*sigh*
HotSnoj, Stealth, Warlock, et al.: Fine. You're free to believe what you like. Stealth, I'll even partway agree with you that most people believe in what they do without understanding it fully, certainly not grasping the question and the available answers clearly enough to feel as strongly about it as they do. But this works both ways. There are just as many people who don't think about the universe they live in before giving a knee-jerk response to a rather significant question on any side of the argument. That's the nature of people- we're intellectually lazy but quick to form opinions by default. This thread is a case in point.
Personally, I can't offer any answers. I've taken an honest look at the universe around us, and what people have to say about it, and I can believe equally easily that there's some conscious force regulating it of one sort or another or that it exists on its own. I happen to find the latter particularly tantalizing, partially because many tenets of most of the major religions just don't hold water nowadays and partially because it's so much more interesting an idea to think that it formed of itself than that some guy just plonked it out over a working week plus overtime.
In a complete vaccuum of concrete information pointing conclusively either way, where the only thing that one can even begin to trust is personal observation, I think it's a bit arrogant to claim some higher knowledge of the workings of the world. Observe, deduce, hypothesize, but don't assume you understand it- if you drop your preconceptions and specious third-party data (such as the Bible, as well as quantum physics), you'll find that you don't know substantially more than you did as an infant, or have a much deeper comprehension of what, how, and why than does any living thing. Theorize if you like, but never take the stance that you know everything, or you'll never learn anything- and then you've defeated the whole point of thinking about the Universe.
I will say this, though. HotSnoj, if there is a God, and he's as bigoted, narrow-minded, and outright sadistic as you claim your God to be, I wouldn't worship him anyway on principle. I'd sooner go to whatever would await in Hell than bow down to the biggest bastard in the Universe.
Poll
