Letters for August 9, 2012

Question everything

Re “Are you there God? It’s me, Jake.” (Feature story, June 28):

I, too, find Jake Highton’s article to be excessively blunt and lacking in grace; but I’m not writing to argue for or against Jake Highton. (Actually, neither Highton nor any of the subsequent letter-writers has argued at all.) I just want to ask believers, “How did you come to believe in your religion?” and “Why do you not believe in any other religion?” and “How do you think those other people came to believe in their religions?” These are not rhetorical questions; I’m genuinely curious.

From the moment I first met my ex-wife 35 years ago, until the moment she left me 28 years later, I believed and felt with all my heart, “I’d be lost without you,” and “Without you my life would be worth nothing.” Well, it turns out that I’m not any more lost than I would have been, and my life isn’t worth any less than it would have been, all of which makes me curious about what that other me was thinking.

Richard Sasaki
Reno

Support downtown retail

Re “One vision for downtown” (Editorial, July 19):

Retail, folks, that is what we need and need to support. Kor gym downtown should be embraced. They are now offering a free first month just to try to attract the casino workers. Our downtown is considered by so many of the suburbanites to be scary. It’s not! Just unloved. I live in Park Tower. I have and always will live in the downtown corridor, as long as I live in Reno. There are so many wonderful things going on down here that people don’t ever see. Artown, thank you! I happen to work in the south of town. Speaking to people at work about Artown, they think I’m crazy to go.

Their impression of the downtown is that their car will get broken into, homeless will mug them, nowhere to park, and parking is dangerous. So not true! Walking my dogs every morning at 4:30 a.m., there are people who all live in the Southwest that are on the River Walk. Friendly, funny, and very inviting.

I would, in the years to come, love to see the area closed off, more like Baltimore Harbor. Thriving, bustling, and friendly. Or perhaps like South Street in Philadelphia. All are places I have been privileged to live, due to business. What happened to the National Conference of Mayors? The city marketers must have gone to sleep. It’s now in Denver. Not here! There are times I hear “New York State of Mind,” and I want to go home to NYC, my first home. And then I walk over the wooden bridge at Wingfield, and fall in love all over again. Yes, folks, this is a place to fall in love with. Everyone who lives in Reno/Sparks, let’s take our cities back. Make us proud to be here. And let’s have our visitors leave saying, “Wow! Reno/Sparks that’s a place you need to see!” and not for the bad reasons. Get a new marketing department for the city!

Cynthia Morgan
Reno

Off the grid

Re “Grid line” (Green, July 19):

Let me understand this. Indira Chatterjee, an engineering dean, who defends the safety of smart meters, says, “There’s not enough solid research about smart meters health implications. More research needs to be done.” Yet, current independent scientists coming out with biologically harmful results doing the research that “needs to be done” are often dismissed by industry shills. Funding is hard to come by in a world run by industry money and the government stake in smart grid monitoring potential. So, in the meantime, this college dean is willing to play Russian roulette with public health, exposing the unwitting masses in a huge experiment they never signed on to do? And informed people, who do not want to take the chronic smart meter exposure risk, should be forced to, as well? In 2011, the World Health Organization classified exposure to radiofrequency radiation as a class 2B potential carcinogen despite huge industry pressure not to. The classification does not even take into account some of the damning research due to attacks of industry on the reputations of the scientists. To impose undisclosed, involuntary cancer risk on everyone while the scientists battle it out is unconscionable, and may turn out to be a heinous crime against humanity. Ah, well, we don’t know yet, for sure, so full speed ahead with the smart meters.

CK Zehfus
Sheboygan, Wisc.

Thirsty zombies

Re “When zombies attack!” (Feature story, Aug. 2):

I’m not a big fan of survivalism, maybe because I’ve had to do too much of it in my life and work. I work and live in the deserts of the Great Basin, play in the Sonoran desert of Mexico, and a liter per day is a surefire way to end up dead in a matter of a few days in desert systems, especially if you’re trying to get the hell out of Dodge on foot during an emergency. But don’t believe me, give it a try yourself. Head out to a remote part of the Basin next week and try to walk even a measly 10 miles a day on one liter. Then get up and repeat the task the next day. Note to participants; have someone with lots of water and a vehicle keep a close eye on you so they can whisk you off to the emergency room when you collapse. Notice I didn’t say if. Trying to survive on a liter/day, you’ll be dead in a few days in temps above 90 degrees F, two days in temps above 100. I frequently go through 2 or 2.5 gallons a day when I’m working in the desert in temps above 100, and still come back from the field dehydrated. This article is very under-informed. Entire books could be written, have been written, on those topics. You might wanna give ’em a read.

C. Rosamond
Reno

An angry god

Re “Are you there God? It’s me, Jake.” (Feature story, June 28):

When I was growing up, I blindly accepted going to church and believing in what everyone else believed in because everyone else believed in it, therefore it must be true. I did not learn to really question or seek the truth about Jesus Christ until about two years ago at age 44.

I decided I wanted to find out the truth about God and Jesus Christ on my own terms instead of swallowing what everyone had been forcing down my throat all these years. There is a story in the Old Testament about a slave who reached out to steady the Ark of the Covenant because the oxen stumbled, whereupon God gets pissed off and kills him right there on the spot. I always thought that was rather excessive. Since when is a man’s life worth less then the gold used to build the ark?

I dig into the Old Testament, and I see just many acts of murder are described and committed by God, infanticide is accepted as normal, slavery is endorsed and practiced and nobody bats an eye at practices committed 3,000 years in the Bible that would be unacceptable today.

Now I see other so-called Christians attacking Jake Highton for his beliefs and for daring to question God. These same Christians are turning a blind eye to the atrocities listed in the Old Testament, the thousands of people that have been murdered in God’s name in this century and centuries past. Where was God when people were gunned down in Aurora, Colo.?

But what I really want to say is that everything in the Bible is written in third and fourth person. There is no book of Jesus. A man who could walk on water and resurrect the dead and provide food out of thin air—this man cannot write or speak for himself?

Religion is based out of faith, faith in an event that supposedly happened 3,000 years ago? What do the Israelis say? Jesus is gone, and he is not coming back. They would know best, would they not? Christians decided the Talmud was not a good enough authority and invented their own version called the Bible. I will pass on anything written by Christians. Thank you very much, Jake, for your expose on the atrocities committed by Christians in the name of an entity who allows a 6-year-girl to be gunned down in a movie theatre in Colorado.

Chris Granger
Reno