Well, Steve, Kevin McGrath looks an awful lot like me. So does Charley Noble. If I happened to see either of them in Florence, I would be horribly enswamped in an identity crisis, and I wouldn't know which one was me. Facebook often confuses me with Charles Clark, but that's not true. I'm far better-looking.

I'm glad you confirmed my suspicions about Michelangelo's David. Since I had eight years of "custody of the eyes" training in seminary, I spent most of my time looking at David's face....

Yeah, I couldn't quite deal with Greg's puppet-master God. I'm sorry he got bogged down in God-constructing like that. My ideas on God are far more foggy and likely to change at any moment - I like it that way. I suppose I ought to admit that in an earlier day, I might well have been burned at the stake for my theological concepts. I did get fired for said concepts, but I'm still alive and relatively unscathed.

I'm of the opinion that for most questions worth considering, there are myriad valid answers. What bugs me about Fry and Hitchens and Dawkins and their ilk is that they, like fundamentalist Christians and Muslims and whatever, are obsessed about being in possession and control of "the right answer," and that everyone else must be wrong. They're like that annoying kid in school who always had to be right. I'd much rather consider a wide variety of possibilities - and one of those possibilities is always in the context of the possible non-existence of God. Another is in the context of a biblical literalist concept of God, but I prefer the atheist alternative.

But that being said, I'll accept your word on it that David wasn't circumcised....and will maintain custody of my eyes.

-Joe-