It would appear that some here on OPP live in a much more action packed, fiction filled world from the everyday, "Gosh, I have a pretty good life" world that MOST of us live in. It's no wonder they bay at the moon and scream, "The sky is falling"!!!!

It's a good thing drug prices are coming down because they're going to need some strong psych meds to get thru the next 5 years of "winning". The rest of us will just go about our daily routines enjoying life and all that we have. I think I'll add coloring books and crayons to my winning stock portfolio just in case their meds don't help them....

The automatic quote left out most of the post, and it's hard to reconstruct it. Rose42 was discussing God, religion, imagination, etc. with another poster.

In this post, I won't try to claim whether you know or don't know a thing. I just say: There are some things that _I_ don't know. One of them is what God is. Another is how the universe got started. I'm a good guesser though. Sometimes guessing feels about as good as knowing, if you do it right.

Science has models for reality. We (people) (including those who are scientists) don't understand _all_ about reality, but we can think up simple models that work pretty well to understand reality.

(The models are sometimes called "theories".)

The flat earth theory worked alright for a long time. Then the round earth theory worked even better. To clarify, I explain that in the round earth theory, the earth is so large that any small part of its surface works the same way as in the flat earth theory.

In another post, I've already put forth my guesses about how the universe got started. Now I want to also put forth my guesses about what God is.

In what I write, don't put too much meaning in whether I spell it as "God", or "god", or even "gods".

For me, there are at least two or three kinds of God:

There's the personal God. I'll probably never know how much of the personal God is just part of the human mind, and how much of the personal God exists independently of the human mind. I did have an experience, once, in which I felt the existence of God, and concluded that God does exist independently of the human mind. And I told myself to never forget it. I am unwilling to, and maybe incapable of, understanding more about that. Most of my ideas about God are just good guessing.

Someone, maybe you, said or indicated that humans are naturally bad. I disagree. And this is related to what sort of being we think God is.

One of the other kinds of God is the nature god. This (I say) is the god that would be involved, if a god created the universe. I don't believe "God created the universe" in the traditional sense. However, I do feel that "God and nature are the same thing" is a workable theory. For everything that happens, you can either say "God did it" or "nature did it" and it amounts to the same thing.

The other kind of god that occurs to me is the abstract god. This is a kind of supreme being, or supreme beingness. For example, whatever we imagine as the highest good, we believe that is a characteristic of the most supreme beingness, also called God.

It's possible to suppose that the personal God, the nature god, and the abstract god are all one and the same god. However, I don't think it's useful to think that way.

The personal God is a kind of friend. The nature god is a way of thinking about the universe (also called the natural world). The abstract god is a way of naming, or thinking about, what we feel is the highest good or the most important things.

The topic has come up, that there are protocols for presidential discussions with foreign entities, especially adversaries. When Trump was criticized early on for insisting on secrecy, the only defense in his favor was that Obama talked to Putin alone for a few minutes so it was okay.

There are dozens of good reasons why every minute of discussions between the president and adversarial leaders need to be 100% monitored and transcribed, which they are supposed to be. This prevents a foreign leader from claiming our president said something he did not, promises, commitments, threats, bribes, whatever, he needs witnesses.

Trump has had multiple conversations with Putin that he didn't even disclose, we have no idea what was said. Then we have found out about them through Russian press, which is Putin's propaganda machine, Putin says what he wants to say. Trump says conversations were meaningless when we find out about one, then the Russian press makes claims about conversations and involvements that are definitely more than nothing. We can assume that conversations with dictators are conversations with liars who could easily be believed to lie about what the president says. But then we have a president that quite frankly can't be believed for a second when he tries to relay his side of a conversation, which leaves us with a dire need for 100% monitored conversations.

Now we have a whistle blower complaint that is marked urgent, must be dealt with as soon as possible. National security is not a time for obstructing serious complaints that involve national security, disturbing promises made. It is ridiculous to think someone is going to jeopardize their career over something silly, and impossible to believe that the Intelligence Inspector General is going to validate something as urgent that is not. Laws are there for a reason, and those involving national security and the intelligence community are more serious than most.