Without a doubt. I believe in a higher power.

Patric - "I look forward to the epoch of accepting others personal subjective spirituality, but I think I may have been born a century too early...
oh well!"

All you have to do is start accepting others' personal subjective spirituality. Can you also accept others that don't have what you consider personal subjective "spirituality" or do you feel the need to impose your beliefs upon others?

I have no problem accepting people's personal experiences and beliefs as personal, subjective experiences and beliefs...after all, I cannot know another's experiences, they obviously have that experience and the story they tell themselves about it obviously has meaning or helps them to make sense of the world. However, I don't consider someone's personal subjective beliefs as objective fact or anything more than personal subjective experiences - and that includes my own subjective experiences. Sadly, quite a lot of people who have personal subjective experiences and beliefs they label as "spiritual" seem to require others also believe their personal subjective experiences are objective fact (not subjective experience) and get evangelical and hostile about it. The question is, why do some people need to so desperately impose their personal subjective spirituality on others if it's personal and subjective? Why can't they allow others to believe differently from them and accept that we don't all personally and subjectively experience the world in the same way? And why do so many mistake their personal subjective spiritual experiences and/or beliefs for global objective reality?

And, no, I don't believe in god or gods. However, all the stories us humans tell ourselves about nature (where we anthropmorphise nature) are interesting, if only for what they reveal about us as humans and storytelling. (Just as the stories we tell ourselves reveal things about us and our perspective on the world and others.) One can have ecstatic experiences of union and all kinds of peak experiences without attributing them to god or spirituality (I consider these kinds of experiences human experiences not divine, they don't require faith or a belief in god or gods). Also, not everyone needs a creation myth. Some of us are quite okay with not knowing, uncertainty and exploring possibilities rather than needing to make up something - anything! - to fill in the gaps. Not all of us need a god of the gaps to feel secure or need to believe there's more to life than life and living one's life in the here and now. The world is a rich and diverse place and people are equally rich, interesting and diverse. As long as people aren't trying to impose their personal subjective spirituality on me, or assert their subjectivity is universal and objective, I take no issue with them and very much enjoy hearing about their experiences and the stories around them they've either adopted or created :-)

Sounds like Xenu is not what you'd call a happy-camper God.

I guess it's no wonder that, if we were to posit the existence of Gods whose powers dwarf normal human abilities, what we'd imagine we ourselves would DO with such powers would fall in line with our own normal human desires. L. Ron was a sci-fi writer, and a pretty successful one at that, so it's no wonder that his Gods show up ballooning atomic blasts out of volcanic craters (even if those Gods come from traumatic memories from 75 million years ago).

Our own imagining of meta human powers lead to comic books and TV shows and movies, but it seems like the basic struggle of our superheroes or Gods aren't much different than our own normal human ones, and its not often that the struggling leads to anything more noble.

'ensure', not 'endure'. Time to trim the nails.

It would be cool if fairies were real. And ents. Of course, the world and plants are pretty cool without having to anthropomorphize them anyway so I don't feel too sad about fairies living only in imagination. Imagination is pretty damn cool too.

Love Terry Pratchett