G.W.: "In 2001, a merger with a thriving church downtown, run by the young son of a powerful pastor in Phoenix, brought renewal -- not merely in the form of massive social outreach and volunteer programs, youth events and Bible study groups, but also, as the church explains on its website, in the form of "new cushioned theater seats, Ferrari-red carpet, modern stainless steel fixtures and acoustical absorbers hung decoratively from the ceiling similar to the Royal Albert Hall in England." It is Saturday night, and I am greeted at the door by a blast of air-conditioning and a wave of sound. It looks like a rock concert. It is a rock concert. More than 500 teenagers are crowding the stage, hands uplifted, singing along. There is a 12-member band, four huge videoscreens, and a crane that allows the camera to swoop through the air, projecting images of the believers back to themselves. "How many people are excited to give to the Lord tonight?" asks a young man who saunters up to the front. He handles his microphone naturally; he is not self-conscious. "How many people are pumped up? You have a destiny. God has a plan. But you have got to sow some seeds tonight, or it is never going to happen." Text flashes across the overhead screens, telling the teenagers how to make out their checks. Behind the lighting rigs and the acoustic panels, stained glass peeks out, a relic of McPherson's era. McPherson was personally wild and doctrinally flexible. She had visions and spoke in tongues, but she tried to put aside sectarian disputes. Even today, the charismatic movement is somewhat careless of doctrine. There is room for theistic evolutionists, for nonliteralists who hold that each of God's days in Genesis was the equivalent of a geological epoch, even for the notion that a check made out properly to the Lord can influence divine whim in the matter of a raise at work or a scholarship to college. Of course, evolutionary accommodation is controversial in the seminaries, and the idea of bribing God is rank heresy -- no trained theologian in any Christian tradition would endorse it. But such deviations are generously tolerated in practice. The forces at work in a living church have little to do with intellectual disputes over the meaning of the Lord's word. Having agreed that the Bible is inerrant, one is permitted to put it to use. This use is supremely practical. Pastor Matthew Barnett, onstage, wears the uniform of America -- jeans with loafers, a short-sleeved knit shirt. It's one of the costumes Kanye West wore on his Touch the Sky Tour, the same costume kids put on to go fold clothes at the mall. Like Kanye, like the kids at the mall, like millions of sober alcoholics, like Jesus, Pastor Matt -- as he's called -- does not traffic in proofs. Instead he tells stories. For instance, Pastor Matt used to be fat. Every night at 10 p.m., it was off to an orgy of junk food at Jack in the Box. Two monster tacos, curly fries, a chocolate shake. He was programmed. He was helpless. He could not resist. "The devil is a lion seeking whom he may devour," Pastor Matt says. On the other hand, strength to resist temptation is an explicit promise from the Lord. Let us read from 1 Corinthians: God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. Anybody who has ever been a teenager will recognize the relevance of Pastor Matt's sermon. These are the years of confusion, temptation, struggles with self-control. Pastor Matt openly shares with the teenagers the great humiliation he faced when trying to lose weight. The pastor is trim and handsome now. He talks intimately with the teenagers about food, about sex, about drugs. He boosts them up. He helps them cope with their shame.

