[TheRaisin]

Oh, I'm sure they're dead serious.

Atheism isn't a religion.

I don't find the God Version of Creation particularly far-fetched in itself, I find most concepts of what God is and most religious beliefs far-fetched. I believe in science, though, so I am a supporter of the Big Bang theory. If that makes any sense at all. Probably not. Oh well.

To me, the word "immoral" suggests that something in some way hurts other people. Like, it's immoral to sell your multi-billion dollar corporation off and fire all your employees. Homosexuality doesn't hurt anyone, therefore I don't consider it immoral.

As for the naturality of homosexuality, I don't really have any proof either way. The one thing I go by is people who hate themselves for being what they are. Either they subconsciously choose homosexuality because they want to hate themselves (this would involve one of those complex psychological explanations), or it's beyond their control. The latter seems the simpler of the two, so I assume it is correct.

The Buddha. . . what a great dude. I could probably do Buddhism but for two things: 1) I'm American-- love of the material has been instilled in me since day one, and 2) the whole abstinence thing. I'm a little odd in my thinking about that. I think lust is bad to give in to, but I don't believe in total sexual repression. I think a balance of sentient thought and animal instinct is necessary to live neither as a savage nor as an animal that lies to itself for the sake of feeling special.

Shintoism, I think, sounds awesome. From what I've heard of it, it's basically small god worship. Like, spirits of the land worship. Sort of nymph-like deities, if you will. Worship of things neither here nor there. I've probably read way too many fantasy novels about tapping the mana of the land and using magic and whatnot.

Speaking of which, if anyone is interested in the whole "spirits of the land" sort of thing, I highly recommend the book "Found". It starts off like some kind of boring survival novel, but it quickly becomes deeply supernatural in. . . nature. It's set in the Scottish moorlands or someplace like that, and there are all these ancient ghosts and things haunting the place and it's just spooky as hell. But it's also about these two abandoned children born into a society in the future with no room for them and they find an abandoned infant and have to survive and learn to deal with each other and assume the roles of mother and father and take care of it/him/her (forgot the gender, not important anyway). Anyway, it's cool.

And I'm done. This took a while.