Re: Cattle mutilations, UFOs, and views of the Universe: On the cattle I have no real opinion, apart from wondering why the aliens would care to mutilate so many of them. If they're advanced enough to get to Earth, the biology of a cow should be something they could figure out with a couple of carcasses, so probably not them doing research. If they're sucking blood, I don't see why one couldn't as easily say vampires, though I can more readily imagine other life in the universe than vampires existing since whenever on Earth. Unless they're really evolved mosquitoes.
Someone's already shown how the crop circles can be made without tracks leading away; probably a society of mischievous Engineering students.
UFOs I don't worry about so much one way or the other; I reckon we've got enough to worry about with humans and natural disasters and rent and stuff. I did see some lights once at twilight I couldn't explain, so I did some Googling and matched what I saw with various explicable light formations in the sky, and one matched perfectly. So I take no stand on UFOs apart from thinking most reports are explicable by non-alien phenomena. I think aliens could exist, given the size of the Universe, but if they're really experimenting on us, they seem to be taking their sweet time about it. I mean, honestly, we're just diabolically clever apes, and even we puny humans have more or less gotten the gist of apes. And why bring people back and re-abduct them? Why not just keep them? People go missing all the time, and the people looking for them don't usually accuse aliens first, so the aliens could pretty much keep their subjects if they wanted to. Hell, they could just come clean - they'd probably get people volunteering, or donating other people just to get rid of them. But I don't completely dismiss the idea of UFOs, it's just not something I think about much or worry about at all.
Re: Inter-dimensional beings - no way to really know for sure about other dimensions, physically too large a question for science to test in any rigorous way, though of course Quantum Physics has some theoretical physicists who posit other dimensions/parallel universes, etc. If they're advanced beings, though, they probably wouldn't need to pick and probe at individual humans, IMHO.
Re: Gods vs. dust in the wind (dude), I was raised RC, and though I left, it's hard to completely shake a sense of incompleteness without some form of spirituality, though I do believe most holy books are largely symbolic and you're really not gonna improve much on Taoism. Atheist, agnostic, or otherwise, Infinity seems pretty much a given; and immortality exists at least insofar as we are made of energy and energy cannot be destroyed, only transformed. Whether what it transforms into is also conscious is up for grabs and can't be proven. Something had to go bang for the big bang, and that little something may have just popped into existence like a rogue electron, but it had to have popped into somewhere. Whether the Universe had consciousness in its infancy, nobody knows. Perhaps it evolved consciousness, but as we are in fact part of what is all one thing, and are conscious, the universe has consciousness now at least insofar as we (and other creatures) do. That does not mean it understands itself or consciously controls the evolution of anything, however, any more than we consciously control our bodies' autonomic systems.
I have my own made-up theology, which I call a placebo - I don't need to fully believe it's true; placebos work, it's been proven, often even in cases where the subject doesn't fully believe in the placebo but tells themselves they do. It's mostly just to help me stay calm and carry on. I'm pretty cool with what anyone wants to believe as long as they don't use their belief to abuse others or trample on the freedoms of those who don't believe what they do. Cults are another matter. There's a famous one in the US and beyond- which shall remain nameless because they love lawsuits, but I'm sure you all know who I mean, and they are greed and evil incarnate.
