Thanks for the response. Benjamin. As for the issue of tone, I notice that I am not the only one to comment on your often disrespectful, dismissive and "I'm a lot smarter than you" tone. Even those who really support what you have to say have frequently commented on how the way you communicate can hinder your message. I have a question: do you think that you are a lot smarter and better educated than Christian believers like me and Dan Foster? If you are honest, I think you would agree that you are. Maybe you are. But it doesn't help the discussion when you communicate that sense in your writing.

You describe your view as pragmatic, pantheistic, existentialist and cosmicist. This is helpful because, I have commented before, it is easier to find fault with the belief of others than to defend one's own. We've tangled a bit before on some of these issues but I don't know how you can conclude that a monstrous, self-organizing, absurd universe can produce a working brain and minds. Could you explain? The ideas of self-organization and emergence, even in the words of one of these ideas' greatest proponent, Stuart Kauffman, amount to what he called "natural magic." You suggest that it is a mystery, a horrifying one at that. I've written before that one key distinction seems to be whether people see the universe as essentially or inherently bad, or good. Your terms suggest you see it as bad. There's a lot of badness to focus on, for sure. But, I hope you can see the goodness in it as well, the fundamental goodness, and then start to ask where that might come from.