Yet Another Monday - Pride and Rants

Another weekend is over all too soon. Sigh.

Saturday was a beautiful day, and we spent much of it visiting with our daughter and with Leya, the most adorable and intelligent grandchild in the Commonwealth of Virginia. If these two pictures don't convince you, you're beyond help.


The remainder of the most adorable and intelligent grandchildren are in Ohio, where our oldest granddaughter, Marcy, celebrated her eighth birthday last week. This is a picture of Marcy and her brothers Joe and Noah taken last fall. I rest my case on the subject of adorability and intelligence.

Okay, now I've had my fix of grandparental bragging. On to other topics.

If Saturday was a beautiful day, so was yesterday...but only if you're a duck. It rained almost nonstop all day, it's still raining, and it's supposed to keep raining all day today. My garden is cheering, but I'm thinking I should probably have spent the weekend reading my copy of Ark-Building for Dummies. I know I'll be thankful for this rain later on, when my garden is overflowing with fragrant herbs, but for now, I don't like having to wear water wings to go out and do the weeding.

Pope Benedict XVI has finished his visit to the United States and is now home at the Vatican. His visit - his first to America as Pope - was extensively covered in the newspapers, and led to a great deal of very interesting commentary on the state of religious belief in 21st-century America. There was a particularly interesting article in yesterday's Washington Post, titled "Perceived Slights Have Left Many U.S. Muslims Wary of Pope." Muslims are still loudly offended by some of Benedict's words (such as his Regensburg speech last year) and actions (like the very public baptism and conversion to Christianity of a prominent Muslim critic of Islam). There doesn't seem to be any accompanying offense, however, against "slights" committed by Muslims against Christians and Jews, such as the characterization of those believers as apes and pigs, the fact that it's against the law in much of the Muslim world to do so much as wear a cross or pray openly according to a faith other than Islam, and the fact that some Muslims believe that it is religiously sanctioned to kill anyone who does not acknowledge Islam as their religion.

Clearly, not all Muslims are wild-eyed fanatics. But the fact that the Muslim "mainstream" spends its time bemoaning perceived slights rather than working with other faiths in a spirit of peace and fellowship in belief leads one to question their commitment to real interfaith dialog and peace.

But that's all an argument for another day. Now it's time to feed and walk Punky, slip the oars into the oarlocks, and row myself to work for another week.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo