Now that I've gone and said to seperate religion and morals, let me offer an annecdotal story that happened yesterday. First, let me describe Clay County where I live. There are a lot of churches, and the best time to commit a crime is noon on Sundays because just about every cop in the area is either at church, or helping to direct traffic from the churches. Right now, every Clay County school is serving as a summer school location for one church or another, and religious groups who don't have a bricks & mortar church use many of the schools as church locations on Sundays... something that would be unheard of in most places. Our only city, Orange Park, had a full-on Christmas display at the courthouse that would have done Clark W. Griswold proud, even after being threatened with a lawsuit. So it's safe to say that religion has a major presence in Clay County.
Yesterday, I'm driving home and stopped to get gas a couple of miles from my house. It's raining cats and dogs, and thunder and lightning are going off everywhere. I've been stuck in traffic, and my 30 minute commute has become a 2-hour commute. I'm sitting at a traffic light, and I see the door of the car behind me open and the driver gets out and comes up to my window. I was thinking his car had died and he needed help pushing it, but instead he says "Excuse me Sir, but I saw that your gas door is open. Do you want me to close it for you?" I said "Yes, thanks!", and he turned around and sure enough I saw in my sideview mirror that the door was open. He closed it and then got back into his car. A few minutes later we were moving and I gave him a wave as I turned off onto the road to my house.
A little earlier than the time that this guy was helping me out, and getting drenched in the process, my oldest son was in Maryland driving with a girl he knows, on a beautiful sunny day, and they were pulling out of the WaWa at the RT 5/235 merger, and a woman in another car comes whipping out of the access road and comes a hairbreadth away from slamming into their car. The girl who's driving my son hits the horn at the woman, who's now stopped at the light. The woman gets out of her car, comes back to the car my son is in, and starts beating on the window. When the girl rolls down the window, the woman reaches in, grabs her by the hair, and starts slamming her face into the steering wheel repeatedly, and ends up slicing her ear with a fingernail in addition to battering her face. The police were called, the woman took off, and a chase by the Sheriff's Office resulted in her capture.
Now I heard this story from my wife as soon as I got in the front door, and she asked me to call my son as he was pretty shook up. I called him up and we talked, and I couldn't help but compare our two very different days. Now granted, this was a violent woman with little regard for the law or decency, and this was a man who was the exact opposite, but I really had to think about which of these two types of people am I more likely to interface with in Clay County Florida as compared to St. Mary's County Maryland. I think I gained a new level of respect for churchgoers yesterday, and my son is counting the days until he gets back down here.
