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I should start by confessing that I'm a God fearing atheist, I could be backing the wrong horse, I backed the wrong horse all week at the Cheltenham horse racing festival the other week. However I very much support a person's right to believe, be it in SL or RL.

Whilst searching Second Life for The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster I came across the Atheist Centre. Lots and lots of literature about humanism, it appears to double as an unofficial Obama 08 campaign centre. My great uncle was a humanist, at his funeral they played out with the Ying Tong song by The Goons. My Father, who is an Irish Catholic, was having fits of hysterics.

I love the church of FSM largely because they have an awesome graph that proves that global warming is due to a decrease in the number of pirates on the planet. Alas there doesn't appear to be SL headquarters for the movement.

However what the atheist center exemplifies is something that isn't one of SL's best features. There's a lot of literature there ... that isn't really there, it's all web links. Including one to "Blade Runner the directors cut", Do Avatars dream of electric sheep? Well not unless you've got a job with them I guess ;)

However wouldn't it be nice to go to a centre such as this, or any centre of your choice and be able to read some of the literature within SL without having to go elsewhere or read it in plain text on a notecard? The upcoming viewer will aid a little bit with this and to me, who likes to read, it's a step in the right direction but my vision of an all singing, all dancing, intergrated SL HTML viewer is a long way off.

However what the atheist centre did awaken in me is the fact that the sheer number of opinions, views and commnuities in SL are vast. It's something I've lost sight of with complaining about VAT, IDV, customer service, group limits and land buying bugs. The truth is very much out there if you're willing to look for it and it's something that SL could do oh so well ....except of course there's the issue of group limits...grrr!

However what I myself need to do is start looking for more events, finding the time is one thing of course but there are events, discussions and debates galore in SL. Hey there might even be one that you'd like to get involved in. The point is that I need to get myself involved in some of these debates and activities instead of sending Robin Linden whingeing emails about the new search. Generally the only events I've been to outside of office hours have been a Sun event (Java people not the tabloid rag owned by Murdoch) and a couple of events that Nobody Fugazi tipped me off about.

Now I'm off to watch part three of a four part drama on the Beeb about some dude who is upsetting the Romans, it concludes on Sunday and is apparently based on a book based on a true story.