe a lot easier after that third one.” I think our wor’s cut out for us on the supersticion thing.

I took a course while I was still in the army which dealt with insurencies and resistance movements. The people most likely to be involved in these were often discribed as “the odd ones”, “strange people” who didn’t follow the conventions of society at large in the first place and tended to chafe at authority’s intrusions. They were considered to be as dangerous once “liberation” was at hand, and many were dealt with by the very liberators whose way they sacrificed a lot to prepare.