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.)

Jessica, I hope they can work something out. I sometimes think that the entire purpose of insurance companies is to not cover people and not pay out any money.

Step away from the research, vw. I do the same thing, in part because research is my favorite part. The writing, nsm.

As I have said before, I struggled with describing my beliefs, or lack thereof, until I read an interview with Carl Sagan's wife after his death. The interviewer touched on Sagan's atheism and said, "Didn't he want to believe?" She replied, "No. He wanted to know."

That only contradicts a benevolent, omnipotent God. Who's to say God isn't just interested in us? That or eternally bored. I was just thinking the other day about how if you wanted to, you could believe God was so lazy he let evolution do all the work. Then he sat around looking at all the dinosaurs and plants and people. And maybe he walked away. Or took a vacation. I think if you want to believe in a God, you can totally come up with a plausible personality.

This is why I like the portrayal of God in The Universal Baseball Association. First of all, J. Henry Waugh (do ya see the Yahweh/Jehovah in there?) is not a deity, as such. He's a guy with a job like being an actuary. And he invents his own table top dice baseball game (like Rotisserie baseball, if you know what that is). But his game is massively complex and absorbs all of his life. He creates this alternate universe governed by the rules of his game. He creates the ballplayers and calculates their skills - not unlike an RPG. So imagine this world that's a mix of RPG and Sims and Rotisserie baseball, and you not only follow Mr. Waugh, but you get absorbed in the events of this world he created.

Coover's an excellent writer, so this is all very grounded in a regular guy's every day life. Very detailed and earthy. And the metaphor is obviously there, but he works it without anvils.

Anyway, what happens is that something very exciting happens in Waugh's little universe. And then, because of a roll of the dice, something horrible happens. By this time you're so deep into his character and world you can really feel Waugh's anguish over this horrible thing. You respect that he desperately doesn't want to cheat or break his rules, or roll the dice again. That his whole universe would come unraveled if he did. That his faith in that world would vanish and that it would cease to exist. But he suffers for the world he created.

I always thought that was a very compelling insight.