If I could afford it I would live in Vancouver, and Toronto, in spite of the bleak winters, ain't too bad either (certainly better than Buffalo or Detroit).

I once had Toronto explained to me as the most "American" city in North America, in spite of all the pictures of the Queen.  It has ethnic neighborhoods, lots of immigrants and second and third generation types, subways (pretty good ones too), skyscrapers, condos, billboards, freeways, lots of cars, American English (I can't tell the difference), and largely American labor and business cultures.  Canada doesn't seem to have as all the guns, including Toronto.

I think the problem of God and suffering goes deeper than just our ignorance of God's purposes.  Regardless of God's purposes, when you are an ethical God, the end never justifies the means, and if you are all powerful, then this God can accomplish his ends regardless, and does not need to resort to unethical things such as permitting suffering.

Rebirth (the Buddhist and Hindu word for what in the West is often called "reincarnation") would not, it seems to me, provide a way to grow unless there is good memory of past lives, which manifestly there is not.  Both Hindus and Buddhists agree it is a manifestation of the immortality of the life spirit, but they disagree on whether it is a form of immortality of the person.  Hindus, if I understand correctly, do, but Buddhists do not.  The process of Samsara (birth, life, death, rebirth, over and over) is seen by Buddhists as at best a trap wherein one is condemned by the natural force known as karma combined with our instinctual desire to live (animal grasping onto life), to be born over and over in one life after another, sometimes for the better, sometimes not, but all including large dollops of suffering.

The idea in Theravada Buddhism, though, is that the new baby is not the person who died, but just the life spirit, with few if any past memories, just the karmic status.  The new baby has its own genes and its own life experiences and is in fact a new person.  When one dies one is dead, nothing lasts forever.

I don't know and don't venture to guess whether this view reflects reality or not (at best any such picture could only be a reflection).  Instead, while I can see where evolution fits within such a picture much better than the Wester theist ideas, I can also see where it is more likely these ideas of afterlife derive from wishful thinking and the reality is much more bleak and we live in a universe that happened entirely by natural processes without any purpose.  The first goal of wisdom is to learn to accept the universe as we find it, not as we would like it to be.

Did God use evolution to create?

No one can deny this as a possibility, but to be an acceptable scientific theory one need to apply a little more rigor -- like by thinking through the logical implications of what we should see in the fossil record is 

God used natural processes such as those of evolution to do his creation.

First, though, let me point out that the idea that God used evolution removes the need for God, and makes him an unnecessary complication in evolutionary theory, and therefore a violation of the scientific rule of avoiding the addition of unnecessary complications.

How could we tell the difference between a fully "natural" process and one that happens under divine direction?  

One might be with the demonstration of something that happened in the history of life that could not possibly have happened naturally.  Many possible such events suggest themselves, but there is always the problem that simply because we don't know exactly what happened does not mean it did not happen naturally.   The evolution of flight or of the eye have been in the past mentioned as such events, but now the evolution of these things is well understood.  In other words, such an approach raises the danger of resort to the "God of the gaps," resorting to God when all that really can be said is, "We don't know." It is like those who resort to alien visits to "explain" UFOs.  

More important, there is the problem that the history of life looks for all the world like a sequence of chance events that after many slips and falls finally resulted in us.  (This is looking at it from the normal creationist anthro-chauvinist perspective.)  Life is a history of extinctions, mainly, with few species having living progeny.  Such imperfection does not fit well with God's perfection, although of  course the problem can be rationalized.

The biggest problem I have is that involving God achieves nothing to help the biologist, and is in fact merely a sop to traditional ideas that date from pre-scientific times.

Nausea.  That's the word, nausea.
Trump, Putin, Syria, nausea.

Contaminating Mars

Should we find traces of life on Mars of a significantly different sort from what we have here, that will be the really important thing, because two occurrences of independent life origination would indicate life is common everywhere.  The coincidence would otherwise be huge.

However, if what we find uses DNA or even the RNA code or is otherwise like us, then we will have issues to sort out  before reaching conclusions.

It is entirely possible that life evolved first on Mars, as Mars would have reached inhabitable status sooner than the earth, being smaller and cooler, and then got transported to the earth via meteors.

I think that unlikely and that it is more likely that there never was life on Mars and life originated on Earth.

Still, if we find traces of life on Mars, we want to be able to say which was the case.  If the life is very much like the life on Earth, does that tell us the first scenario (above) is true or that we managed to contaminate the traces or perhaps we can expect life everywhere to use the same chemistry?  I would think it extremely important that every precaution against contamination be taken.

Am I happy?  No.
Am I unhappy? No.
I just am, and that is enough.

