R.I.P. Tyler Tenorio

The Santa Cruz Community has suffered a great loss. A young man taken from us in his prime.

Whatever the circumstances, this horrible violence has touched me and I don't feel I conveyed the depth of my thoughts on the matter when I spoke of it previously.

When I was sixteen, I was really stupid. I didn't know Tyler, and I have recently discovered some of my friends in fact did know Tyler or his family. I am making an assumption that perhaps teenagerist stupidity was at play in this stabbing based on myself, not Tyler.

I feel what must be said is that I believe in my heart of hearts that Tyler Tenorio rests in peace with God.

This young soul taken from us before his time.

My heart is with all those who have lost loved ones.

I apologize if any person took offense from my previous post in regards to Tyler. I was awarded an "Editor's Pick" on Open Salon for my efforts, but in retrospect I should have expressed my emotions on the matter rather than pure dispassionate conjecture.

Talking About God and Science

An anonymous man once impressed this image upon my mind:

I was doing one of these things awhile back and there was this guy in the room with a huge chip on his shoulder as soon as I said the word ‘God.’ This guy was huge, almost seven feet tall and arms like a gorilla. He told me there wasn’t no such thing as God and on top of that since nobody in the room could do a damn thing about him that he was God as far as it mattered. So I put a challenge to him. I emptied out a dresser, moved it out into the center of the room, and had everyone help me fill the bottom drawer with all the training weights we could. Then I told him to lift it up high. He struggled and moved it around more than I thought he would. But he couldn’t get it off the ground. Then we had everyone in the room, with him, try and lift the dresser. It came up from the floor so easily we almost hurt ourselves, surprised at our mutual strength. When we all sat down again after replacing the dresser and the weights he asked me what was the point. I told him that when he walked in that door today he thought he was God and now he can see that some things are outside his power. The God in everyone else with himself included was stronger than he could ever hope to be alone. So he was not God. But God was still present in the room, between all of us and stronger than any of us.
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If you change the physical nature of this image of the huge man proclaiming himself “God” for a more intellectual design, one might evoke an image of a high-brow scholar scribbling out a formula that disproves the existence of God.

This is my impression of many atheists, and certain agonistics, I encounter. It seems to me that many have ‘thought God out of existence’ in the course of earnest and worthwhile studies. To my perception all science, and the nature of all knowledge itself, provides us with a constant ’unknown.’ Even in the absence of any religious background there is more than enough room for an understanding of the universe and life beyond simple reasoning’s of black-and-white logic.

While science shatters dogma and begs the eternal question simultaneously, it still does not negate the concept of a higher power.