Suppose there is another, possibly higher, form of life out there in the universe? - There could be, probably is. Would they be loved (by God) more than us? Would they regard
us as we now regard chimps, dogs, porpoises or even insects? It’s a bit of a cheek to suppose that God would give preference to this planet.

To borrow from Plato, I view God as "a rational essence, a free-floating, eternal intelligence". I cannot envisage God as a Caucasian man with a long white beard, up in the sky somewhere anymore than as a black woman.
All life on this planet had a common source and it would seem to me to be somewhat arrogant to claim that God resembles or is in the form of our particular species.

Personally, I do not think that God, as a cosmic intelligence, would give individual attention to any race of people let alone an individual. That is only a personal feeling. I am no more likely to be right than anyone else as I have no hot-line to heaven. Neither have the Pope nor the Chief Rabbi let alone Abu Hamza.

It’s a fact, though, that my prayers often have an adverse effect.

I did 3 years of philosophy at the LSE, many moons ago, together with logic and semantics. It helps clear the mind; so do a couple of glasses of red wine.

My father was headmaster of a C.of.E school and I was indoctrinated in that environment - church 3 times on a Sunday. In my late teens, I began to see through the posturing and woolly-mindedness of some of the clergy and lay-persons and thought I would switch to a more disciplined church so joined the R.C.s and underwent 6 months training in theology but left a severely rattled tutor-priest as I could not accept and questioned in depth some of the dogma (on sex, divorce, birth control etc. ( St Paul’s doctrine, not Jesus’s) and was not prepared to say I believed in order to be admitted. In fact, on leaving, I bet the tutor priest £5 (a lot then) that within 50 years the RC Church would have to change tack on a lot of issues. Pity I lost touch with him - he would, in any case, be about 150 years old by now - as I would have won the bet. No one noticed the changes, as it was done imperceptibly, but change it did. Much more tolerant today. The last Pope Paul even discussed the probability of bringing back divorcees as communicants and condoning condoms to combat H.I.V.

I realised when studying theology that what has been passed on through the generations, from a very primitive age, has changed greatly - mostly for political reasons. All religions today differ greatly from what they preached only 50 years ago, let alone 2000 years. Many ideologies arose from economic or political concepts that were incorporated into religion as a means of getting the people to follow without questioning, or because something was known but not why. All seemed based on the fear of reprisal and/or punishment. What the church advocated during the Albigensian Crusades makes Al Quaeda and the Taliban seem very tame stuff.

About 5000 years ago it was almost suicidal to eat pork due to the parasites the meat contained. People then had no knowledge whatsoever of liver fluke, bacterium etc so the powers that be in the Middle East declared it to be "unclean" and made a religious issue of it. The condition no longer applies today but the belief persists as do many others. Hindus and other Indian tribes regard the cow as holy. Must find out why. Perhaps in the mists of antiquity some rich rajah or, more likely, a wealthy cleric declared it such in order to stop the hungry hordes from illicit barbecues?