Today mom asked me if I remained an agnostic. That is, if I still didn't believe in God. I told her I didn't really know. See, the church and I have problems. I--and my family--scrutinize the Church for their errors and hypocracy and are sickeningly annoyed by "bible thumpers". But besides that, even in my happy church-going community where the service is light and tolerable, I may seek enjoyment from it, yet still find myself in a problematic situation. I have prayed perhaps five times in my life, and I daresay I remember every prayer. Once was when my parents were on the verge of divorce, another was when I was extremely lost and depressed, a third might have been at the time of my Grandpa's death, and the last prayers were quite recent, for it has taken a long stretch of time since I have been able to bow my head and accept a higher being. I've questioned and disputed over faith for ages; I've philosophized the issue at way too young an age, which is perhaps why I am still so lost. Even if I accept God, which I think I unknowingly have, I cannot accept the way some of these churches preach about him. I guess I figure that God should be a likeable character, and the way they describe him, well it makes me sick in a sense. But that's not today's argument. What currently divides me most from the church is a simple matter of life after death. To put it plainly, I am a solid and firm believer in reincarnation. I always have been and I see it in people all the time. But Christians don't believe in that, for their afterlife is in Heaven. I think if there is a Heaven, it is a lay-over to your next life. And to be more elaborate on the subject, I'd say that two souls begin as one and after its first death, it divides, and then those souls forever feel an attachment and longing to reunite, which would explain the human need to fall in love. Now, whether or not a soul can keep dividing, I don't know. I suppose it could, but I haven't thought that far along. At any rate, I believe in reincarnation and karma, so that whatever you do in this life, carries on with you in the next one. That is not to suggest that rich people are righteous and that poor people were evil, for every life has a lesson to be learned, a point to be made, and in the rebirth of that same soul, life endures a change of thought which has propelled us for centuries in a constant vortex of change and adaptation. When I think about it long enough, I can pretty much decifer exactly who I was in past live. of course, I wouldn't share that with anyone because it's really not something I believe should be shared. But at any rate, that's my current situation with religion. I can go to church and pray without feeling blasphemous or even skeptical (I think mostly I just block the question out of my head and simply accept what I am being told) but I cannot really say I am a Christian because of that whole reincarnation thing. Or maybe I'm still quite ignorant to it all, I don't know. Someone will eventually shed a glint of truth over my eyes. .D.P. Thinker.