He tells them that they are kings anointed by God, that they simply need to pray, and have faith, and be honest, and express their vulnerability, and work hard, and if they do these things they are guaranteed their reward. When he calls them to the stage, hundreds go. He puts his hands on their heads, and some cry. The altar call is a moving spectacle, and even we adults, we readers of Dawkins and Harris, we practiced reasoners and sincere pilgrims on the path of nonbelief, may find something in it that makes sense. Notwithstanding the banality of the doctrine, its canned anecdotes, and its questionable fundraising, Pastor Matthew offers a gift to his flock. They sow their seeds, and he blesses them. It is a direct exchange. The next morning, I seek to cleanse my intellectual conscience among the freethinkers. The Center for Inquiry is also a storied landmark. True, it is not as striking as the Angelus Temple, being only a bland, low structure at the far end of Hollywood Boulevard, miles away from the tourists. But this building is the West Coast branch of one of the greatest anti-supernatural organizations in the world. My favorite thing about the Center for Inquiry is that it is affiliated with the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, founded 30 years ago by Isaac Asimov, Paul Kurtz and Carl Sagan and dedicated to spreading misery among every species of quack. I have become a connoisseur of atheist groups -- there are scores of them, mostly local, linked into a few larger networks. There are some tensions, as is normal in the claustrophobia of powerless subcultures, but relations among the different branches of the movement are mostly friendly. Typical atheists are hardly the rabble-rousing evangelists that Dawkins or Harris might like. They are an older, peaceable, quietly frustrated lot, who meet partly out of idealism and partly out of loneliness. Here in Los Angeles, every fourth Sunday at 11 a.m., there is a meeting of Atheists United. More than 50 people have shown up today, which is a very good turnout for atheism. Many are approaching retirement age. The speaker this morning, a younger activist named Clark Adams, encourages them with the idea that their numbers are growing. Look at South Park, Adams urges. Look at Howard Stern. Look at Penn & Teller. These are signs of an infidel upsurge. Still, Adams admits some marketing concerns. Atheists are predominant among the "upper 5 percent," he says. "Where we're lagging is among the lower 95 percent." This is a true problem, and it goes beyond the difficulty of selling your ideas among those to whom you so openly condescend. The sociologist Rodney Stark has argued that the rise and fall of religions can be understood in economic terms. Believers sacrifice time and money in exchange for both spiritual and material benefits. In other words, religion is rational, but it is governed by the rationality of trade rather than of argument. Stark's theory is academically controversial, but here, in the Sunday morning meeting of Atheists United, it seems obvious that the narrow reasonableness of Adams can hardly be effective with the deal on offer at the Angelus Temple. "We're lagging among the lower 95 percent," says Adams. "You are kings anointed by God," says Pastor Matt. As the tide of faith rises, atheists, who have no church to buoy them, cling to one another. That a single celebrity, say, Keanu Reeves, is known to care nothing about God is counted as a victory. This parochial and moralistic self-regard begins to inspire in me a feeling of oppression. When Adams starts to recite the names of atheists who may have contributed to the television program Mr. Show With Bob and David between 1995 and 1998, I leave. Standing in the half-empty parking lot is a relief, though I am drenched from the heat. My pilgrimage is about to become more difficult. On the one hand, it is obvious that the political prospects of the New Atheism are slight.

People see a contradiction in its tone of certainty. Contemptuous of the faith of others, its proponents never doubt their own belief. They are fundamentalists. I hear this protest dozens of times. It comes up in every conversation. Even those who might side with the New Atheists are repelled by their strident tone. (The founders of the Brights, Geisert and Futrell, became grim at the mention of Sam Harris. "We don't endorse anything from him," Geisert said. We had talked for nearly three hours, and this was the only dark cloud.) The New Atheists never propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. For instance, the Catholic Church opposes condom use, which makes it complicit in the spread of AIDS. But among the most powerful voices against this tragic mistake are liberals within the Church -- exactly those allies the New Atheists reject. The New Atheists care mainly about correct belief. This makes them hopeless, politically. But on the other hand, the New Atheism does not aim at success by conventional political means. It does not balance interests, it does not make compromises, it does not seek common ground. The New Atheism, outwardly at least, is a straightforward appeal to our intellect. Atheists make their stand upon the truth. So is atheism true? There's good evidence from research by anthropologists such as Pascal Boyer and Scott Atran that a grab bag of cognitive predispositions makes us natural believers. We hear leaves rustle and we imagine that some airy being flutters up there; we see a corpse and continue to fear the judgment and influence of the person it once was. Remarkable progress has been made in understanding why faith is congenial to human nature -- and of course that still says nothing about whether it is true. Harris is typically severe in his rejection of the idea that evolutionary history somehow justifies faith. There is, he writes, "nothing more natural than rape. But no one would argue that rape is good, or compatible with a civil society, because it may have had evolutionary advantages for our ancestors." Like rape, Harris says, religion may be a vestige of our primitive nature that we must simply overcome. A variety of rebuttals to atheism have been tried over the years. Religious fundamentalists stand on their canonized texts and refuse to budge. The wisdom of this approach -- strategically, at least -- is evident when you see the awkward positions nonfundamentalists find themselves in. The most active defender of faith among scientists right now is Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project. His most recent book is called The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. In defiance of the title, Collins never attempts to show that science offers evidence for belief. Rather, he argues only that nothing in science prohibits belief. Unsolved problems in diverse fields, along with a skepticism about knowledge in general, are used to demonstrate that a deity might not be impossible. The problem with this, for defenders of faith, is that they've implicitly accepted science as the arbiter of what is real. This leaves the atheists with the upper hand. That's because when secular investigations take the lead, sacred doctrines collapse. There's barely a field of modern research -- cosmology, biology, archaeology, anthropology, psychology -- in which competing religious explanations have survived unscathed. Even the lowly humanities, which began the demolition job more than 200 years ago with textual criticism of the Bible, continue to make things difficult for believers through careful analysis of the historical origins of religious texts. While Collins and his fellow reconcilers can defend the notion of faith in the abstract, as soon as they get down to doctrine, the secular professors show up with their corrosive arguments.

