"Case in point...my dingbat brother-in-law jokingly kept telling his kids that Santa was Jesus' uncle. That sounded cute, but when the time came to reveal that Santa was a myth, the kids had a hard time decoupling Santa from Jesus."

Sounds like a great way to make kids understand Jesus is a myth.

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Most children are told the truth about Santa, if they have not already deduced it for themselves, before they are old enough to distinguish significant differences better the Jolly Old Elf and the Son of God.

Perhaps if they were not, perhaps if they were encouraged to continue to believe in Santa long after the stories made any further sense to them, those same children would have a better chance of determining for themselves how preposterous BOTH characters really are.

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So -- correct me if I am misunderstanding this -- your proof of a Creator lies in the fact that we, as humans, have not equalled his creation?

I'm still failing to grasp how someone can say, "I don't understand how this happened--therefore, God did it." A being that no one has ever seen using some method beyond our understanding created everything? How is that an explanation? Using a mystery to explain a mystery?

If complexity requires a creator, then the creator itself must also then require a creator, and so on and so on.

I like the idea of a higher power but I can't understand the level that people let that belief "Take the wheel" of their life.

Is it really that hard to understand? People want to belong to the group, religions are some of the biggest most popular groups. You don't join a group and tell them they all have to change to suit your different view of things, it's much easier to exclude you from the group. "God" is cited as the reason but really it's just group mentality. Is it any wonder those considered "evil" by religions also just happen to be the natural minority in populations, and their solution for them to be "good" is to change to fit the majority. Christianity is weird in that Jesus spends the majority of the New Testament telling people it's OK to accept "sinners" (those on the fringes of Jewish society, and following him will make them a fringe group too) and many Christians (once they were the majority) just reverted to excluding people again. It seems almost ingrained in us to exclude people who don't want to be like "us". (just go through some threads on this forum)

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Why should it NOT form an information code?

Again, you are looking at the Universe as it exists, and assuming that is the only possible form -- therefore there must be a Creator. But the Universe is merely what happened this time. Maybe this was the only time, maybe the latest in an infinite string of times that stretch off forever in all directions and dimensions.

After all, as far as we are concerned, this extraordinary unlikely thing only needs to have happened ONCE.

In the end, God is about ego -- human ego. We need God to give us importance in the Universe. Here we are, little lumps of protoplasm swimming around in a biological film that happens to coat a lump of rock circling a particularly unprepossessing star in a galaxy that is not at all special, in a Universe filled with (at least) hundreds of billions of such galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars. It's like the ultimate punishment device in THE HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY -- a booth into which the victim is placed, and within which s/he is made instantly aware of the full scope of the cosmos, whereupon an infinitesimally small DOT appears, with the marker YOU ARE HERE.

God makes us IMPORTANT. God makes us actually what the whole Universe is ABOUT. We invent God to give us a sense of importance, and then some of us seize the concept to give themselves an even GREATER sense of importance. They make themselves priests and rabbis and other such keepers of the faith. And every once in a while they grab some big swords and go out and slaughter the people who are keeping the WRONG faith. Or they get slaughtered themselves, which serves only to convince the wrong thinkers that they are RIGHT thinkers.

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It takes more faith to believe what has been shown to be true, than to believe fairy tales. Incredible!