There was a time when Abercrombie & Fitch was a proper store. You could buy a .378 Weatherby Magnum or a .375 H&H and outfit an entire safari that same day. As a kid I would sometimes just walk through and imagine I was on my way to Kenya. I only had money for train fare home but the place was the stuff of dreams. No one discriminated against me.

When times get really bad I will have enough books to burn in order to stay warm. Then there are all those other papers, comics and magazines for when the toilet paper runs out. I see no value in an e-book.

Ruth Street has held a deep attraction for townie life-styler students for at least 35 years. It's a culture that has a tradition that perpetuates even though those same places get robbed every year.

But really, the whole police blotter thing is getting boring in a tragic way.

@amj614:
Too many partial truths to comment on.

More people, more kids, more illegal guns, more gangs, no school safety for kids or teachers, and white flight has been going on for 50 years not just recently. Inner city parochial schools are still doing well and have been integrated for years. It's the other culture that is unsustainable.

And yes, Obama and Valerie Jarrett did rob the poor for their ambitions. They contributed to the fabulous history of slum continuation, that scams millions in fed dollars for upgrading that never happens.

@GroversMill:

Thank you ever so kindly for noticing the moat. The paddle boats should satisfy even a rabid green cyclist but they should be employed as water taxis powered by fat people who will pay to ferry drunks around town who will pay double for the ride. The paddle boat franchise alone will revitalize Athens.

[quote][b]GroversMill[/b] - Just the deserving parties: the IRS and the fascist wannabes in Obamaland.

REPLYQUOTE [/quote]

Is this the place you referred to?

The White Castle could honor vegans for all I care.

By all means build the thing. Healthy competition for downtown Athens.
And build those bike lanes on Prince too. The townies want those bike lanes especially where they live. Great. Let Prince Ave. suffer with 3 lanes and let downtown be choked off..... oh... that's why after 15 years of planning there's still no bike lanes in the most obvious place.

Sorry, no bike lanes.... we must maintain the preferential treatment for downtown. Maybe the traffic studies will return bike lanes to Hawthorne to show how progressive the government is.

Never too late to dig the moat around the City Hall as part of the Greenway.

Guilt is the common currency of the realm. We use guilt to pay a price; "I feel bad, I'm sorry." But most use that token to do it all over again.

@2dollar:

totalleh' until then

Moving to Montana soon
Gonna be a dental floss tycoon

Montana, where you can carry your 7mm Remington Mag to school so you can quickly get out to the elk hunt after class before it gets too dark to see.

And Rhode Island. Half of the senior class goes to Avignon to learn French for a semester and the other half goes to Fiesole to learn Italian. However their pregnancy rates are equal to Athens area schools.

I cried watching The Yearling.

@2dollar:
I've tried to make Athens more like Amsterdam but my canal project keeps getting rejected.

I'm sure a big bike safety program would also emphasize proper equipment, helmets, reflective gear, lights, you know , personal safety equipment to keep the ego well preserved. I see a few dedicated alternative transportation cyclists like this in Athens but very few.

I heard several UGA students also discuss pedestrian safety. Yes, they sounded like they were auditioning for dumb and dumber goes surfing with the bachelor on Jersey Shore. "Yes, like, absolutely, I was walking with my 7 best friends and like we were texting our make believe friends and suddenly, like, we were in the middle of the road and a rude driver honked his horn at us, like we could have been absolutely killed or worse, so we looked up and like it was traffic everywhere."

[quote][b]avenger[/b] - Did I address you? [/quote]

I addressed you not to single you out but to include you... to let you know that I am trying to understand the various points of view expressed. I am not hostile to you Big A, only looking at the problems.

The Bibles in Ga.State Parks have now become a problem for Americans of all stripes. In the past, Gideons were in the background, if I may address the original topic. Personally, I saw their omnipresence as quaint and as a symbol of the dominant religious faith in the New World. Never a problem and sometimes a chance to read it. But this issue brought to crisis by atheists is a problem that will have dire consequences as I said early on. The atheists are not direct problems but enablers for changes that Christians and all Americans will have to negotiate in the future. It won't matter to most if some other literature is next to Gideon's Bible, but what will be a game changer is when very clever, well funded radical Islamist lawyers challenge and win and change laws in ways never imagined by our founding fathers.