When it comes to concrete examples of exactly what we should believe, reason is a slippery slope, and at the bottom -- well, at the bottom is atheism. I spend months resisting this slide. I turn to the great Oxford professor of science and religion, John Hedley Brooke, who convinces me that, contrary to myth, Darwin did not become an atheist because of evolution. Instead, his growing resistance to Christianity came from his moral criticism of 19th-century doctrine, compounded by the tragedy of his daughter's death. Darwin did not believe that evolution proved there was no God. This is interesting, because the story of Darwin's relationship to Christianity has figured in polemics for and against evolution for more than a century. But in the context of a real struggle with the claims of atheism, an accurate history of Darwin's loss of faith counts for little more than celebrity gossip."

Here's another hyperbolic analogy, "Like rape, Harris says, religion may be a vestige of our primitive nature that we must simply overcome.", that comparision is an obvious play for supposed feminists and feminists to convert to atheism, there is simply no rational basis for such an analogy. You imply Darwin did become an atheist, and that's not accurate.

G.W.: "From Brooke, I get pointers on the state of the art in academic theology, particularly those philosophers of religion who write in depth about science, such as Willem Drees and Philip Clayton. There is a certain illicit satisfaction in this scholarly work, which to an atheist is no better than astrology. ("The entire thrust of my position is that Christian theology is a nonsubject," Dawkins has written. "Vacuous. Devoid of coherence or content.") On the contrary, I find the best of these books to be brilliant, detailed, self-assured. I learn about kenosis, the deliberate decision of God not to disturb the natural order. I learn about panentheism, which says God is both the world and more than the world, and about emergentist theology, which holds that a God might have evolved. There are deep passages surveying theories of knowledge, glossing Kant, Schelling and Spinoza. I discover a daunting diversity of belief, and of course I'm just beginning. I haven't even gotten started with Islam, or the Vedic texts, or Zoroastrianism. It is all admirable and stimulating and lacks only the real help anybody in my position would need: reasons to believe that specific religious ideas are true. Even the most careful theologians seem to pose the question backward, starting out with their beliefs and clinging to those fragments that science and logic cannot overturn. The most rigorous of them jettison huge portions of doctrine along the way. If trained theologians can go this far, who am I to defend supernaturalism on their behalf? Why not be an atheist? I've sought aid far and wide, from Echo Park to Harvard, and finally I am almost ready to give in. Only one thing is still bothering me. Were I to declare myself an atheist, what would this mean? Would my life have to change? Would it become my moral obligation to be uncompromising toward fence-sitting friends? That person at dinner, pissing people off with his arrogance, his disrespect, his intellectual scorn -- would that be me? Besides, do we really understand all that religion means? Would it be easy to excise it, even assuming it is false? Didn't they try a cult of reason once, in France, at the close of the 18th century, and didn't it turn out to be too ugly even for Robespierre? The doctor for these difficulties looks like Santa Claus. His name is Daniel Dennett. He is a renowned philosopher, an atheist, and the possessor of a full white beard. I suspect he must have designed this Father Christmas look intentionally, but in fact it just evolved. "In the '60s, I looked like Rasputin," he says. Children have come up to him in airports, checking to see if he is on vacation from the North Pole.

