To the editor:

As I looked over the front page of the Journal-World (Dec. 30) with the list of top 10 most influential Kansans, I don’t know that I find it as much disturbing as just disappointing. I am a married father of three with a graduate degree in technology, work in a large corporate office and care about religion. Thus, I qualify myself as mostly “average” and the type of person for which our state and society need to work.

While I recognize the positive influence of one or two members of the list, I’m not proud to say that most of these people come from my state and I certainly don’t want to be influenced by the majority of them. For the most part their “influence” is either scandal or religion versus science. Neither science nor religion will ever completely explain the other. However, I think we need them both. We also need to be influenced by a better list than this conglomeration of losers!

Robert Barnes,

Lawrence