Well, I shall contribute a vague end of my side. My take on religion is a complex one. In fact, it's so complex that even I still don't fully understand how I believe things are. All I know is I've come a long way from what I used to believe back in high school and I'm no poser slandering the name of God to make people think I'm hardcore. Don't get me wrong though. I don't slander God's name. Not anymore anyway. But I'm still far from a Christian. Though I've yet to fully research Christianity I have begun researching some other, more exotic religions as well as lesser exotics. But in an interesting way the pieces are planting together in one form or another and even some morals and factors involved in religions based less around God seem to fit some pieces with religions that do focus directly on God. In any case it's really not like any of us have any 100% guarantee... not until we die anyway and even that's a bit biased to assume that we'll learn "everything" after death. When I get down to the basic facts of what I actually know, I know nothing. The rest is up to a leap of faith in any given direction. From where I stand all I see are people leaping. Making huge jumps every which way and not even always looking in the direction they're jumping. A lot of them just jump. Some jump because others jumped that way. It's just a shambled mass of people leaping every which way and yelling out to everyone else "hey, you're going the wrong way". And no one seems to think they're wrong. And that's fine. I strongly agree with self confidence in one's own beliefs. But I'll be taking solace sitting in my stationary spot until I can make more sense of things. It's just gonna be some time before anyone sees me jumping, let's just say. As much as it's based around our everyday lives I think that people should lighten up with religion and let people go their own way. I've seen about as many hypocrisies as I have legit beliefs from people. The church my mom goes to is one of those Pentacostle churches where the people jump up and scream and shake all about. They claim that it's the lord jumping into them and speaking through them. Thing is, the lord must certainly like speaking through the same people all the time because my mom has yet to claim that she suddenly flew out of her chair and "spoke in tongues". To that I say balderdash. I find that to be a load of crap. I'd imagine that things like that would happen a lot more often, outside of church, and with random people. Now Buddha. Buddha is good to me. I'm not exactly a regular practitioner but I have read into Buddhism and it gets my approval since it's based around finding your own personal happiness. No right virtues or wrong sins. Only the own person's decision and the effect afterwards. Ever seen a picture of the Dahli Llama? Ever seen a picture where he's not smiling? He smiles because he's happy. Happy with himself. How can anything like that be wrong or bad? All I know is what makes sense to me. And what makes sense to me is the thought that people should just take a step back and reevaluate things a bit more. If the end result is still the same then that's fine. I support that, like I said earlier. But something as big as where you put your life just shouldn't be short changed. I did just that at one point and decided that I was an inane little **** talking out of my ass figured I should know what I'm talking about. Keep in mind I'm still trying to learn what it is that I'm talking about so, be gentle with my hypocrisies, that is to say if I expressed any above. I was gonna try to keep it short but I don't feel like rereading this for any grammatical mistakes so please forgive my misspellings and whatnot if any.