I'm roseweed. My true identity is thinly veiled, and many here know who I am and others could easily discover it with a little Internet sleuthing. Nonetheless, I choose to remain semi-anonymous -- for no particular reason that makes any sense, except that maybe it will deter some believers I annoy from easily sending me spam email....

I was raised in a Christian home by professional-musician parents, and attribute my gravitation toward the arts as much to their incessant practicing as to anything else -- the imaginative music, and its subliminal logic, just never stopped around our house, day or night for the 18 years I lived there. Ask me if my skepticism/atheism also came from music, and I'd probably want to say "yes," although I have no real idea why that should be -- just a vague notion that the architecture of much classical music has embedded in it some audacity, risk, and antagonism toward what is conventional. Still, I have two sisters who are neither artistic nor skeptical, so -- go figure?

One of my favorite musical works is "The Unanswered Question" by Charles Ives, and a favorite poem is "The Learn'd Astronomer" by Walt Whitman. Both cozy up to notions of the sublime -- mysticism, in my opinion, stripped of its supernatural component.

I'm forever raising children, it seems, with my wife of 25 years, and with the light at the end of the tunnel only dimly in view -- one child is 22 years old and seriously developmentally disabled, and two others are aged 10 and 12. They are the shapers of who I am, and they keep me real -- forged in the fires of parenthood, I am.

Kids and music, that's how I became the person I am today, in a nutshell. By the way, although I read alot -- mostly historical fiction or other novels, I have never read a whole book on atheism, skepticism, science, philosophy, religion, or the paranormal. I've bought a few, but have just skimmed them. They do work to cure my occasional insomnia, though.

Roseweed