Did you watch the Super Bowl?  I watched the first half, Rhianna's half time show, and the closing moments of the game.  Millions of other people, however, watched the entire game, all four+ hours of it.

    I often wonder what our many animal friends think about the sight of that many people glued to their television sets for over four hours, eating, talking, laughing.  Whatever are those human beings doing?

    Simply being, I guess, human beings, magnificent, glorious, frail, intelligent, self-conscious and incomplete sentient beings availing themselves of the only existence they will ever have on this planet.

    Therein lies the puzzle.  Where else will we find such an intriguing combination of will, tenuousness, folly, and determination?  Is this God's intention or is this evolution's result?  Either way, it's nothing anyone could have predicted:  life's essence eludes us unless we understand why it is.

    And to deny that we need to know why life is, is, it seems to me, as big a crutch as an unbeliever might say about the nature of faith.  We will never escape our need to know.  So did British philosopher Iris Murdoch observe that, "It is a task to come to see the world as it is."