Then the countless mystics and those who have had profound mystical experiences are just delusional aren't they? Except for the pesky fact they're so damn consistent-throughout **centuries** and across all cultures.

Consistency would be expected with a neurological phenomenon. Just sayin'.

BTW, delusion has nothing to do with such an experience per se--that would be more in the line of a hallucination. Delusion would be when you believe something is true that is demonstrably false. Believing in God, or any supernatural force, energy, or being, is thus not delusional, since the existence of such cannot be proved or disproved. Believing that you can fly by flapping your arms, that you are the King of Atlantis, or that you can beat the house at craps is delusional.

We are no longer people, but simply assemblies of various chemicals and physical structures. And in doing that the entire world of values disappears.

Well, the world of values that depends on supernatural intervention in human affairs, anyway. You don't have to believe God carved something on a tablet and handed it to Moses to understand that murdering people is generally a Bad Idea.

What you are really protesting is the loss of mystery as more and more of human thought and action becomes explicable through strictly material means. And it is a loss, in the same way that losing one's virginity is: one moves from a condition of second-hand information to one of empirical knowledge.

By the way, understanding how my brain works doesn't make music less beautiful, or the love I have for my wife less real, any more than understanding how a curve ball works make baseball less fun.

But when it hits you, there's no mistaking it. It often comes to those of us who aren't even looking for it. It hits you over the head and turns your life upside down.

Are we talking about religion here or sexual infatuation?

The problem with this is that clearly it doesn't come to everyone, or a lot more of us would be believers. If God picks and chooses who gets the guaranteed life-changing experience via cosmic dartboard, I'm just as happy I've been spared so far.

I thee a lot of pithy people in the Thalon letter thection, every day.

...how DO you write fiction? I know I depend on my desire to find out what really makes people what they are when I try.

To wit: I have to ask a question, of the LW and those others here who vent to journals and the like: why exactly do you keep that stuff around after the moment is past?

First, in regards to:

Still, it's likely more than a few have fled out of plain old cowardice. They don't mind doing the shooting; they just don't like it when the Iraqis shoot back.

Fear of getting killed or injured has never been the chief reason for psychological casualties, as David Grossman amply demonstrates in his important work, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. It's been the natural human reluctance to kill clashing with the intense loyalty to one's comrades. Since VietNam that's been complicated by psychological conditioning techniques designed to make it easier for our boys to pull the trigger. Here, the increasing obvious fact that the war was started for no good reason and a variety of bad ones makes it an even more volatile cocktail.

Second, as to:

Funny how Salonistas constantly rag on GWB for "dodging" the Vietnam War (though he served in uniform and flew fighter jets) even though the same things were said about Vietnam as are being said about Iraq, but somehow think these cowards who have skipped out and left their friends to hold the bag are heroes.

Actually, GWB isn't criticized by us for dodging service in VietNam per se, but for doing so (flight suit and all) and then starting his own equivalent morass for another generation. To dodge a stupid war in your youth only to start a stupid war in one's middle age leaves one open to a variety of, ah, ethical suspicions.

Finally--while under ideal circumstances figuring out what was going on before one was enlisted would have been preferable, I can't fault anyone for having a Pauline moment after the fact, even if they were nearer to Baghdad than Damascus. Remember, at one point most Americans actually believed the administration's line.

Seriously, I opened it maybe once every other week, mostly because I had looked at everything else and had time on my hands.

The talk show listings sound like they filled a particular niche, though, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of effort to track that info down.

...so much as he did from Wagner's own medieval source, the Nibelungenlied, with which he had been familiar since boyhood. And the Old Norse Eddas. And the Kalevala. And Beowulf...there is certainly a syncretic element to his work, but some of the themes are common enough in Germanic and Scandinavian literature of the Middle Ages that even "borrow" is a strong word for what he did, unless one also "borrows" oxygen from the air.

but all I can think of is whether Maher expects anyone to take him seriously as a journalist.

My guess is that he expects us to take him seriously as a comedian, sort of like Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and other political comedians all the way back to Lenny Bruce and his ilk.

Comedians can write, you know. They learned it from a book.

...that sometimes one must choose between less than ideal options. That the perfect is the enemy of the good. That unless someone has a BETTER idea than wind power, not simply one that has DIFFERENT problems, blanket statements about wind being a dead end are going to sound like they are coming from the most selfish and short-sigthed NIMBYs and apologists for legacy polluters.

And that nobody likes whiners, of course.