This is not anti Islam to be clear..... but a call to attention of the coming storm. We are passed the point of putting the Quran in every room, we will have no choice. These are the incremental erosions that lead to conflict. Accommodation will not be enough and the ideal of separation of church and state will be lost.

[quote][b]melmarino[/b] - @davidxto: What is always the question for me is why do atheists feel the need to proselytize so much.[/quote]

I am trying to delve into this.... maybe, it is a measure of their John Lennon styled pain..
possibly..... that pain leads to dominating others and if you have great gifts like Lennon did you continue howling your pain while putting everyone else down. Great talent doesn't make someone a better goat herder..., just a suffering fool on the hill and wife beater.
question for you mel, can you really ferret out people's identities from their on line presence here? to what degree with what ease? I really don't care to be sacrificed on any altar.

[quote][b]avenger[/b] - @Farmer GA: My attempts to articulate my non-belief in religion, a deity or Gods fall on deaf ears. Maybe this will help your own understanding of what atheism is:[/quote]

Dear deaf one, try reading what I wrote as I have read and understood what you wrote.

I have only brought up for thinking the mechanisms by which we think and then organize our thoughts. When you can see yourself with clear observation, then something new may be learned beyond your hard won thoughts, beliefs or conditionings. The possibilities of the new are denied when we say "this is all there is.... I have no evidence of anything else." That is intellectual and spiritual dishonesty..... it is at least limiting. As Don Shmioda said, "Argue for your limitations and they are yours." Do not allow atheism to limit your potential just because you and Ben and FtM and Mr. PC and others are secure in elitist John Lennon "you're all effing peasants as far as I can see."

[quote][b]Politically Correct Name[/b] - So the fact that iron age goat herders wrote a nice story determines your belief system in the present day?[/quote]

When I consider the vast resources available to us this very minute, such as the computers we type at, I can still be amazed that some of those iron age goat herders were smarter than we are now.. Those stories are more than nice stories and myths. They are more than mere instructions for the other goat herders. And the great irony and tragedy is that misunderstanding of those early texts has lead to so much elaborated violence. And, by absence of those texts, an equal amount of violence.
The current threat is from the nihilistic, liberal, relativist, anti religionist left that is either in naive denial or selective hatred. That "everything is the same, why can't we all get along" mantra is anything but all inclusive and tolerant.

So the goat herders will once again be the scapegoats. That's something everyone can agree on..... that is why I resist the intelligence of @mcdawg.
I'll say it again..... mcdawg's definition of world corrupting elites is not inclusive enough...it is selective.

@Shalmaneser:

I am not seeking to elevate or lower any spiritual belief or even the lack of such belief. I am looking at the problems using these words in a limited forum.

So I introduced a psychological frame to look at atheism, disbelief, rejection of belief, failure of faith or even embracing of faith.

Because our pain and punishment and loss and innocence and sickness and death feel so unfair we try to come to terms with such pain. (EJ would call it the sum total of trauma inflicted by men.... mostly). And people both punish and suffer throughout the ages.

BUT, because the pain is so great people are in denial.... Hemingway called religion the opiate of the people and then he listed a long line of opiates like bread and finally said, opium is the opium of the people. This is the numbness that we protect ourselves with, Atheism, agnosticism, and so forth are also opiates.

Arthur Janov introduced his controversial ideas about pain in "Primal Pain"
Ben Had should find it interesting that John Lennon and Oko did Primal Therapy with Janov. One of the basic ideas was that pain can be accumulated and is not always the classical one big trauma or rape. Often the smallest thing is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Sometimes even, the kindness of a stranger after so much parental abuse. This pain is survived by any means possible.... anger, numbness, denial and so forth.

