I found this quote and thought...

"Omnipotence contradicts omniscience. To be omniscient means that all future facts are known. This means that the set of knowable facts is fixed and unchangeable. If facts cannot be changed, then this limits the power of God. If God knows what will happen tomorrow, then he is impotent to change it. If he changes it anyway, then he was not omniscient."
- Dan Barker

I think it sounds like a very covincing reason to lose faith in dieties. However, that does also nullify the truly beneficial aspects of faith and any code of conduct that revolves around any given diety. Not to mention the mind over matter aspect of belief in anything. Without religion modern society would have taken so much longer to achieve in my opinion. Even though I also believe that we are in the process of evolving out of organized religion, with its pitfalls of excessive power in the hands of the corrupt, and into a more personalized spirituality. The proof is everywhere that any form of religious freedom is present. Even in places that force a religious belief, there are "underground" spiritual groups operating, or infiltrating from the outside world. I mean face it, the smaller the world gets, the more we mix it up. Then in just a few short years everyone in a given area is just used to what ever there is around them. That is what people do. They adapt to their environment, then begin adapting it to themselves.

The mixing of cultures is, I believe, a major influence in the advancment of humanity as a whole if you think of it from a genetic standpoint. All of those secluded cultures were basically "inbred" in their locations. Once say spanish and indians met, which always includes mating when talking about humans, two vastly separated genetic lines were merged. This has now happened with nearly every single group of humans on the face of this planet. Now we will go into space with our new found vigor.

Then of course the same thing will happen with distant planets. Centuries will pass and an "inbreeding" will occur upon individual planets. But soon enough faster travel, and communications will come along and the galaxy will get small again. Then the entire process will repeat on a larger scale.

Of course discovering faster than light travel and/or communications will skip that step all together. However, it may prove that we "need" that genetic disversification to jump to the next genetic level. It could give us time to build up the stronger characteristics in every group in order to form a "hybrid" when we finally mix it up again.

After all is said and done, belief in yourself is the most important thing you can learn in my opinion.

I believe this has always been the way.

-Nathan Wandrey 051027