But I think the most likely reason of all was that his heart was two sizes too small.

I heard an item on NPR this morning about "new" atheism, one that evangelizes for its cause, focusing on hatred and contempt, casting all religion as dangerous and ignorance.

They interviewed a man who'd posted a photograph of a communion host impaled on a rusty nail on his blog. He laughed, saying, "People got very angry. I don't know why."

I thought, yet you do. Because it Means Something. Otherwise you would not have done it in the first place.

I was surprised how deeply upsetting the story was to me. It quite literally gave me a sick feeling in my stomach that I couldn't shake for the rest of the day. I understand wary questions and even cynicism, but I don't understand circumventing the natural act of discussion by objecting in such a mean-spirited way.

It seems to me that at a most basic level, religion emphasizes the importance of symbols and ritual on the soul. The importance of CULTIVATING the soul. The focus on the spirit, as well as the mind and body. So what I take home from this story is: it's weird that people don't want others to do that. I know religion gets big and messy and fundamentalists really ruin it for everyone, but I have poked around quite a bit and have yet to find a religion with central tenants of nastiness and cruelty to others.

And atheist fundamentalism is still fundamentalism.

And within that I suppose there is also the problem of respect for others. I would not dream of tearing the pages from the Sikh holy book, just as I would not dream of trampling my neighbor's flower garden. It worries me that other people don't see things that way, regardless of opinion on higher powers.

It's the intolerance I find so distasteful, and I realized this morning that I was thinking to myself, I am intolerant of intolerance, which I realized is completely unsound. How does that make me different, in a big cosmic sense, than the people inventing Blasphemy Day? I don't think it does. And if I am going to claim to be at peace with everything in this world -- really at peace -- then I'm going to have to come to terms with this somehow.

Which is why I am here, in this image, as both the accepting loving heart and the frozen heart of the intolerant bigot. Because until I can work this out -- this intolerance problem -- I'm just as bad.

LINKS WITHHELD

I need to share this with you, because it's creepy. And I don't know what else to do with it. And I can't stop thinking about it.

An acquaintance from high school has been surfacing on facebook lately promoting her blog and twitter feeds. Her blog, it is about blogging, but it's worse than that. It's not an insightful muse on the medium in particular, indeed there are no in depth thoughts of any kind to be found as far as I can tell. It's "instructions" on how to write a blog. How to manage a twitter feed, ten things you never knew you never knew about linkedin.

Everyone has been using these media as long as she has, and they are evolving as quickly as she can read the FAQs and lurk around on the sites. An email from Twitter itself just four days ago stated: "as Twitter has evolved, we've gained a better understanding of how folks use the service." So I'm not sure how it is that she has magical knowledge beyond what I'd have access to if I gave it some thought. And I hesitate to get sage I've been there done that type knowledge in a brand new blog from a robotic technocrat.

The best part: all of this information is coming from a person who, on her facebook profile, makes sentences instead of keywords under the various "interests" categories.

Ownership, entrepreneurialship, making money. I shouldn't beef with people who are genuinely interested in the topic, but I can't help but wonder how the hell she can afford to do all this, unless she is being paid to blog (which I suspect, since those gigs generate fairly poor quality content). She isn't connecting with others, she is connecting with pixels and gadgets and things that people have to buy into, or buy. Things that people like me don't have time for. Or don't have money for.

I don't mean to pick on this person specifically, (although she has made it very easy to do,) it's the larger issue at hand.

Listen: it is stupid to pay for a domain name and have tons of banners pointing to ME ME ME when what you want to do, truthfully, is blog. Which is to say: you have thoughts you want to type out. Maybe people will read it, maybe they won't. It seems to be that people who are "successful" at this -- people who have been doing it for a long time, with a lot of content, who have a nice readable page -- just blog. They don't particularly want anything to come of it, they just do it. The readership and comments and warm feelings come later.

Because you don't need money to blog. You can get a quite serviceable blog for nothing at all, there are countless platforms to do so, and if you need help in this area we can chat about it becuase I have bounced around quite a few of them. Or ask the bloggers you read. Or something.

I keep coming back to this idea of genuine living vs. robot people, and this is such a perfect example.