That's a bingo, Little Hawk. Well said.

Since I was about six years old, I haven't been able to accept the picture of God as a cranky old man dressed in a toga, sitting on Arturus Twelve, and granting blessings and hurling thunderbolts at people who please Him or piss Him off. Yet, lots of people do. The personification of God is strictly man-made, and that's where we get into trouble.

The problem of Evil. Whether something is evil or not seems to be a matter of human interpretation. Is a hurricane that wipes out a coastline and kills a lot of people evil? From our viewpoint, yes. But to Nature, it's neutral—just something that happens, an unavoidable natural process. Is a serial murderer evil? He's sick, warped, and has to be stopped or restrained. We still don't know how he got that way. How about someone like Hitler? It's hard for me not to say that he was evil, but what was he other than a madman and a serial murderer on a grand scale? It's more of a problem in psychology than one in theology.

Bad things happen. That's the nature of life. If something evil (detrimental to human life) happens, we naively ask why God (the process of Life itself) allows this to happen. Well . . . it's just part of the process of Life. Was the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago evil? From the viewpoint of the dinosaurs, yes, indeed. But that allowed mammals to come to the fore and evolve, eventually producing us. From our viewpoint, that's good. (Future species may judge otherwise.)

Just thinkin' out loud here. . . .

By the way, kat, I hope you're right about reincarnation. I'm just starting to get the hang of this Life thing, and I'd like to be able to keep at it until I eventually get it right.

Don Firth