It's like they're obsessed with a movie that came out in 1999. They think it's the best movie ever written and it's the only movie they ever talk about or watch.... On one level, there's little difference between Christians and 13-year-old Star Wars nerds.
So I'm thinking, Evangelicals are like that, but Unitarians are nothing like that. My point is, our concept of religion divides movements and communities according to belief, when it's more helpful to divide them according to mental state. So Evangelicals, Star Wars nerds, and people who are obsessed with some political movement, have more in common with each other, than with Unitarians, casual Star Wars watchers, and people who engage the political system without being obsessed.
Or maybe obsession is also the wrong angle, and a better way to frame it is the strength of ingroup-outgroup thinking. So the test is: can you be friends with someone who disagrees with you?
This all comes back to the search for meaning, the human need to be part of a story. And you can put stories on a spectrum, from simple to complex. The danger is when too many people find meaning in simple and compelling stories, that draw a clean line between good and bad.
]]>Nightingale songs are made up of an impressive variety of trills, gurgles, whistles and rapid "beats". During the latter, Schneider said, "the tones don't just come out rapid and hard, but almost mechanically precise -- it's almost like techno."
]]>I have never been able to find it again, although I go up almost every day when the weather makes it possible. There is nothing but an empty sky and a few jets. Sometimes, to tell the truth, I have wondered if things would not have been different if, in finishing the Fokker, I had used the original, flammable dope. She was so authentic. Sometimes toward evening I think I see her in the distance, above the clouds, and I follow as fast as I can across the silent vault with the Fokker trembling around me and the throttle all the way out; but it is only the sun.