Atheists such as Richard Dawkins, a polemicist who writes such a tut-tutting screed as "God is not Great", seem to be cut of a certain cloth as sharp, hawk-like men who obsess over the details, every little bit in their favor, "jealously snatching" their bit of short-changed ecstasy like a teenager fighting his way to the front of the line at the deli counter, raising his hand to say "I'm next!" when clearly he's not. When one lives a very miserable, self-centered existence when you resign yourself to the ashcan and "suppose this is the best you will ever have", without opening yourself to the holy mystery and essential elusiveness of life that makes it so wonderful with possibility.

Religion is a man-made expression of spiritual forces he feels vibrating through every atom of his being (-- should he care to listen), but as a human institution is subject to man's fallibilities and animal passions which "can get out of hand". But that says more about "the human condition" than it does about this blind, indifferent spiritual "humming" just as science, the harnessing of nature's laws, can be misused depending on who wields "that mighty work bench" known as "progress". Ideology can be described as a way of systematically boxing the world into a framework while either ignoring or distorting inconvenient facts and atheists like Dawkins are just as guilty of that as Christian fundamentalists.

He writes that "those who offer false consolation are false friends". . . . . but then again, offering false non-consolation as a bile-spewing pessimist "that protests too much" against the kind of trenchant belief to which he takes "an opposite stance". If you push against something, there's only "more of it". And to the extent that religion was once described by Marx as "the opium of the people". . . . . like poppies that grow in between the long, clanking chain of their working-class servitude, an argument is made to break them of the chain so they may find "the real nobility".

Well, to break Dawkins of "his opium", a bile no matter how sour, though I could certainly not call anyone of his ilk particularly "noble". As he stands in "a higher order" above the "unsophisticated", how high others stand above him for what he cannot see.

Yes, an unfalsifiable theory is a weak one. . . . . but that's when a "leap of the imagination" comes in with the stories we tell ourselves, the awe that is life. Though the life force has no eyes, it creates creatures who can see and perceive. . . . . reaching out to explore the universe and to know itself as part of the universe. Part of man's greatness comes from beginning to take control of and steer it's own destiny, hopefully for the better though certainly "incompetence has been subsidized" through this oppressive liberal ideology.

Remember too, that evolution-- or natural law-- is smarter than human beings are and their arrogance to think that they can supercede the traditional "rules of thumb" that have governed our semi-religious society for centuries. We may have "a living constitution", but to make sure that it is not taken over by the grey, sucking "oyster mouth" of hanger-on's "who don't know the difference", stuffing up the byways of moral and legal and political thought with the gray crud of "deadness" that thinks it is "the progressive universal" that only smothers true diversity. It's funny how oftentimes "a leap of faith" is required for any absurdity, of whatever stripe, and needs more and more evidence to reassure itself. . . . . no matter how back-patting and forever dubious.

When one is not forced, or overly indoctrinated when they're young, they have a natural gravitation toward a religious or political faith with pleasant connotations, while others brought up in it are typically unable to think for themselves and "simply accept it without question". Whatever the fate of the small-minded, "they will continue to carry the stamp of their lowly origin".