Actaeon2

And where did the thousands of meat-packing employees in 1900 buy their meat? Let me guess...they were all vegans. That's right. It was a great conspiracy. The meat-packers didn't tell anyone except their ten-thousand closest friends and relatives about how bad the conditions were. It was all very hush-hush. And no one ever thought to ask why every meat-packing employee was a vegan. Those poor proletariat! They just can't see past their noses. ;-)

Even more than that, I think the evangelicals owe their recent growth to the not-so-religious left. The left has an almost unchallenged monopoly over the public school systems. One would expect them to be having a hay-day turning out little leftists, and to some extent, they are. But at the same time, the children who would choose to be moral rather than cynical need somewhere to turn. They need some code of ethics that will promise to make their lives happy. Where might that code come from? Certainly not the left. The left has abandoned, not only traditional ethics, but ethics altogether. With the exception of a few environmentalist bromides, it's basically just a bunch of scepticism and nihilism. But since a man must have a moral code for living his life, a lot of the better kids are going to turn to religion. Unless, of course, we get to them first.

Perhaps you should read my post more carefully. I do not claim that Kate Chopin is writing poetry. I claim that she's writing prose. Notice that I quote your words at the beginning of my post: "Prose as such is simply the organization and presentation of ideas, concepts. Poetry is prose plus music." That's what I'm responding to. It is wrong to claim that because musicality of language is a defining feature of poetry, then prose can't have it. It's off limits. That's not how reality works. And so I think we get to the root of the matter. You write, "...some essential that belongs to it alone." Rarely do concepts work so neatly as that. Most concepts don't exist as absolutes, certainly not in the Platonic sense of being a pure essence. Concepts bring order to a very untidy universe. They are purely human devices, invented to help us divide things into useful units. For example, there's a red color and there's a green color, but there's also a thousand shades of color in between, and all of them share attributes of reds and greens in some measure. Sometimes the way we divide concepts is by matters of degree, not by kind. For example, a lake must be larger and have more water in it than a pond, and a pond more than a puddle. So, too, poetry may be the arch example of musicality in language, but only by measure. It doesn't have sole rights to that characteristic. Good prose may have some elements of musicality to, at least in some measure. Thus, my example of Kate Chopin.

Try reading the following words aloud, courtesy of novelist Kate Chopin (from The Awakening): "The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation. The voice of the sea speaks to the soul. The touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace." See how the rhythm, the sound, and the subject all flow as one through the language, wave upon wave rolling in, then receding, rolling in again, and receding. It's quite lovely, I think. Not all prose can read like this. It would be too rich. Sometimes a conjunction is just a conjunction. But a good writer knows when to employ tricks like tone, rhythm, and word associations to enliven his prose, and even sometimes to make it fairly sing.

Hebrews Chpt 11, verse 1: "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Anyone who goes from claiming to be an Objectivist to suddenly replacing reality with his wishes and whims has cut off his own head. It's not enough to say that he's abandoned his rational faculty. He's ripped it out, chopped it up, spit at it, and thrown it in the sewer. At this point, I think you should treat this man as mentally dead, for all rational intents and purposes. He is not worth arguing with.