When it comes to concrete examples of exactly what we should believe, reason is a slippery slope, and at the bottom -- well, at the bottom is atheism. I spend months resisting this slide. I turn to the great Oxford professor of science and religion, John Hedley Brooke, who convinces me that, contrary to myth, Darwin did not become an atheist because of evolution. Instead, his growing resistance to Christianity came from his moral criticism of 19th-century doctrine, compounded by the tragedy of his daughter's death. Darwin did not believe that evolution proved there was no God. This is interesting, because the story of Darwin's relationship to Christianity has figured in polemics for and against evolution for more than a century. But in the context of a real struggle with the claims of atheism, an accurate history of Darwin's loss of faith counts for little more than celebrity gossip."

When it happens, he does not torment them with knowledge that the person they mistake him for is not real. Instead, the philosopher puts his fingers to his lips and says conspiratorially: "Shhhh." Dennett summers on a farm in Maine. Flying in, I have a fine view of the old New England tapestry, which grows more and more rural as we move north: symmetrical fields with pale borders like the membranes of cells, barns and outbuildings like organelles, and, at the center of every thickening cluster of life, always the same vestigial structure, whose black dot of a cupola is offset by a whitish gleam. I know something of the history of the New England church, which began in fanaticism and ended in reform -- from witch burning to softest Presbyterianism in a few hundred years. Now, according to the atheists, these structures serve no useful purpose, and besides, they may be conduits for disease. Perhaps it is best that we do away with them all. But can it be done without harm? Among the New Atheists, Dennett holds an exalted but ambiguous place. Like Dawkins and Harris, he is an evangelizing nonbeliever. He has campaigned in writing on behalf of the Brights and has written a book called Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. In it, the blasting rhetoric of Dawkins and Harris is absent, replaced by provocative, often humorous examples and thought experiments. But like the other New Atheists, Dennett gives no quarter to believers who resist subjecting their faith to scientific evaluation. In fact, he argues that neutral, scientifically informed education about every religion in the world should be mandatory in school. After all, he argues, "if you have to hoodwink -- or blindfold -- your children to ensure that they confirm their faith when they are adults, your faith ought to go extinct.""

Another, "designed this Father Christmas look intentionally, but in fact it just evolved", poor usage of the word evolved, certainly you're not one of those supposed scientists who define evolution as an extremely meticulous history; which is designed to fabricate everything that happens is evolutionary, so, noting can be defined as devolutionary, and, therefore something that shouldn't be doen- like destroying your only sources of clean water, air, food, etc.. Also, "your faith ought to go extinct.", is lame, as most know quite well that parents don't have to "hoodwink their kids", they choose to, because, most religions and spiritualities, especially organized ones, are puppets of the corporate structure, just like gov'ts, sciences, to determine that people are controlled and to facilitate the ever increasing centralization of supposedly garnered delusional profits and delusional pleasures, in ever increasingly cyclical patterns, etc.; and "hoodwinking" is also a poor excuse for judging that a faith should go "extinct", that's a should too far- same as it ever was. Why the continual smattering of extremist projections, terms, concepts, etc.?

G.W.: "When I arrive at the farm, I find him in the midst of a difficult task.

He has been asked by the President's Council on Bioethics to write an essay reflecting on human dignity. In grappling with these issues, Dennett knows that he can't rely on faith or scripture. He will not say that life begins when an embryo is ensouled by God. He will not say that hospitals must not invite the indigent to sell their bodies for medical experiments because humans are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights. Ethical problems must be solved by reason, not arbitrary rules. And yet, on the other hand, Dennett knows that reason alone will fail. We sit in his study, in some creaky chairs, with the deep silence of an August morning around us, and Dennett tells me that he takes very seriously the risk of overreliance on thought. He doesn't want people to lose confidence in what he calls their "default settings," by which he means the conviction that their ethical intuitions are trustworthy. These default settings give us a feeling of security, a belief that our own sacrifices will be reciprocated. "If you shatter this confidence," he says, "then you get into a deep hole. Without trust, everything goes wrong." It interests me that, though Dennett is an atheist, he does not see faith merely as a useless vestige of our primitive nature, something we can, with effort, intellectualize away. No rational creature, he says, would be able to do without unexamined, sacred things. "Would intelligent robots be religious?" it occurs to me to ask. "Perhaps they would," he answers thoughtfully. "Although, if they were intelligent enough to evaluate their own programming, they would eventually question their belief in God."

