You want a better discussion, try contributing to it. You started out yesterday by predicting hundreds of obnoxious letters. Later you said:

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 atheists never learned the value in humility)

The atheist position at this point in the discussion was that Carse was grossly misrepresenting their thoughts and feelings. There was no real disagreement with this, but you decided to stir things up. And now you talk about morality!

When you are a zero "the one" looks very intimidating.

Are you really sure he is an atheist? I He seems as unsure of his own beliefs and feelings as he sure about his knowledge of others'.

Yes, he did say "Frankly, no." And certainly he feels qualified to be an atheist, better qualified than most.

Hard atheism disavows religious experience as well.

Not sure what you mean. Religious experiences certainly exist, and atheism does not deny that. Nor, in my view, does atheism deny an interpretation of religious experience that does not involve god or gods.

Theism, deism, pantheism, mysticism, agnosticism, atheism. Consider the definitions of these words carefully and perhaps they may help clarify your thinking about them. They can mean different things to different people, but unless their definitions are precise they can easily lead to the confusion you seem to want to avoid.

No, I am not concerned with the precise definitions of all those terms. Nor am I confused. Let's just not use a word to throw out an experience. I am not convinced your ideas are quite as solid as you think they are.

How would you know? You can't even be bothered to learn the terminology.

Your knowledge is no deeper than the terminology you can look up and memorize; you simply do not understand what people are saying. You remember our conversation on errors in measuring quantum mechanical constants? You ran away from that conversation because you did not understand the topic. I think you are doing the same thing now. You have brought in you alter ego Droogoy to slavishly repeat what you say, just as you did then. Nobody is fooled by this crap, and it will not work any better now. If you want to understand something, make the effort to develop the concepts in your brain. Terminology alone does not do it.

When I tried to continue that conversation on another thread, you accused me of stalking you, threatened to go to the management, and then refused to say another word. You misunderstood the topic then, just like now.

Only the definition of atheism matters for what I said. Walter introduced the other words as a smoke screen. Atheism is just the belief that God does not exist. This has nothing to do with what religious experiences mean, totally within the brain or otherwise. (My belief is that they are totally in the brain, but so what? I cannot prove it.)

The strong and weak modifiers are relatively recent (maybe early nineties), well after I acquired my pathetically inadequate knowledge. But the definition of neither includes religious experience as we have been using it here. More smoke screen.

By the way, Godot, when Droogoy introduced many more terms, he did not make this easier to understand. Still more smoke screen.

Juan Coles's warning about the impossibility of conquering Afghanistan (that is, statements from Russian officers) have caused some concern. One should remember that conquering a central government is one thing, but "pacifying" the various factions is quite another. Iraq is a good current example. Although what Obama is proposing is very different from what Russia attempted, is there any reason to think that it is any easier? Might it actually be more difficult?

Hold on a minute. What makes you think McCain has been up front with what he intends to do? Or what would be done that he does not intend now? Or that he could even control what happens, even if he wants to? Who are his advisors? Who will be in charge?

This was a good article article, good enough so that some of the commenters who didn't read it should have. No, I did not read all the comments, but enough to see some serious mistakes. And yes, Walter_map's logic is correct, even if his abrasive style leaves something to be desired.

for 29 years. (Had to AC one room for health reasons this year).

1.) Live at the highest elevation as practical. (Lower average temperature)

2.) Local topography matters; hill top rather than valley. (More breeze, lower humidity)

3.) Use ceiling fans.

Some other comments:

1. Shannonr, I completely agree with you this time about the ice cubes. In addition, it seems insane to put more water into the air if you have high humidity.

2. Foil on the windows? If you are trying to reflect energy, bright white paper is more reflective than alum. foil. (White to black is reflective to absorbing. "Shiny" just means "kind of makes a reflection: that is, a smooth surface on order of a wavelength of light locally", and is not directly related to reflectivity. Even something that looks black can be shiny; it is not completely black, of course or it would reflect nothing, but it can be shiny without reflecting much.)

3. It certainly can save energy to turn off the AC when not needed, even for just a few hours. For example, the one room we AC is only during the day. It takes about half an hour to cool the room as the morning heats up.

4. Pablo, you really do need to understand more physics.