Phillips: There's now an atheist in heaven
"I'm not a victim, I'm not a victim, oh I-I-I, I am an atheist. I am an atheist."
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- Vic Chesnutt, from the song "Speed Racer" off of 1990's "Little"
About five minutes before I sat down to Christmas Eve dinner, I heard the news that Vic was in a coma. I knew that was it. I think everyone did. Don't know why.
Vic was the first story I was assigned to write for the Athens Banner-Herald in 1996. I was a huge fan, nervous as I could be to ... what? Sit down in his living room and talk to him? NO way. Troubled over every question, how to ask, what to ask. Then after the interview, how do you do justice to someone like Vic in your own words? The best lyricist of the 20th century - 21st, too.
He was nice, obliging, generous, honest. Real. The most real person I would ever interview. And he was like that each time after.
On the car ride home to Athens from Virginia last Sunday, I heard the Graedon's People's Pharmacy (on NPR) feature on Jill Bolte Taylor, a neurologist who had a massive stroke and a subsequent life-altering understanding of the brain (this is a really interesting story, an expansion on her video that went viral after last year's TED conference).
In answering one of the questions, she discussed depression and its affects on the brain, and in another, the difference between religion and spirituality. The left brain, she said, analyzes, needs the story of religion; it creates the language that shifts us to spirituality. The right brain, though, knows inherently th
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