Stephen Hawking upset a lot of religious folk this week when he declared that God was unnecessary for the creation of the universe.  This has been taken by many as a statement that God does not exist.

I was raised in a religious family, but I have never been particularly under the impression that any divinity was required for existence.  One can accept that scientific principles rule the physical world and still believe in God.  If nothing else, one might believe that the scientific principles which Hawking believes so strongly in were themselves put into place by God.

If you insist that God be scientifically proven, you're going to be disappointed.  But it is not in the nature of all things to have scientific proof.

"The Bill of Rights has a parallel with pregnancy. You can't be a little pregnant, and you can't be a little free. Nor can you serve yourself from it cafeteria style. "

For more, check out Roger Ebert's editorial 10 Things I know about the Mosque.

So speak of your god of love, or your god of hate, your spirits of the world, gods who do not care, Erisian discords, alien Elohim, elementals, thetans, chakras, power crystals, militant atheism, doubting agnosticism, ancestral ghosts, sacred geometry, and the Loch Ness Monster. If you find god resides in your Sketcher Shape-Ups, more power to you.

I cannot possibly expect people to respect my choice of beliefs if I do not extend at least a basic courtesy to others.

I gave up thinking of my country, the United States as particularly progressive some years ago.  Today I found one more reason to discount that claim:  South Africa has a Wiccan member of Parliament.

Just for the record, the number of Wiccan members of the US Congress is zero. No member of the US House of Representatives nor the US Senate identifies himself as any form of neopagan. Wikipedia gives a neat breakdown of the current religious demographics.

This is a guy after my own heart. He does not use the word "witch" or "witchcraft" to describe his beliefs, precisely because he understands what those words mean in his country. "In South Africa, a witch is someone who comes into your house, kills your children and cuts off their genitalia." That is a witch. Thus, it would be foolish to call himself one, as that clearly is not what he does.

And I love his final quote in the article: "I just think it's very arrogant of white pagans in South Africa to push for rights they know will be detrimental to the majority. It would be ideal if we could change the perception of what witchcraft is."

At the beginning of this month I posted the article The Devil Made Me Do It, concerning a man on trial for murdering his wife, which he claims he did while being possessed.

A reader asked if I was actually suggesting that there might be merit in the man's claims. My answer was essentially that my opinion had no relevance on the issue.

Religion is problematic to write about precisely because much of what religious people believe cannot be proven, although they themselves may have very good reason for believing. We call those reasons "unverifiable personal gnosis." It's personal knowledge that cannot be proved to others. I believe in my gods, for example, because I have experienced their presence. I can't prove that to anyone, and MY experiences are, quite frankly, a poor reason for someone else to believe in them.

There are things I specifically believe in. There are things I specifically do not believe in. There's a also a whole lot of things that I say I believe in the possibility of. For example, I believe it is possible that there is alien life in the universe. I've seen no proof of their existence, but their potential existence is at least logical to me.

I deal with people espousing a VERY wide range of beliefs: monotheism, polytheism, atheism, many gods manifesting as aspects of a single god, spirits, angels, demons, magic, power crystals, aliens, ghosts, alchemy, prophecy, possession, divination, creation, evolution, intelligent design, e-meters, thetans, souls, engrams, miracles, hypnotism, past life regression, etc.

I have a wide variety of opinions on a wide variety of things. But those opinions are frequently just that: opinions. One of the reasons I left monotheism was the suggestion that one group was correct about the divine, and every other culture in all of history was wrong. That seemed, to me, improbable.

But that, too, is an opinion.

I certainly hope my opinions bear some resemblance to reality. But they are certainly not perfect. So when I write about Jan David Clark murdering his wife while being possessed by the devil, my personal opinion about demonic possession really has no relevance. The world is full of possibilities.