My life has become the opposite of the poor soul who has written. Each day a promise and life is a wonder. I have people who like me and for whom I am a blessing. I think that every effort is worth this existence.

I was a depressive kid. When I was 20 I stole a bottle of cyanide from the chemistry lab. It sat on my dresser top for months. Once I mixed up a glass and looked at it, but finally threw it out the window. It was a bleak winter day. When spring came, the grass below turned a beautiful and lush green with all of the nitrogen.... Had I succomed, what a waste!!! My life has become green and lush.

I drove a daughter-in-law to the airport this morning. She said that she loves coming to visit at our house. That one comment repaid every effort and every care.

I do not know what agonies this poor writer has, but I can tell her that change is within reach and that a rich life is abundant and will repay.

The lady relishes the hunt and all the excitement it entails. Why not committment? Different kind of excitement. I have to admit to a quite sort of excitement when I look at my wife of almost 40 years. Not only that, at this late date we are still finding things out to make sex better. (It does change with time.) For both of us the sex is better than it has ever been: mind blowing, thought extinguishing, blinding, fireworks. Just not as often. (When I was a kid, it was so exciting as to be brief. Now it goes on for ever......!!!! What happens at the end of that is unbelievable. For her, it blows her mind with stunning orgasms.)

Out of 168 hours, all of it enjoyable, sex takes one(?). Icing on the cake.

My daughter had a spiritual perception which is worth repeating. She had attended a play "Mother Wove the Morning" in which the role of woman was explored. While discussing this play with a friend afterward, she suddenly felt herself dissolve, her face becoming the face of the universe. Behind her face she felt the fullness of time and space. She felt utterly connected with everything.

In another part of that vision, she felt herself as a little shoot growing from the roots of a large oak tree.

I have felt small glimmerings of this expansion. I am just a little jealous of the experience, but this is the rare mystical experience which we aspire to, I think. She was unprepared for it, no meditation, no special prayer, just bang.

In this broader context, this transcendent vision is the apex of religious experience, but it is non-religious. Where does it come from? It is a soul-stretching connection, an establishment of a person's position in the grand scheme of things. It is also an affirmation of the individual, to be "permitted" this great insight.

Proud Dad to Susanna

Religion is easy if:

a. you do not take it too seriously

b. do not expect whoever God is to make changes in the external world, especially for you

c. expect God to do you any favors

d. expect God to be on your side

Then:

a. you can beg and plead all you want in fox holes or with cancer, it is a great relief. If a miracle occurs, if you survive, be grateful, but know it might have been coincidence. Then you can be appreciative of life and of miracles and coincidences.

b. you can feel a great connection with life and the universe.

c. you get to talk to God as an equal, if not in intelligence, then on some existential plane

d. you get to participate in creation

e. then God will be revealed

f. then you can read Dawkins and appreciate

g. then, when you die, you can go with a huge curiosity and a little hope. It beats the alternative.

I absolutely agree with Barbara King. The puzzle of death has been with us forever as well as the wonder of nature. How can we have avoided these things in the past, living so close to nature? Relationships do not end with death even if death were permanent and dead, so we want and need an afterlife for those relationships to continue.

But beyond that. Reading the quantity of the near death experiences, there is enough of this epi-phenomena, that the afterlife becomes real. Even in this day and age, reading near death experiences raises serious questions. It can be well imagined that 40,000 years ago near death experiences would have had a huge impact, to establish a belief in an afterlife and gods.

Then there is all of the lucid dream material, let alone the chemically induced visions.

There is so much material that is so everpresent. I believe that if all memory of religion were erased from our species, it would take about a half an hour to start to reestablish itself. So much for the meme idea.

I believe that life is so important in this universe that whatever powers there are, are vitally interested in its success, even ours. There is ample room for belief in transcendent life.