Well, I’m back from the Capital Case Defense Seminar in Monterey put on by the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice (of which I’m now a member) and the California Public Defenders Association (of which I’ve been a member for several months).

I’d love to tell you about it, but then I’d need a capital defense attorney.

Seriously, I signed a statement saying a) I’m not a prosecutor-type and b) I wouldn’t share any information with prosecutor types. Since prosecutor types periodically monitor my blog (even from the Federal level, based on log entries), I guess that means no blogging about what I learned there!

However, it was a fascinating experience; one of the most interesting of my life so far. And that’s saying a lot.

I’m looking forward to restructuring some of my appeals that I’ve been working on based on what I’ve learned and, hopefully, I’ll be more successful at overcoming some of the asinine arguments that now have watered down our constitutional rights of late.

At any rate, I’m going to be playing catch-up for a day or so. Keep your eyes peeled here for new articles coming in a few days based on a new book I picked up: The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason by Charles Freeman. You often hear about how beleaguered Christianity is today what with the “attacks” of secularism and all that.

It’s hogwash. Until the Roman Emperor Constantine formally sanctioned Christianity (and began to assist what later became the Church with a capital C in destroying competing factions), the scientific method developed by Greek culture — later enhanced somewhat by Egyptian culture after Christianity had some success at destroying the world of Reason — ruled.

Christianity is the Upstart Destroyer that stunted the scientific advancement of humankind for centuries. What’s interesting is to see that after the scientific method was able to re-establish itself in later times (ironically through the work of certain theologians working near the end of the Dark Ages) and after the world began to advance again, we now see fundamentalist Christians, under the New Constantine (Bush), trying to twist the story around. They want to claim that Secularism is the Upstart Destroyer.

Anyway…more on this in the coming week.