Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

It's pretty weird being here in Silicon Valley… It's really lush and pretty, the roads are gigantic, the wealth is obvious, and the consumerism is over the top. We stopped at a couple of stores and it's amazing how many different things you can buy and how little it all costs. The computer I recently bought in Mexico for editing video projects could have been picked up here for well under half what I paid for it down there. Seriously, stuff is cheap enough that if you live in Central or South America it would actually cost less to buy a plane ticket and fly here to pick up the computer.

We ate lunch at a Japanese restaurant in Los Gatos. Sitting on each side of us (and I'm guessing at every seat in the place) were the sort of successful-yet-pathetic liberals (not the funny kind) that Ann Coulter spews hatred at. On one side was a couple sitting with an eighty year old guy expressing how sad they were that when he was in the military there weren't enough chaplains, so he and his comrades weren't able to get enough front line “blessings”. He tried to explain to them that it really wasn't his main concern at the time but I don't think they got it at all.

As if praying does any good anyway… Outside of the obvious atheist arguments as to its idiocy, it should be pointed out that one of the core concepts of Christianity is that of “free will”. That is, god doesn't interfere in this world. So you can't pray for God to smite anyone, or keep you from being smote (or smitten). After all, as soon as you start believing that god takes a hands on role in this world, you are only a very small step away from coming to the realization that god is responsible for all of the evil and suffering in this world.

The ironic truth of course is that God doesn't exist, yet is still responsible for a vast percentage of the evil and suffering in this world.