OF which your snide remark may be shief, Richard.

The problem that the whole Dawkins school is up against is a serious problem which has roiled the history of our kind. Evidentiary reasoning and experiential reasoning are often very much at odds with each other, and either one can lead to assertions about the nature of reality.

Dawkins' camp rightly asserts that it is improper (to say the least) to impose experiential conclusions (such as feeling the finger of God or getting guidance from angelic forms) on other people when those conclusions are not supported by evidence of the shareable sort.

Music is a kind of bridge, because it is made from common forms (frets, intervals, frequencies, defined notes) but it reaches deep into the experiential world and touches individuals in different ways.

IMHO it is foolish to try and impose the rules of one onto the playing field of the other.

Unlike the evidentiary universe, experience is extremely plastic and subject to suggestion, and is therefore a very individual thing. One man's night-light is another man's UFO or ghastly specter. THis is a space within which all the poeple fool themselves all the time, blending the threads of "actual" event with the overlays of personal invention, dramatization, preference or simply creative authorship. It is a highly subjective pot-au-feu which gets easily stirred by music, as well as by poetry and art and flirting and a number of other delightful frequencies. Oh, not to mention beer.

A