Thank you for a thoughtful response. I'll keep that in mind as my kids get closer to moving off to college and I'm left home alone. As for agnostic, that may be technically true of me, but practically speaking not so.  If you spend forty years searching for elephants in Colorado and never see one nor find evidence they live there, it is safe to say they don't exist there.  (That is not my analogy, but I don't remember who came up with it.) The universe makes more sense to me, and seems to operate, as if there were no God interested in us or our affairs. It is long past time to move on and deal with that reality.