That's it. That's all I have to say.

I have always called myself a liberal. When the term 'progressive' started gaining currency, I started going out of my way to call myself a liberal. It always struck me that people who called themselves progressive were behaving as though they were ashamed of what they were. Liberals have nothing to be ashamed of, and much to be proud of.

Liberal, liberal, liberal.

In four or eight or twelve years, the right will be back in power. I shudder to think what crimes they will be emboldened to commit then, if they get away with the crimes they've committed over the past several years, now. If we let all of this slide, the Republic is dead.

BTW, NYShooter's post moved me to tears. Will we ever be that America again?

Back in the 80s, people of my generation had exactly the kind of short term, and sometimes-lover relationships that Tracy describes in her article. I think what's different now is that there are a lot more young people now than there were then. This makes it a bigger, easier and more appealing target for the right wing authoritarians: Something they can scare a lot of people about.

The last time we had such a high concentration of young people in our society, in the 1960s, these same people, or their forebears, decried free love with the same kind of fear mongering. This will ebb in about ten years when the current wave of young people has passed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Voter turnout hovers around 50% of the voting-age population:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781453.html

Since 70-80% of voting-age Americans poll as liberal on a wide range of issues, and since the proportion who poll as conservative is near to the proportion that vote conservatives, it follows that most conservatives usually vote, and a large proportion of people who hold liberal views usually do not vote.

In a nation in which only around 50% of the people bother to vote, 30% is an awful lot. Most right wingers vote in most elections. The more extreme their views, the more regularly they vote. In a democracy, people who don't vote don't matter, regardless of what they might say to a pollster who rings them up.

Unless a much larger proportion of Americans start to exercise the franchise (please don't refer to these people as 'disenfranchised'; that's just silly), we're bound to have more of the same.

"For example, they believe that the human species is marching forward, that there is an advancement toward some kind of collective moral progress -- that we are moving towards, if not a Utopian, certainly a better, more perfected human society."

Actually, one of the most fundamental precepts of evolution theory is that evolution is not directional. That's bedrock.

Most of the atheists I know are hardheaded scientists who, far from expecting Utopia, are pretty skeptical about our species' prospects long run prospects.

I am a second generation atheist. Religion has never been a part of my life. The uncertainties that attend atheism are second nature to me. I thrive on uncertainty. I find the prospect of a certain universe terrifying rather than comforting. I would not like to live out my days on a game board, rolling the dice to see how many places to move according to a set of rules set down in a book. I would rather be free to explore and discover a mostly unknown universe.

Nietsche, Camus and Sartre had very different starting points. Much like the young women raised by feminists, the current generation of atheists start out taking for granted much of what our forebears had to struggle to achieve. This is progress.

It reminds me of a walrus, which is very endearing. They should consider adding a couple of tusks ;)

I am quite sure that everything I experience is just my brain running. My brain drinks in sensory input, and chomps away at it, and I experience things.

One of the things that I sometimes experience is a sense of connectedness to all things, a sense of the miraculousness of life and the cosmos, akin to a spiritual experience. I know that I'm not really connected to all things, and that life and the cosmos are reducible to physics. I'm engaging in suspension of disbelief. But I have this experience pretty often. I find it very satisfying. It exercises some bit of my brain that produces lovely molecules, and I feel deeply fulfilled. I get a similar sort of high from helping people who are suffering.

I suspect, and neuroscientists suspect, that this bit of my brain is a built-in. It probably helped us survive in the past because people who had this thing going on in their brains tended to form highly ordered societies that kicked ass. So we find it very pleasant. Like sex.

I think that if I didn't have these experiences, I would start to feel pretty low. Maybe that's what's going on with you. You might try indulging in a bit of this sort of suspension of disbelief, and see if it helps.

Better to trick your brain than to allow your brain to trick you. If you start letting your brain trick you, you could wind up doing something very foolish without realizing it (examples abound).

As a paying Salon reader, I feel that Paglia adds nothing of worth to the publication.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19588942/

If my brain were just slightly different, then I would not be able to have the thought that there is no god; therefore, god must have made me an atheist.

"But more and more physicists point to various laws of nature that have to be calibrated just right for stars and planets to form and for life to appear."

Should have read, "A vanishingly small number of physicists. . ."

This idea has been thoroughly discredited. Salon ought to hire a real science reporter to cover science.