How is it that mankind came to the idea of God?  I think I would like to speculate, with the understanding that whatever it was it happened in prehistory so there is no way we can really know.

I don't buy the "awe" theory nor the "seeking for explanations" theory.  I think these entered the story after the fact.

When we are in high school biology, the second or third chapter of our textbook tries to define what "life" is, and draws the distinction between life and non-life.  This is so ingrained into our culture that we take it for granted.  But it is a scientific observation, and prior to the eighteenth and nineteenth century the line was nowhere near so clear, so we had maggots appearing from non-life spontaneously, and so on.

Of course, we are also more than just "alive." We are also sentient (experience rather than just detect and measure) the outside world and our insides (sensations such as hunger), and, further, we experience feelings and desires (often driven by instincts, such as fear or anger).  Beyond being sentient, we are also conscious -- we "know" we exist and we know what we sense and we can infer all sorts of things.

We also assume pretty much automatically that everyone we know is similar to us, being alive, sentient, and conscious.  Why should we not draw a similar conclusion about the external world?  Why should we not just assume that other animals, and things like mountains and rivers and trees and forests and clouds and so on are like us?  To be sure they look different, and generally don't behave as humans do, but then each person is different too.

So, it would seem to me it behooves me, at a minimum, to try to get along with all these living, sentient, conscious things in our environment.  We have behaviors that indicate politeness, so be polite to the big tree and greet it properly, and when you kill an animal, ask its spirit for forgiveness.  Just as other humans we hurt can get revenge, the mountain may do so also (in it's mountain way) if we insult it or neglect it.  It may be slow witted, and may be very patient, but, regardless, it is in our interest to try to get along.

There is a passage in Cato's ancient book on agriculture about what to do if you have to remove a stand of trees -- it is important that the spirit or spirits of that stand be propitiated and taken care of.  For this he describes a set of rituals.

Now the Romans were not animists in the more "primitive" sort of way -- they had an organized pantheon of deities, but they also still had this assumption that there is consciousness out there other than just in ourselves.  A pantheon of deities with specialties would, with this frame of mind, arrive quite soon in human development -- things like the sky, the weather, the oceans, and so on, are universal and not local, and would naturally be seen to be far more important than the spirits of a stand of trees.

Then there would be speculation about where all this consciousness comes from, and inevitably the more introspective would consider a single "high god," not part of the world but its creator or sustainer.  In short, from the very first, human religion would be animist, "pagan," and monotheistic going in.  

My bedroom is cool, dark, and quiet
My bladder is well behaved
I do not snore or even breathe with any difficulty
I sleep well

Happiness from stupidity and delusion

Life is a prison.  Some of the bars are gravity, time (mainly aging), space, instincts, needs, sensations, past experiences, beliefs, the language we happen to be native to, our culture, our desires, brain chemicals, buzzing flies.

One does not escape most of these, and can only learn to handle and manage some of them, and even then happiness is not a reachable goal, only acceptance.  I think to be happy one must be both stupid and highly deluded.

Over a week and no rain
I can see the tops of the rocks at the bottom of the cistern
The crops are dying and the trees are stressed
Things are going to have to change

Blood and pork as food

I always kinda wondered what a herd of swine was doing in Nazareth.  I tend to see this as evidence the Gospel was written by a Greek who had only a fleeting knowledge of Palestine and its customs.  A herd of swine would have caused a riot.  Of course at that time "Nazareth" didn't exist anyway.

Religions have a tendency to make rules for the followers.  This serves a useful purpose in separating out the "true" believers from everyone else, and thereby gives the followers an excuse to feel superior to everyone else.  Food rules, what one wears, funerary customs, holidays, and on and on are of this sort.
Christians, for example, can eat pork, but cannot eat blood (two of the Jewish dietary restrictions, one of which got abandoned and the other maintained).  (Someone correct me if I'm wrong but I think for some reason the Scots do consume blood products).  Of course it is impossible to avoid eating blood if one eats any meat, but this is justified by means of some pretty slaughtering rules (and cruel ones, at least in Muslim societies).

Neither pork nor blood is terribly good for adult males and women after menopause (but, then, again, neither is beef or whole milk), as they raise cholesterol and iron levels, but excellent food for children and anyone iron deficient.   Pork is about the best natural source of B-12 in our diet, and vegetarians should consider a supplement.

I think people migrating to new countries should, "Do as the Romans do," and not try to make themselves out as different in public ways.  It just generates bad feelings and mistrust all around, and is really quite arrogant and stupid.  What one does in private is of course different, and I don't think it a good idea for politicians to get involved, nor the law, if one pretends one has a free, secular, society.