Religion is a very personal thing and I get secretly angry with people who push what they belive on to the rest of us.

We all have our own personalitys and I think we are drawn to what suits us.

There is a system some folks belive in about soul age and the number of times we reincarnate, I’m not sure about this but it does make a little bit of sense to me.

I think too that *god* is nothing at all like the christians try to knock into our heads.

I belive in love and think that even the vilest of humans are welcomed home like a prodical son.

Who knows LOL

Lynx, you have some very good thoughts that I can relate too.

love jackie
x x

it’s the part where people project human characteristics onto non-human entities that strikes me as dumb.

It totally makes sense to me that a mountain or a river or grove of trees (for instance) would have its own energy, a collective consciousness rising out of all the living things in that particular local ecosystem. Anyone who’s spent time in nature and really stopped and listened should know what i mean. it’s very Shinto, really…  It also seems pretty obvious to me that that’s where the idea of local deities originated from. Even cities have their own energies, produced by all the people who live and die in them. New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Dublin, Mexico City are all very different places – each city has its own personality, so to speak. That’s an example of the kind of collective consciousness that I’m talking about. Writ large, that type of collective intelligence would fit my conception of deity pretty well.

And of course, if string theory is correct then matter is just sub-atomic vibrations, distinctions between individuals literally do not exist, and we are all manifestations of the same universal entity.  What we have to remember is that such an entity would not be human and there’s no reason to expect it to have human characteristics, be self-aware, or be at all interested interested in human affairs. To expect deity to care about our personal lives is beyond egotistical, it’s downright insane.

again, just my 2 cents.

Your post also made me recall in the Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett’s description of Death as an anthropomorphic personification, I think used in a similar way of mutual co-creation.
L