Ahh, there's an atheist with insight into the human condition, cool. Here's another observation, there's a thread of mechanistic projection, usage of language, and concepts, analogies, etc., throughout this article, which one could readily conclude from that you don't have a problem with the corporate structure's (la machine) convolution's devolutionary directions mechanization of life, for e.g., historically, from Newton's transforming the defining of time, to usa citizens thinking they have it like that that they don't have 2 months paid vacation, like many Europeans, etc., and work so much to just succeed that they hardly have any relationship with their kids to speak of, nor, even, with their spouses or selves, for that matter; unbecoming into biological automatons- the devolution of the somatic revolution of the sixties and on, etc.. Though, I can understand why the usage is convenient, as mechanistic language, like mechanistic living, does lend itself to simplistic acceptance or negation, interpretation, etc.; an elemental ends/means scenario- although, convenience doesn't further, according to the Tao, perseverence does.

G.W.: "Dennett is an advocate of admitting that we simply don't have good reasons for some of the things we believe. Although we must guard our defaults, we still have to admit that they may be somewhat arbitrary. "How else do we protect ourselves?" he asks. "With absolutisms? This means telling lies, and when the lies are exposed, the crash is worse. It's not that science can discover when the body is ensouled. That's nonsense. We are not going to tolerate infanticide. But we're not going to put people in jail for onanism. Instead of protecting stability with a brittle set of myths, we can defend a deep resistance to mucking with the boundaries." This sounds to me a little like the religion of reason that Harris foresees. "Yes, there could be a rational religion," Dennett says. "We could have a rational policy not even to think about certain things." He understands that this would create constant tension between prohibition and curiosity. But the borders of our sacred beliefs could be well guarded simply by acknowledging that it is pragmatic to refuse to change them.

I ask Dennett if there might not be a contradiction in his scheme. On the one hand, he aggressively confronts the faithful, attacking their sacred beliefs. On the other hand, he proposes that our inherited defaults be put outside the limits of dispute. But this would make our defaults into a religion, unimpeachable and implacable gods. And besides, are we not atheists? Sacred prohibitions are anathema to us.""

Another example, why 'use' the word, "defaults" to describe what is usually called experiential or somatic intuitions, instincts, autonomic responses, behaviors, etc., as it is a machine language term, as computers have defaults, living beings don't, etc.? An underwhelming implication of this continual mechanistic language to describe human behavior and psychology could also be that one, or atheists, adhere to the simpleton, though, populist in totalitarian and remocratic circles alike, projected conception that humans are like clay, however they're molded is how they come out; a throwback to certain editions of the Bible usage, etc.- tragically. A well brought up set of somewhat hypocritical analgous conceptions between his atheism and theology, yet, you easily and readily dismiss it; rather conveniently.

G.W.: "Dennett replies that exceptions can be made. "Philosophers are the ones who refuse to accept the sacred values," he says. For instance, Socrates. I find this answer supremely odd. The image of an atheist religion whose sacred objects, called defaults, are taboo for all except philosophers -- this is the material of the cruelest parody. But that's not what Dennett means. In his scenario, the philosophers are not revered authorities but mental risk-takers and scouts. Their adventures invite ridicule, or worse. "Philosophers should expect to be hooted at and reviled," Dennett says. "Socrates drank the hemlock. He knew what he was doing." With this, I begin to understand what kind of atheist I want to be. Dennett's invocation of Socrates is a reminder that there are certain actors in history who change the world by staging their own defeat. Having been raised under Christianity, we are well schooled in this tactic of belated victory. The world has reversed its judgment on Socrates, as on Jesus and the fanatical John Brown. All critics of fundamental values, even those who have no magical beliefs, will find themselves tempted to retrace this path. Dawkins' tense rhetoric of moral choice, Harris' vision of apocalypse, their contempt for liberals, the invocation of slavery -- this is not the language of intellectual debate but of prophecy."

A small point, didn't Socrates take the hemlock to avoid the sword, whereas, wasn't Aristotle who, knowing he would die by the sword, faced it and spoke the words of his own demise to the wielder of it; is this really a trend threading through to Christianity, or life being as real as it can be- as that's its and their experiential evolutionary discernment 'to be', at the time?

