About a month ago, I tried my first venture into blogging. Also started an experiment. My Verizon service offers a free site so I started with that one. Googling blog services led to blogger and blogstream. So I started the same posts on all three, just to see the attributes of each. My three blogs are: Verizon's http://scdiv.spaces.msn.com/, blogger's http://sinannblog.blogspot.com/, blogstream's http://sinannblog.blogstream.com/. The Verizon one was the easiest to do. It also has a neat map that shows the country which recent blog entries come from and a link to see that blog. Photos are easy there, too. The blogger and the blogstream have an easy way to publish the blog to Google blog search. After a month of making a variety of different kinds of entries, the Verizon site has received no responses, the blogstream one five (three from the same person), and the blogger one (a response to a comment I made on someone else's).

It is time for the experiment to go to another level, I must do some promoting. Both telling friends and family about my blogs and responding to interesting blogs I run across. The best part of blogging is just the writing of them but it is gratifying to see that someone out there reads my stuff.

A recent Newsweek had an article about summer camps – for the next generation of creationists, evolutionists, atheists. As a science teacher, I always wonder about the intellect of both the creationists and the atheists. Creationists can wait for a later entry. Today, it is the atheists that stick in my craw. Do I have a “craw”? Some have accused me of being a crustacean.

I am a particular proponent of the proof of God that Stephen Hawking has in “A Brief History of Time”. Every good science student and atheist should read it. He compares the odds that the universe is either a random event or has a Creator. The same general concept that Copernicus called “The Artisan”, Galileo “The Author”, Kepler “The Founder”. The odds come out to an astronomical number (even larger than the odds that O.J. Simpson is guilty) in favor of God. But even if the universe is a gigantic number of experiments and we just happen to be on one of the ones that work, there must be The Experimentor.

Believe in God? Does one believe in something (Something) that is a fact? It is just there, not a “belief”. Of course, this argument skips over a multitude of issues. But I fail to see how anyone can not acknowledge the existence of God. Is that the definition of “atheist”?

Yesterday, I received a note from www.congress.org that they were conducting a “virtual hearing” regarding the immigration hearings in Congress. Of course, I responded:
“As part of Congress.org's virtual hearing on immigration reform, I wanted to offer my own views. Security at the border is definitely important. The United States has a great wealth in its immigrants, however. They add so much at all levels. There should be a means for them to earn their citizenship; a means to attract those good, bright, hard working folks to continue our great country's growth and heritage toward them. Let us learn from the failures of our European friends who do not do this.”
I know that there are perils – drugs and bad folks. There must be an administrative means of protecting America from them and doing it quickly and forcefully. In my sheltered environment, however, all the immigrants I have had the occasion to run across have been as good as or better than us “born heres”. Amnesty, to me, is giving something for nothing. Earning citizenship is what we all had to do and what we should be doing every day. That is not amnesty. Our European allies are missing the message. Their economies are difficult and there is rioting in the streets – because they do not allow citizenship. To quote Newsweek,”The United States is the only industrialized country that will not experience a workforce or population loss in the coming decades, thanks to immigration.”
Immigration may not be easy, good things often are not, but it is our heritage and one of our strengths.