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Hmm...there are a few things on my mind.

The first being the apparent "randomness" that fuels creation and how it contrasted with the examples of creation myths put up on the website. I realize we have a tendency to "humanize" creation, because perhaps the only creation we truly understand is our own. A teacher in high school told me a saying that goes something like (and I'm paraphrasing here 'cause I can't remember exactly) "desire keeps the world going". At the time, it seemed pretty fair. Without desire, how could we have created buildings, technology, or even eat (and as an extension of that, live)?

Last week's discussion altered my view on the quote. Maybe human desire motivates only human creation/change, which is just a small piece of the entire world.

So how does that change how I think about things? I'd like to think that there was a *reason* that everything happened as it did, rather than the result of randomness. We learn a lot about cause and effect in history, the why's and how's. But this seems to have an effect without a real cause we relate to.

So maybe it is all random. And it all happened by chance. But we are conscious beings. It's what separates us from animals. Was this "event" (our slow gaining of consciousness) simply random? What if turtles had been in the right environmental conditions, could they have been the ones with consciousness? Why did we develop this ability? Does that mean anything?

I'm taking archaeology right now and it seems one of the greatest debates of the field is to use the excavated remains to discover how we, as humans, became a society. Essentially, to answer all the questions I just asked. It appears that our brains grew progressively more complex over time in order to create the society we live in. It had to, didn't it? Was it random events that forced (motivated?) us to start farming, thus giving us the time and ability to worship? (Considered a "push" theory.) Or did we somehow develop this desire (there's that word again) on our own? (Since we now needed the time for more art and activities, we began to farm. A "pull" theory.)

Something happened that caused our brains to gain consciousness. And we still don't know exactly what that is. That seems like the next big question.

Okay, I think that's all I got for now. The conversations have been really interesting and have given me a lot to think about.