"A bunch of biased sillies."

Well, Gfs, I really wasn't going to bother but, as I have a few minutes to waste before the real business of the day, here goes.

The first thing to consider in discussions of this sort is the extent of your knowledge or, more importantly, its limitations. Let me illustrate with your comments on energy and end of life. What you haven't taken into account is the concept of entropy, and in order to understand that you'll need to get to grips with the soft and hard anthropic principles. I can recommend 'The Cosmological Anthropic Principle' by Barrow and Tipler as a good starter. In discussions of the soul, we will, in my opinion, never be able to understand this until (if ever) we understand the nature and origins of consciousness. This is one of the most hotly debated subjects amongst neurologists, philosophers, psychologists, physicists, mathematicians, historians, poets………. You could do worse than read Roger Penrose's 'The Emperor's New Mind' on the subject of whether it's possible to create artificial intelligence, and David Chalmers' excellent (if controversial) ideas on 'the hard problem of consciousness' which he sets out admirably in his book, 'The Conscious Mind'. And just when you think you're getting somewhere, you'll come across ideas from left field like those of Lyall Watson that he sets out in 'Lifetide – a Biology of the Unconscious' and, of course, in 'Supernature'; the gaia theory of James Lovelock; and the, for me, entrancing idea of morphic resonance as conceived by Rupert Sheldrake ('The Rebirth of Nature'). Along the line you might like to dip into Jung (archetypes and synchronicity), Sir James Jeans' 'The Mysterious Universe' and 'Physics and Philosophy', Wordsworth and the Romantic Poets, Peter Russell's 'The Awakening Earth', Guy Murchie's 'The Seven Mysteries of Life', John Gribbin's 'Deep Simplicity, Paul Devereux's 'Earthmind', Hans Duerr's 'Dreamtime' and, certainly, Sir Alistair Hardy's 'The Divine Flame – Natural History and Religion', And that's just for starters…….

You will, however, discover that you need a very big bookcases and that once you've opened this Pandora's Box out will come all kinds of strange things that can be good or evil (now there's another fascinating subject), amusing, charming, frightening and certainly puzzling. Once opened, you can't put the lid back on and you'll embark on a journey that will end only when you do (or perhaps that will just be the beginning) so it's one on which, in my opinion, it's better to travel hopefully than arrive. It was Frank Zappa who said that the mind is like a parachute - it only works when it's open, and an open mind may be best accompanied by a closed mouth lest, as I have often discovered, it ends up with a foot in it.

So, you can don your suit of shining armour and embark on your quest for The Holy Grail or you can stay at home and wallow in the comfortable muddy puddle of ignorance. If you choose the latter, however, please keep your grunting to yourself.