… non sequitur. I’m an atheist materialist (in the philosophical and economic sense, not that I think an active internal life is unimportant) and I care a whole lot about the future. I have 2 kids. I can barely understand how someone could be so selfish as to not care about the future beyond themselves – and I don’t see in the least how this question depends on whether or not they think there’s some god or mystical force out there.

I think the decline in children is due to economic and other social factors – the effort to raise viable offspring in the environment grows too great – the judgements you see yourself as facing from everyone who can now see every nitty detail of what you’re doing and going to say how wrong wrong wrong you are about it – we all became hyper-aware of the horrible things that happen occasionally and weight them beyond their true risks – and so on.

Simply pinning birth rates on atheism… well, I’d want to see statistics with a bunch of possible confounding factors included, not some unsupported claim from the outside.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I suspect that the nearness to God, the becoming one with God, the melting into the Godhead experienced by users of entheogens are in fact illusions.

But then, there are plenty of people who, without the use of drugs, have thought that they were sexual supermen, that they were omnipotent, that they could fly, or various other illusory feelings. They’ve also felt a nearness to Kali, to Astarte, to Jesus, to the Spirits of Nature, all without taking in special molecules.

Now many people (you?) want to tell me that feelings of omnipotence are invalid, with or without drugs.
Feelings of nearness to Zeus are invalid, with or without drugs.
Feelings of communing with the minds of trees are invalid, with or without drugs.
Feelings of closeness to Jesus are invalid with drugs, but are valid without drugs.

And there’s really no reason for me to accept that, unless it just happens to be what I want to believe. It may be true, you may be right, but how can I or anybody else really know? Maybe the only religious experiences which are true are the ones gained by the use of a certain plant, but not other plants. Maybe that’s why God put that one plant on Earth, but the Devil put the others. Or maybe not.

But I can have my suspicions, and I suspect that the origin of religion is to be found in the consuming of psychoactive plants and mushrooms in the ages before writing, nation-states, and organized religion. Can I utterly prove it? No. But then, nobody can prove that her faith is the right one, either.

That’s why they call it faith.

Actually getting close to God requires openness to the holy spirit, and it comes to you without the need for any drug to induce fake feelings.

So I’m going by what people who have done psychedelics say about it. They don’t call them “entheogens” for nothing. The word means “creates God within.” Shamans from the rain forests of South America and Africa, the plains of North America, and the Egyptians of Pharaoh days all had these substances as an important part of their faith. Some people in the industrialized Information Age Western world still do.
And this is what’s said by people who have done an oracle-load of entheogens, not people with even less experience than I have.

Nutmeg didn’t give me a religious experience, and marijuana didn’t give you one. But others have had experiences with the aid of a little chemistry (or botany, or mycology).

Better, more qualified teachers usually seek jobs in affluent areas because the pay is higher and the students are easier to teach. Good teachers generally don’t want to teach in bad schools – where they are most sorely needed.

I went to a public magnet school with an entrance exam and an exclusive admissions policy, and high teacher salaries; it’s a racially and economically diverse school with black kids and white kids, rich kids and poor kids, and 99 percent go on to universities and it’s one of the best high schools in America. Giving poor kids and nonwhite kids a great education CAN be done but only if you have brilliant, dedicated, caring teachers.

“Waiting for ‘Superman’” portrays the Harlem Success Academy, where great teachers give a good education to kids from the worst possible neighborhoods. It can be done – but only if you have good teachers who really CARE.

One thing, though: the teachers’ union is everywhere, so why is it worse in DC?

From day 1, there’s been religious people who want no part of abusing any alcohol and/or using any drug for reasons outside of having a true health problem.

How can we possibly know that? Even if it’s true, how can we know? There are pictures of psilocybe mushrooms on cave walls. There are no scriptures that old; writing hadn’t been invented yet.

It could well be that Cro-Magnon Man was meditating and praying, achieving altered states of consciousness that way, and only used the ‘shrooms in very low doses to improve visual acuity while hunting, but we don’t know that. They could also have been tripping balls and wouldn’t invent prayer for another twenty generations, but then we can’t know that either.