and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

Darwin’s God
A scientific exploration of how we have come to believe in God.

This article in the New York Times Magazine actually gave me a new thought, and a contrarian one as well: Maybe I am not too atheist - maybe I am not atheist *enough*.

You know, I haven't really posed it to myself this way ever before (that I can recall) and it is these new thoughts that make re-living and re-thinking the same debates over and over worthwhile.. the idea that maybe you'll come across a new seed of truth, some new thought that helps you get closer to the truth, or at least your own personal truth.

The reason I say I am perhaps not atheist enough is that in my travels it is the what-ifs, the maybes, and the nonsense coincidence, serendipity, and wonder that really catch me up.

We know that drinking too much is not healthy. We know that smoking is bad for you. I know what works: hard work. I know that if I utilize this brain of mine, if I educate myself and motivate myself and work hard, I will succeed in this modern world we live in. Certainly, things were different in caveman or greek or roman times. Maybe my lack of physicality would put me at a dangerous disadvantage. However, right now.. what slows me down is the unknown.

Knowing of famous poets and philosophers who were pie-eyed drunks till their late 80s.. Knowing of people who smoked their whole lives - packs a day - with nary a tumor to speak of. Knowing of 'lucky' people who won the lottery or just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

It's bad enough to have these false hopes, which makes me glad I'm *not* religious. Cause, if you combined that stuff with God all I would be doing is sitting at home in my room in the dark praying to God to make *me* lucky.

I do struggle with the pure atheism, though. Deep down I don't believe in squat, but when people approach you and push you and use the scientific method against you (the same method they refuse to use for themselves) to make you admit that there *could* be a God, well, you get painted in the corner. The reality - when pressed - is that I fully admit to knowing nothing about what is "out there", beyond the galaxies and universe.. What that doesn't imply is me believing in anything out there. I just don't. I have blackness. Nothingingness. Somethingness.. I just can't and won't say what and, really, I don't really care. It's a bit removed from my own situation, you see.

So I guess in the end I'm a sneaky little agnostic because I can't say with faith that I know God does not exist. The joke there is that, to be an atheist, I would need some sort of "faith" to believe wholly in what I believe in.

But what really gets me is this unending effort and time that people put in to all this. I guess we all suffer from the internal questions of life but in a tiny world only 25,000 miles round, we manage to completely forget about entire countries of starving people... God is a lot farther away than that yet somehow oh so important. Important, certainly, if you believe he has the keys to your eternal glory.. which really makes you just a selfish bastard, in the end.