"Bill, I'm sorry that you spent so much of your time in churches, classrooms and libraries and didn't find any answers. Others haven't been quite so frustrated. "

Did you ever hear the story of the guy who prayed for something and was disappointed? His friend said: "I told you religion & prayer were useless. All that praying and you got no answer."
The guy replied: "God answered...he said "No"."

That's the religious form of the answer *I* got from all those studies. Because I found no consistent, testable answers in some areas, or any answers which were not based on 'wishful thinking' or linguistic equivocation, the answer I got was that certain questions do not have answers we can be sure of, (or possibly, that we have framed questions improperly.) This is what I call learning. I do not assume in my questioning that the answer MUST take some pre-determined form, or that there IS a religious answer entwined in all the confusion.

   I am not "frustrated" that I didn't 'find' certain answers - I put such things into the category of 'stuff humans can't seem to get a handle on'. (If you want to add "yet" to that, be my guest). Just as we can't really answer "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?", we can't answer "What is the nature and origin of all reality?"

When someone tells me, "I can't imagine how anything can exist without a First Cause.", I reply, "I can't imagine what a First Cause might imply or how IT got there."

You can't say that something **EXISTS** or happened, just because we have words for it. Are there Unicorns? or Elves? or Ghosts?

So, "frustrated", for me, applies to other things....like being told I "haven't opened my mind" to the 'truth'.....

Am I taking my chances with my eternal life? *shrug*... sadly, If I'm right, I don't get to say "I told you so."