Kendall: Oh! Thanks for that clarification. I didn't "get" that from your word to the atheists. I thought the cook in your analogy was your concept of God.

Little Hawk (re your post of 1:48 PM): Wow, that's very interesting – and I mean that seriously; I'm not being sarcastic. I say this because my view is just about the opposite: I see the mortal mind and ego as being "so clever and simultaneously so ignorant as to take delight, or at least cold comfort, in concocting" the various stories of after-death experience (eternal reward and punishment, reincarnation and so forth) and in inventing the various gods, most of which have the characteristics and/or personality traits of humans or animals (right down to the gender!). I don't see the "story of reality" that ends in one's inevitable demise as a concoction, but as the natural conclusion to be drawn from observation of the world around one.

Likewise, I don't see that inevitable demise (without thought of or planning for an afterlife) as "defeat and extinction" but as part of the cycle of nature that constantly renews itself and evolves itself. To label the end of mortal life as a "defeat" implies that "victory" is only to be found in immortal life of some kind, hence all the theories about how to achieve that immortality. It also assumes that there is a game to be played, and won or lost. But not everyone sees life as a game one is playing, even with oneself, or as a competition to outlive someone else. Some of us are just living, determined to choose kindness over cruelty and love over hatred for the sake of one's own happiness in this life, not for the sake of winning a game that someone else invented long ago.

Your reference to "a mere biological machine" being worse than a worm puzzles me. "Destined to be thrown on the junkpile"??? IMO, this devalues all of nature, not just humans. Whether or not you believe in a God that created the "biological machine", each machine (human, worm or whatever) is a marvel in its own right. Part of the mechanism is (or at least is supposed to be) that the human is eventually eaten by the worm, and it's only the mortal mind and ego that has such a problem with that concept that it stores its dead in impenetrable boxes in the ground – or burns its dead – so that the worm can't eat the bodies before they're resurrected by their particular god. The mortal mind and ego seems to be obsessed with breaking the cycle of nature because it presumes itself to be immortal – or at least hopes and strives to be immortal – and to my mind that is a "most unfortunate attitude", when the mortal ego is more concerned with its own perpetuity than with that of the natural world. When the survival or extinction of other species at human hands is less important to man than his soul, IMO he has already lost his soul, and no amount of praying is going to bring it back.