The Chemical Brothers
Dig Your Own Hole

No, I'm not an ecstasy chasing club hopper, or a head-banger wanna be. I used to deliver newspapers late at night and started listening to unusual music, a fair amount of techno and some women's music, to stay awake. I'm as incredibly square in real life as I am in cyber life.

My parents were both main line protestants. I grew up in the sticks near a small city. Had an unremarkable childhood, at least from my perspective. In my teens I experimented with spirituality, enjoyed the novels of Hesse, and the writing of Gibran, and eventually joined the Mormon church.

I started at Brigham Young University, a Mormon school, and left it unfinished after two or three changes in major and a very low QPA. I started college as a Mormon, was a theist by sophmore year, and left it an atheist. Looking back, my major changes reflected my uncertainties in spirituality.

Since BYU and up to marraige I'd worked as a field technician, bench technician, tried to join the Navy and was rejected (a bad foot), and as a library clerk. What I read of religion then came primarily from a Time-Life series of books on the world's religions and Robert O. Ballou's Portable World Bible. I tried reading the Koran and some Bahai scripture but found it convoluted and repetitive (like Gibran, who lost his power for me).

I am married, two kids, middle-aged (unless I die at 90, then I'm still young) never divorced. I work for a living, have had a part-time job in addition to my full-time job for most of my married life. I finished a BS degree from Youngstown State University and have only begun to fill in the holes in my education (degrees in technologies do not leave alot of time for humanities) with reading and a class here or there.

If I had it all to do over, I'd have worked part-time jobs all those years before I got married in addition to my full time jobs, I'd still be married to the same woman but would have asked her much earlier to marry me and start a family. Since life never works out as expected, I'd probably still be listening to Chemical Brothers in my car between Wall Street Journal drops.
I'd still be middle aged and square.

Bummer...

Mr. Gruff, the atheist goat, is the intellectual property of Objective: Christian Ministries and Peggy Miller, used by kind permission.
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If you visit please be civil if you disagree...and if you're an atheist you will disagree.

I work in a college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in classroom support. In doing my job one day I came across a Chick Tract.

I threw it away.

For a whole summer term, every morning I delivered equipment to classrooms on the Business/Accounting Department's floor I'd find a Chick Tract. And every day I'd throw it away.

I began to wonder what an atheist tract would look like. The original tract grew to this web page.

I should point out that my supervisors at the college have always encouraged their staff to play with and learn about the available technology. This web site is a result of my own thoughts, and was enabled by curiosity and availability of web technology in my office.

E-mails have been added as the conversations, generally, have concluded. Book reviews have been added as I've had time. I've had about 200 hits per month under usual circumstances. Under unusual circumstances the hit counter was about 400. This happened after the murders of Septmeber 11, 2001. I guess people were confusing Moslem extremism with atheism. For about three months this page was in Yahoo Atheism's most often used sites list. Even though that's a small subcat of the greater index I was fairly pround of that and disappointed when I lost that status.

Pensee is, I've read, the French word for Freethought and pansies are, therefore, the symbolic flower of freethought. This came up on a listserve I belonged to about the time the purple Teletubby was accused of being gay...horrors. He's not gay, he's an atheist. My source for the pansies says my site needs graphics and colors badly so he willingly allowed me to copy them, so, if you're from the copyright police...BACK OFF!

Updated 10/4/04.