Juliana, my sister in(paren) abuse. Funny you should say it like that, cause CG told me maybe I could start a religion like Ayn Rand, kind of based on"baroque paragraphs and abuse of parentheses" (I knew better than to write an editor all verklempt, but it spilled out before I could gave a crap for composition.)

Oh, Jessica, that just SUCKS! I hope you're able to work something out with them...that's just ridiculous.

Someone, please tell me to stop looking up more info for my big research project. I don't need any more sources! I've got too many as it is. I just can't help myself, though. I find this topic fascinating, and I want to see EVERYTHING that is out there on it.

Belief-wise, I'm not sure. I can't say I absolutely believe in G-d. I can't say I absolutely don't. I am extremely doubtful that I will ever see proof one way or the other. (Well, I'm certain I'll never see "There is no G-d" proof, and, while I'm not ruling out the possibility, I really don't think I'll ever see definitive "There is a G-d" proof.) And in general, I don't really see the point in spending much time on that question.

I think that, if I needed to totally pin down my beliefs, I believe in some kind of unifying force. I don't believe in a G-d that's micromanaging every detail of our lives, but I do believe that there's something binding everything together. Maybe it's close to Spinosa's view of G-d, but not quite.

I want to see EVERYTHING that is out there on it.

If I were your librarian, I'd love you for this. However...

Stop! Looking! Up! More! Sources! You can always go back when the paper is done, set up an independent study, etc., to feed your need to know.

vw, stop researching. You'll drive yourself nuts otherwise.

Jessica, I hope the health insurance situation resolves itself with the utmost haste. There's no excuse for HR not to honor what they originally told you.

Cindy, I look forward to reading your thoughts.

that there is someone at your place, who can call someone at their place, and straighten this out, eventually, even if it means the insurer will need to use some sort of manual work-around.

Oh, no doubt. I just know it's going to be a nightmare because of the size of the two companies involved. The amount of corporate bureaucracy involved is huge. (And that's without all the little quirks that go along with my company's particular brand of insano giant multinational corporate bureaucracy, which comes with its own set of problems.)

To me it makes perfect sense that life evolved on earth over an incredibly long period of time, and that one of the results of evolution is us. I don't see where there needs to be a God to do anything.

This is me, more or less. And I'll add to that that for me, there's no sense of anything being lacking or less meaningful because of it. I know that for a lot of people, it's very important that there be a purpose or a destination to it. That's not a need I feel.

What's that old line about information wanting to be free? That's not a bad summation of my feeling on the matter. Life wants to progress, to become more complex. Information, i.e., complexity in a sense, has it's own internal drive. But I don't see that in any way as a conscious or directed thing, just...the nature of the beast, I guess.

I suppose my beliefs could be summed up with "Gut instinct tells me there's something Higher, and Christianity has a lot of good core concepts."

Oddly enough, I was raised in the church and still have some involvement. I can vividly see the value that some people get from it, and I wouldn't for a moment suggest that it's less than real. To go a step further, I can imagine in myself the comfort it could be if I decided to go that route, the strength that it can bring.

But for me, that gut instinct you mention is not at all there. In fact, my gut tells me the opposite. And so even when I was more involved, and hadn't yet thought these things through, identifying as a Christian or a believer in god never sat easily with me. It felt like willful self-deception, and I've felt much more at ease with myself and the world since I've been able to openly say (to myself not least) that, no, this isn't me.

Sparky, Hee! (I can't copy text from this computer. Weird.)

I probably am going to do an independent study, so yeah, I can look more then.

Crap. I want to participate more in this discussion (of religion). But OTOH, the problem I'm debugging is interesting, and the time is flying by....

And so even when I was more involved, and hadn't yet thought these things through, identifying as a Christian or a believer in god never sat easily with me. It felt like willful self-deception,

This is me. I was a very devout Christian in grade school, but I did have those doubts even back in, say, third grade. (I went to a private Lutheran school.)