I don't know if anybody's reading this anymore, but I figured your post deserved reply:

I also don't think that logic is the most important thing in the world. There is nothing reasonable about believing in God except that I have thought of every reason why I shouldn't, and I still like my life with God better than without. It may surprise you (or not) to learn that I did not grow up in any faith tradition. I grew up hating Christianity and Christians because, like you, all I saw were a bunch of crazy people doing cruel things to other people.

You misunderstand me. I never grew up 'hating Christianity' - like I said, I had no idea what religion even was until my basic concepts about the world had somewhat solidified. And my problem with religion was never that it was cruel or oppressive, etc. - it was simply that it was not true.

I've heard the same line of argument from several Christian friends and it always baffles me. How can you actually manipulate your mind to believe something that you know is not logically justified? If I knew that somehow believing 2+2=5 would make me the happiest person in the world, it would still not be possible for me to actually make myself BELIEVE it (as opposed to pretending to believe it - but that of course wouldn't make me happy). To paraphrase your point - trust me, if I could make myself believe in God, I would. Who wouldn't want to live in a world where some omnipotent being is looking out for you and you never have to die? But the point is that belief is not a choice, it is something that occurs on its own when you have been convinced of something.

If you completely deny this, I will have no choice but to say that perhaps people's minds are just constructed differently and logic plays a less important role in yours, but as far as I know (and Kant backs me up), logic is an essential internal structure of our minds (even if it doesn't entirely correspond to reality per se) and there is no way to think outside of it. Besides, if it's truly the case that people's minds are just constructed differently, that means believers can have no beef with non-believers, because it's simply not possible for them to believe.

Second paragraph is a quote. Forgot the tag.

Given the current laws, albeit vague ones, the fact that you were at a New York bar almost certainly means you weren't drinking absinthe in the traditional sense, since the sale of any liquors containing wormwood (the key 'hallucinatory' ingredient in absinthe) is prohibited in the U.S. Even when this is circumvented, what you are usually getting is absinthe made in one of the many countries (the UK, Australia, France, Canada, most of the EU) that limit the thujone concentration to 35mg/kg or less. About the only way to get something close to real absinthe as it would have been drunk in its heyday is if the bottle is from the Czech republic, which has no such laws and where the levels can go up to 70 or even 140 mg/kg (though I have personally only encountered the former).

This is not to say that you'll definitely hallucinate if you try the real stuff or that the traditional descriptions of the experience are accurate, but it is definitely different from usual drunkenness and you probably would have had something more to say about it. I'm not gonna bash a quick, fun Video Dog piece for not being more than it was intended to be, but come on, this is interesting stuff - you could have done so much more with it! Hell, I'd do it if Salon were interested in hiring me (In case Joan Walsh sees this, I do have my English BA and a year of journalism experience :-p)

Gee, that sounds vaguely familiar. So after trillions of dollars spent and hundreds of thousands of lives lost we'll be right back where we were in the late 80's. Wonderful. The worst part is that my sarcasm doesn't change the fact that this is in fact probably the best-case scenario at this point.