If God wanted something to happen in our lives then it would, right? So the effort we put into our goals is only possible to a certain extent -- or so we may think.

There are different ways of experiencing things. I tend to focus more on what I conceive as the difference between things, instead of how the same things can be experienced in different ways.

Nothing is the positive yet indeterminate impression on the horizon, just before becoming something definite. It is nothing and it is not-nothing. Together with the present, it is the future and it is the past.

Whether we can have meaning and purpose in life really isn't a religious/secular debate. All reflective people can find important and meanings and purposes.

All religions may well be ultimately the same, Prothero's book notwithstanding -- systems of practices and beliefs that share many of the same attributes and values, including, perhaps ironically, that of not being literally true.