I’m a believer sometimes and in some ways, nonbeliever in others, existentialist in feeling responsible for my acts with the dread and anguish that responsibility sometimes brings, moral sometimes and in some ways, amoral in others. Another way of saying I’m wishy-washy, changeable, and justified therein by virtue of womanhood? Every issue is like a new day for me, even if it’s been hashed over for centuries. My day is ending while yours begins, a result of our positions on the globe, and its position relative to the sun. My yours reveal some new slant or freedom from a new slant, maybe the knitting of an ancient culture into your own.

By all means, hop on the soapbox. By the way, please vote. 10 means you want me for President, 9 and below mean you're for those bums, Bush or Kerry.

While this is true for those religions that send unbelievers to hell, I was referring to the comfort of knowing your loved ones are safe and alive and that you will be reunited with them. I would like that comfort, but know I cannot have it.

And you shall become Prince of Voided Bushes.

zodiac,

In answer to your first paragraph, comfort is, I believe, the primary benefit religion gives to believers. If they truly believe, they have more comfort in times of bereavement and sickness than I do while contending with my unanswered questions.

In your second paragraph, I think you miss the meaning of “Discrepancies are expunged for them by faith.” When I mention to a religious person some discrepancy about heaven or about God’s personal caring for their condition, the usual response is that God is greater than our feeble understanding of these things, and they will trust Him even while not understanding.

Your third paragraph introduces the restraint people have on killing each other, a topic not much related to the above. DA’s “innate sense of guilt” argument makes sense here. Religion can go either way on this. It might, as you say, restrain those who would otherwise kill you or take your wife. But it could in other times and conditions encourage killing, such as in the Crusades or recently in the Iraqi resistance, or within Al Kaida.

You and I abstain from “lewds” as DA calls them, “for perfectly sensible reasons” most of the time. I wonder how well those reasons would have held up in some of the historical settings where religion has held groups of believers together in winning good causes against enemies who claimed to be reasonable.

Thank you, Sir. May you live long and thrive, and enjoy a lucrative position on the Board for Controlled Ingenuity.

I, Dovina, have personally approved this message.

As you finish the bottle, drunk, you see the devil, and what was yours is now his. You decide you have made all the wrong choices and will be denied heaven. It's a workable theme, but I don't see it developed, no reasons given.

There is a suggestion to that effect on the Suggestions tab. Why don't you comment on it there?

When she thought of leaving flowers or saying a prayer at those tombstones, the idea fell cold compared to her memory of an old couple who loved and taught her to love and who might appreciate the risqué act at midnight as the perfect projection of their lives into the present.

I think the suggestion of Dan garcia Black, "They paid their respects," is a better way of saying they had sex.

You're not advocating suicide again are you? I hope not, because if you are, there's a host of considerations besides "I want to die," and to not even mention them is to degrade the subject to mundane jibborish.

Although my thinking seems excellent sometimes, it will likely change, possibly turning today’s excellence into tomorrow’s foolishness.