Murder of Alabama Biology Dept. Chairman Shocks Community
By GREG HEFFERNAN   
indiawest.com    February 18, 2010 02:09:00 PM 


The local Indian American community of about 1,000 families in Huntsville, Ala., is in a state of shock over the murder of 52-year-old University of Alabama biology department chairman Gopi Podila, one of six victims of an apparently disgruntled professor’s shooting spree Feb. 12 on campus.

Three university professors were shot and killed and another three people were wounded – two of them still in critical condition at press deadline – when Professor Amy Bishop, 42, apparently upset about a denial of tenure, opened fire at about 4 p.m. with a 9mm handgun at a biology department meeting at the Shelby Center, before being pushed outside the room.

The Harvard-educated Ph.D., a wife and mother of four, was later arrested by police and charged with the shootings.

Podila’s two daughters, Bindu, a junior in high school; and Anela, an eighth grader, are helping to console their mother, Vani, a researcher at CFD Research Corp. in Huntsville.

Family members are arriving from Canada and the U.S. and Podila’s brother is coming from India to attend the funeral, which is scheduled Feb. 19 at Berry Hills Funeral Home in Huntsville.

The Church of England is recalling at least four thousand of vicars over concerns of faulty baptisms performed by those men of God released since June 2005.

The Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams said there were technical faults with some baptisms conducted between 2006 to 2008, which could lead to conflicts of morality later in life.

He told reporters, “The risk of any problem with your baptism is slim, but we take the safety of the eternal souls of our believers extremely seriously, so the recall was the only realistic option available to us.”

Though the number is small, the move is unlikely to play out well for the Church, whose assets value just £4.4bn after the recent £400m sale of its faith-funded properties.

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Here's what I currently could be defined as (and my test result when I gave the most accurate answers possible):

But this is not a picture of how I would like to be understood, in terms of the future...

Imagine the night sky. What we can all observe is a multitude of little shining points, the stars. Now... imagine the blackness inbetween the stars as your available belief-space and the stars as what you can actually and factually know about life in this world. As there are a lot of stars, so is there a lot of possible lines of connection inbetween them.

Believing things is like drawing lines between stars. Sure enough, everyone can see the same night sky and agree on that, but we start disagreeing as soon an anyone is suggesting how they are "connected". An intelligent person will immediately realise that there are multiple options for connecting those dots, not just the ones that are being hailed as "the truth" by the few or the many. We can say that there is a multitude of perceptible subjective variables in the same objective observation.

Illumination, then, is an act of erasing the lines and seeing reality for what it is. Little shining points of truth against the vast blackness of the belief-space. Illumination isn't about learning how to correctly draw those lines through the empty belief-space and make the correct conclusions about how it all hangs together; rather it's a question of detaching from all assumptions that can be derived from subjective observation alone.

It is common in our world, in these times, to identify with our products. We are told that being productive is a virtue. Making, distributing and owning these strange fetishes of megalomania is what life is all about. The biggest shitter is admired - and so are those who claim possession over the largest amounts of these excrements of activity. The human monkey is trying to be an insect, building a glorious colony of lines, angles and surfaces we proudly refer to as 'civilization', wherein we spend our lives in frantic activity just to stay alive from one day to the next.

But something has died. Our sense of wonder and ability to simply BE. We do not consider ourselves a part of nature, and we think of ourselves as 'non-animals' that for some reason - the jury is still out on that one - evolved beyond the 'lesser' creatures, whom we look at with overbearing kindness if they are cute, and a mixture of terror and fascination if they are fierce. Mostly, we reckon that we are GOOD, and that we should probably take our wisdom and our goodness with us and try to colonize the rest of space as well. That is to say, after we have researched forth a cure for that pesky ailment we call DEATH. (We wouldn't want to miss out on all the excitement that our glorious future holds, now would we?)