[quote][b]Tewise[/b] - Wasn't the bible translated for hundreds of years from Latin? Latin and Arabic really and truly can't be 100% translated correctly.[/quote]

before I continue, you might find it interesting to look up just a little on the origins of the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

While it is true that translations are like a game where much is lost or elaborated, the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm how faithfully most has been recorded without change. Most of the scrolls were written 3 to 400 BCE/BC. Some are 800 to 1000 BC and are written in paleo Hebrew.... others in Hebrew, Aramaic and then Greek. The scrolls were originally copied and hidden because of threats of destruction. As Forster has pointed out that destruction has continued for over 3,000 years. Some of the scrolls were of course, damaged, lost, then poorly handled, stolen or deliberately destroyed because they are evidence of the Hebrew presence that radical Islam seeks to destroy.

As far as copies are concerned, the text is considered holy. I'm not talking about modern printed copies of any bible or quran but scrolls on parchment handwritten with iron gall ink. A person studies for many years to acquire the skills as a scribe and a single error is not permitted. Not a single word has been altered in centuries no matter where on earth the copy was made. The other constant is how they have been destroyed almost as fast as they could be created.

Some thought for thought.

All humans have the potential for some kind of direct experience with an expanded consciousness. As an example: Moses sees a burning bush and has a conversation with it. When we have such experiences we put them into thoughts and words and substitute symbols and the experience is no longer the experience but a description of the actual. Classically it is said that we mistake the map for the territory or the menu for the meal.

So all humans organize these higher or altered or spiritual experiences into structures. The largest of these structures are religions. So we often come to live with the religion (menu) as a substitute for spirituality (meal). When we confuse a belief, any belief, for the experience we are confused.

So some people spend years reasoning this out and using the limited tool of the thinking brain, they go as far as they can go, still making up stuff about that which can not be known by the brain alone. That is why some have said that all of these atheist thoughts are also just beliefs.

I'll try to go further with words. Why do people abandon a belief in God or in unseen spiritual mysteries?

Everyone experiences varying degrees of pain, loss, trauma, disappointment, betrayal and or hypocrisy. When a bright mind experiences enough of these human weaknesses they begin to question, challenge and or break from what has obviously failed them. Classical religion asks then that the individual accepts on faith, or resigns or submits. That works for some but others continue wrestling with God like Jacob.

When you wrestle with these complex issues it is very painful to re-experience the original traumas. I once read about a group of sailors who spent days on a life raft after being torpedoed by the enemy. When help finally arrived the officers were rescued first. Hours passed and several men died before rescue returned. One survivor, post trauma, became very hateful of his rescuers. The enemy torpedo was the fate of war, but the unfairness of the rescue was too great a betrayal for this man. He became, so to speak, an angry atheist.

This is too long so that's enough for now.

And to the politically correct, it may be that God has you on ignore, but who am I to say?

[quote][b]Farmer GA[/b] - As we learn more about the universe, it will become self evident that there is more to reality than that to which the Atheist subscribes[/quote]

Well said.

The Universe is not understandable with our limited consciousness.The Mystery is Unspeakable and not be contained in any belief or controlled by any science. The need to be comfortable with the Unknown and Unknowable leads the mind to seek answers. The seeking and the proving and the denying are limiting the Unlimited. Atheism is just another belief system and suffers from the hypocrisy of thinking its thoughts must be more evolved than earlier belief systems. The academic explanations are usually self protecting elitism.
Everyone wants to be right, including the mind of this author.

[quote][b]Anonymous Dude[/b] - Philosophy: The Tome of Helmethead, by @davidxto:[/quote]

Ground control to Major Dude, Put your helmet on and may God's love be with you.

I heard my name and I want to tell you to be happy.

@GroversMill:

Earth to Grover: I spared the entire planet because of Chicago-style hot dogs.Take a bite out of this wiener.

"From a moral point of view there may be no such thing as a bystander. If one is present, one is taking part." -David Gushee