I don't want you to believe anything. I want you to stop categorically disbelieving things. I want you to stop arbitrarily denying certain things on principle, things that you cannot possibly be certain about, merely because you want to disbelieve them for some emotional reason...or out of your own insecurity.

It is your absolute denial of things you can't really be sure about that I object to...not the fact that you don't "believe" this or that. Belief is not knowledge, it's simply a temporary opinion, and it's usually based on hearsay, cultural habits, and resistance to anything new or unfamiliar.

I bet if you'd lived in the 1700s you would have laughed uproariously at any suggestion that men could one day build powered flying machines, exceed the speed of sound, travel at 100 miles per hour in a horseless carriage, take xrays, send radio transmissions, and do heart transplants. ;-) And you'd not have been unusual. 99.9% of the people of that time would have laughed right along with you, because people are creatures of habit, and they all think they know it all already. The average largely ignorant man thinks as he walks into a room, "The smartest guy here just walked in." He pats himself on the back in his own mind for being more clued in than his neigbours, his relatives, his boss, his president, and his wife. He's an insecure egotist in other words, and you can't tell an insecure egotist anything he doesn't already know, because he already knows everything. Just ask him.

I'm saying I don't know if there are space aliens visiting us, but I think it's very probable, based on my own direct observations and thousands of direct observations by other people, many of them highly trained people.

You're saying you DO know that there are no space aliens visiting us, based on absolutely nothing except your kneejerk certainty that it must be that way. And your own ego will keep you in that little mental insecurity box, because that's where it likes to be...where it's safe because it's always "right", and everything is either "YES" or "NO", but never "maybe". "Maybe" is too frightening.

"If your aliens are coming here, that's what they'd be coming to do as well. (invade and exploit) It hasn't happened so they're not coming here."

1. The evidence suggests to me that they are coming here.

2. They haven't invaded and taken us over and exploited our world.

3. I draw a perfectly logical conclusion from that, which is: they ARE quite different from us.

You seem to feel that it's impossible for an intelligent race to rise above sheer greed and selfishness. That's sad. I think you have a very poor estimation of the real positive potential of humanity or of any other intelligent race. You lack idealism. You're willing to settle for a garbage mentality and a petty set of material objectives. If it were impossible for all individuals to rise higher than that, you'd be right in what you say, but various individuals have risen higher than that. If a few individuals can do it, then an entire race of beings can eventually do it. THAT's social evolution! We CAN improve ourselves.

Your reasoning that they haven't done what we would do if we came here, therefore they can't possibly have come here, is a Catch-22. It's circular reasoning, like a snake eating its own tail, and it's anything but logical. It's a statement of blind faith, nothing more. I guess you're the one who really belongs to a religion...you just don't realize it. ;-)