Separation of church and state

I read something today that got me really riled up. On a discussion board that I frequent, some guy was complaining that the National Parks Service (US) had no right to put books advocating Creation in its bookstores because of the principle of separation of church and state, and because the NPS is a government owned service. To me, this is stupidity.

Being Australian, I don’t claim anywhere near the level of knowledge of US history as a local would, but as I understand it separation of church and state is supposed to be a constitutional guarantee of sorts to protect individual freedoms. That is, by not allowing religion to control government (or government run services), people will not be forced into living or acting according to the edicts of any religion against their will. Conversely, government is not allowed to pass laws in regards to the establishment of any religion.

So tell me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that putting a book about Creation into a NPS bookstore is restricting anybody’s rights not to believe in Creationism (and Christianity). Rather, it seems to me that people like this guy are using separation of church and state as a tool to purge religion from things that they wish to own for themselves. Ironic, given that atheism itself is a belief (and hence could be considered a religion), not to mention a minority one.

Do you agree or disagree? Post your thoughts in the comments section below!

Look ma, no wires!

Woohoo! I’m making this post from a wireless connection at home! Er, yay me… or something.

Sleeping patterns

In spite of these first two posts I don’t mean for this site to be a record of my dreams, but I thought this was worth mentioning. Last night I dreamt that I was at the house of a Transformers collector. While I was browsing his collection, I came across an interesting piece of information – the theme songs for Transformers (the 80’s cartoon) and Sailor Moon are the same. When I woke up, I hummed them through in my head, and sure enough, they were quite similar. I don’t remember ever having read or heard this piece of trivia anywhere before. It isn’t exactly an epiphany, but the thing that struck me was that my brain conjured up this tidbit all by itself! I wish I knew this when I was younger. The more sleep I get, the more I’m actually learning – although not necessarily useful stuff. Hehe…

These dreams are probably because I changed my sleep pattern. Before, I used to sleep around 2am and wake up at 10 the next morning. But I figure that I’m more productive in the mornings, so now I’m sleeping at midnight and waking up at 8. This post comes to you courtesy of an early start :D

I dreamed a dream…

I had this really weird dream last night, where I rented a ute, then went overseas and forgot about it. When I got back, I found out that I owed $20,000 in rental fees. So what does one do in a situation like this? Take the ute out and thrash it!! Hehehe…

So, this is my first “proper” blog post. As you can probably see, the site is a bit spare at the moment. That’s because I haven’t actually had time to merge the content from my old site into this one. Well at any rate, the forum’s up already, so please do go and make some posts in there. I’m really hoping that the forum will reach critical mass such that there will always be something interesting to see in there, and people come back regularly. (I’m not making any money from it btw… all those ad banners belong to the company that hosts the board).