I'm bothered by the report of the local gun shop that apparently gave or sold a gun to the DC Sniper, illegally. The shop had, in the past, been investigated for illegal dealings. It took a pile of corpses for the weight of the law to come down on them, though. We've got plenty of gun laws in the country. If they were ever enforced, things might get better. I don't have tons of faith in that, but if this shop had been punished properly after it's first few problems, instead of just getting warnings, several people in the DC area might be alive today.
There's a big article about a dissident "Mormon" scholar who is probably about to be excommunicated from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It goes on and on about how he has "proved" the Book of Mormon wrong, all the while mostly ignoring his faulty premises. I was raised in that church, and even I can see that the guy hasn't made his case. The reason he's about to be excommunicated is because, as he says in the article, he resigned from the church already! Six years ago, in fact. And then he continued to speak against the church with "proof" that was not only hardly conclusive, it was hardly significant. Duh. Any church would kick him out after that. I only wonder why it took them six years.
What really gets to me, though, is that the article itself gets bunches of facts wrong. The whole section on "racist" passages in the Book of Mormon come from misreading the thing. Believe me, I've read it. There are some disturbing bits, but that sort of racism isn't in there. As a teenager I had a crush on "native American guys" because of the Book of Mormon. Because it presented them as way more than just savages, unlike most other reading material of the time.
If a person like me, who hasn't gone to church regularly in about a decade, can see that this scholar is barking up the wrong tree, how on earth did he get any support at all from people who are supposedly active members of that church? Are people really that stupid? Have none of them actually read what they profess to believe in? How utterly pathetic of them.
And why on earth is this news fit for the front pages of the local section of a newspaper?
A better article in today's Times is about books to get kids for Christmas. Most of these I'd never heard of, but they all sound interesting. Now I want some of them... library, here I come! Er, after work, that is...
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