G.W.: "In Breaking the Spell, Dennett writes about the personal risk inherent in attacking faith. Harris veils his academic affiliation and hometown because he fears for his physical safety. But in truth, the cultural neighborhoods where they live and work bear little resemblance to Italy under Pope Urban VIII, or New England in the 17th century, or Saudi Arabia today. Dennett spends the academic year at Tufts University and summers with family and students in Maine. Dawkins occupies an endowed Oxford chair and walks his dog on the wide streets, alone. Harris sails forward this fall with his second well-publicized book. There have been no fatwas, no prison cells, no gallows or crosses. Prophecy, I've come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere -- that is the sign they've hit a nerve. But what happens when they don't hit a nerve?

There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown."

Your extremely liberal 'use' of the word prophet is sad, though, fits with your 'whatever' academic background, which you supposedly rail against; which is one reason why I never suffered academia, yet, nor, have suffered from it.

G.W.: "Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I've decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism -- this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism -- is too much for me. The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong."

Good for you, and, again, well said. Though, if I may, a suggestion seems appropriaite, I suggest their polemics, etc., seem to have appealed to you, why a need for a simple solution to one of the most complex issues manufactured by the remocrat conspiracy, through their dictation that the usa must have an unnecessary war with Iraq, in order to manufacture astronomically more supposed terrorists, and supposed rogue states, so, that the war machine can replicate itself by manufacturing the circumstances by which it seems "necessary" to have not only "unending war", but, rather, their preferred "unending religious war"; of course, for the real war their waging against the usa taxpayer by supposedly necessitating astronomically more corporate welfare to their industrial complexes- like they did for fifty years with the dividing and conquering of the world with the bipolarization of it with the totalitarian and republican axises during the cold war. Still, "la machine", the corporate structure, and their ever increasing and increasingly interlocking systems of premeditated mass-destruction-murdering programs are all just linx in the chains on humanity, attempting to stop us from breaking free, we can break the chain of murder, the chain of death; by abolishing the over use of fossil fuels and being most alive! That's also why I think allowing evolution as a common language, as it's the thread that links every, in the fabric of life, is a good place to start. For, the corporate structure has made a trap of this world, yet, all life is in it, so "we..." can't underestimate our responsibility; that generations past have heaped on our heads and shoulders by not acting on theirs, then. Dylan Thomas' poem's line comes to mind :) "...and death (murder) shall have no dominion...", as others might say, "we, the people..." can make it so! Will you? By the by, "In Germany they [the Nazis] came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me, and by that time no one was left to speak up. - Pastor Martin Niemoeller, 1946", so the story goes, though, you might know that they actually came first for the mentally ill, elderly, handicapped, diffabled, foreigners, poor (Gypsies, Roma, et al); homeless, like the republicans are doing now. Defend yourself by defending them, one for all, all for one! Remember the lessons of WWII, if you're not taking bullets, you're making them, etc.; I'm bleeding every moment, are you? What do you think? From the heart in the heart of the heartland.
Some groups I moderate:
Disabled Greens News and discussion, home page:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DisabledGreensNews/ ,
Abuse in Therapy, homepage:
http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/AbuseinTherapy/
Diffabled, Mental Health, all related issues, advocacy, and professionals:
Invite link: http://passport.care2.net/invite.html?g=880 Homepage:
http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/Diffabled_MentalHealth_Action
reality's webpage, blog :) http://360.yahoo.com/jamesmnordlund
"Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen." ~ Leonardo da Vinci Enjoy an autumnal eve' as you can. Copy, share, as you will. Lest "we" forget, if you don't exercise responsibility, its Siamese twin sister, freedom, will wither like a muscle, as well. Sadly, now, it first needs to be exorcized, before its exercised. Viva la evolution!

Matutinally Yours, james m nordlund reality (aja) :)

For those interested "of or pertaining to the morning, day: relating to or happening in the morning or in the early part of the day (formal), (Mid-16th century, from late Latin matutinalis, from Matuta, goddess of the dawn.)" Music is life's song accompanying the abundance of joy's Spring. I look forward to hearing from you. Oyate.