While the carbon sequestered up by growing sugar cane might be equal to what is later released through burning the ethanol produced from it, the process of growing, transporting and refining the ethanol will release carbon that is not in any way offset. Ethanol production is a carbon-positive activity.

Do you have a reference for this? My simple-minded view is that those things you mention are carbon producers because they need energy, which can be supplied by a fraction of the ethanol produced. Nothing is perfect, of course, but I do not see why there is a significant release of carbon.

I think Israel is just as much to blame for the problems there as Palestine.

There is no way that two cultures with such vastly different amounts of power can be assigned the same amount blame for such problems. It just cannot be done.

To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the universe.

...as well it should! And it is testable, if you are willing to believe what people say. I might have missed it, but did one of the many atheists who commented agree? I guess it does not take a belief in god to be awe-struck. We did read about the scientist who became a Sufi, but was she incapable of experiencing mystery before converting? Probably not.

And yet, true to form, even the slightest critique of their chosen belief system brings out the Dawkins brigade in full force. We get a bunch of people who feel the need to tell a tenured professor that he's an idiot...because they're so manifestly correct you see.

I guess people have every reason to discuss the part they consider to be untrue, especially if it denies their own participation in a near universal experience. You think these atheists are liars?

Perhaps you would like to share with us why you have no sympathy for people who get pissed off when they are treated as if they lack the capability to have a fundamental human experience?

Atheists are nothing more than religious believers who feel shunned, so they set up their own belief system and doggedly (often boorishly) stick to it.

Another guy who thinks he understands how atheists feel. He is way farther from the truth than Carse.

....towards attempting to understand the world in binary terms.

Fundamentalism involves belief in the specific. Lack of belief in any god that humans conceive of, or could conceive of, leaves open a lot possibilities. Does an atheist deny the mysteries of consciousness? Does a fundamentalist?

In "The Selfish Gene" Dawkins writes: "Most of what is unusual about man can be summed up in one word: `culture'. I use the word not in its snobbish sense, but as a scientist uses it."

Poetry, music, art, literature, the humanities in general, apparently, are all dismissed as elitist snobbery, ready for the blade of the atheist Red Guard.

It should not be necessary to point out that Dawkins is not saying what you said, not at all. He is saying "Culture is not ladies sipping tea and discussing their daughters' coming out parties; culture is poetry, music, art, literature, the humanities."

I'll stick to my guns here. When Dawkins refers to the scientific definition of culture he means the academic anthropologist's definition: a shared, learned, symbolic system of values, beliefs and attitudes that shapes and influences perception and behavior -- an abstract "mental blueprint" or "mental code." It is common to everyone in a given society and has nothing to do with what books they read, museum attendance, etc. These he casually disdains as "snobbism" because he is a yahoo. And what's wrong with women drinking tea?

Just read Chapter 11 of Selfish Gene. It's online. My quote is taken from there. It is clear that D. is distinguishing the academic anthropologist's definition of culture from the arts & letters definition of culture, which he chooses to characterize, for no other reason than to snarkily express an antagonism, as snobbism. Tea-drinking ladies don't even enter into the picture.

I reread the chapter to which you refer. I do not find any indication that he believes that literature, poetry, etc. are snobbish. Nor do I find any indication that the definition of culture he is using excludes these nearly universal aspects of human behavior. I should have left out the tea drinking part, and just kept the "discussion of coming-out parties". That I find snobbish, something the "cultured", that is, a subset of the rich, would do. And OK, my preference for a good cup of coffee is showing.

Do you have some better examples of why you believe that Dawkins is a "yahoo"? I cannot see it myself.

B:The right temporal lobe of our brain has evolved as a center for religious ecstasy.

Evidence?

Our lives are sterile, two-dimensional, and meaningless without the poetry of religion.

If this describes your life, OK. What makes you think you understand everyone's life?

To not participate in mythopoetic aspects of human experience is like being born with wings but never choosing to fly.

Perhaps the feelings you attribute to those causes are really better experienced in a discovery of the world around you, using both halves of the brain together. Or maybe I am wrong; but what you say leaves out at least half of what the human mind has evolved to do.

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Q: And there are unsophisticated believers and unsophisticated non-believers.

The former have much in common, the latter, almost nothing.

That is just plain wrong. There is a lot of common ground for non-believers; lot of differences, too. So what? And the unsophisticated believer tends to believe whatever he is exposed to, with all of its variety. You simply do not understand unbelievers.

I see; thanks for correcting my understanding.