Who wants to start blogging with a downer? But though everything in my profile is true -- it's also true I got a damned virus eight weeks ago that wound up in my heart, and still causes me some terrible nights of pounding rapid heartbeat and screaming blood pressure. Doc not worried, says keep taking the meds, it will calm down. But he doesn't have to live with the adrenalin rushing through his system, so easy to say! No sleep last night, but made it to preach today. Hope it will calm down enough for a good long nap!

By the by, Rod Liddle, a British columnist (whose writings I get in a British paper we still subscribe to), makes some glorious points about Richard Dawkins' new book "The God Delusion". He points out the delicious irony in the fact that Dawkins' book is selling, not just because of his fine writing, but even more because it has the word God in the title. "Any old thing with God in the title sells by the bucketloads. This doesn't prove God exists, but certainly testifies to God's pulling power."

And in talking of Dawkins' attempts at writing a new ten commandments, including "Enjoy your sexuality (as long as you don't hurt anyone else)" (now there's a year of sermons buried in there!) Liddle comments: Not so much commandments given to Moses chisled in stone as the ten commandments according to Cosmo Magazine, chisled in, oh, organic tofu. (He used the left-wing Guardian newspaper, I substituted Cosmo).

Anyone else out there wondering about the inherent self-contradiction in fanatical atheism?