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“God isn’t a superior hypothesis or a better idea – (seeking/experiencing) God is an entirely different orientation to existence. God isn’t a thing, a being, or any other phenomena. God is like a shorthand for discussing the totality encompassing existence, its sustaining power and source.”

“That is, the difference between a world with God or without is whether you expect to find God or not.”

I’m sorry, but these thoughts express exactly nothing relevant to the debate over God’s existence. Furthermore, they miss the atheist’s point completely, and betray a lack of understanding of the issue at hand. Essentially, all you have said in your lengthy post is that God is all in our minds. He’s but an anthropomorphism, a simple metaphor for the “totality” of existence. As an atheist, I dare say that I agree with you; if indeed he is anything at all, he is that.
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Response: No, that is not the essence of what I have said, it is your interpretation of what I have said based I would assume on the cosmology you employ and the categories it contains. I did not say God is all in our minds, nor would I. But let’s pause and reflect on the fact that all experiences we have, that is, all phenomena we counter, must be filtered and reduced to a form that can be detected by our limited sense organs during our brief life spans on this planet and that conforms to the wiring of our brain, to the deep latent expectations we possess that have been shaped by our cultural and personal background, and to our particular disposition at the present time. In that sense, every single thing we know is “all in our minds”, because we cannot experience them otherwise. Everything we think is real is, in fact, a shadow of its true nature, an artificial construct that has been translated into a form we can appreciate inside our skulls. That does not mean, however, that these things exist *solely* in the mind. Moreover, I do think these are pertinent issues, as I am getting at what we might mean we discuss God and the idea of existence. I do not see how they are irrelevant to discussions of atheism.

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However, the whole issue is (for most people, and maybe for atheists especially) whether anything that might be called “God” exists in reality. From your second quote above, I have doubts whether you can even bring yourself to believe in an objective reality, let alone a God outside of your own mind. Expectations do shape perception, but they don’t poof gods into and out of existence.
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Response: I do believe that God is real, or to use your terms, that something called God exists in reality. But I am careful in how I choose my words. I think that the words “belief” and “God” have acquired lots of baggage that can lead people to misconstrue a statement such as “I believe in God.” I never claimed expectations made God exist or fail to exist, in fact quite the opposite. But, as I’ve reiterated, we live in virtual world in our minds, based on a limited and biased set of input. Expectations are essential here, because every one of us tends to “see” what we expect to see and give meaning to our experiences based on how we think the world works. We tend to ignore or explain away incongruous input, often times at a subconscious level. Thus we prune the world, making it into our own image. This is certainly relevant to discussions over the reality of God. If we take such concerns seriously it also forces us to ask, “Where are our blind spots?” This means asking, for example, not just how we define God, but what shapes the nature of how we can define God, that is, what limits our basic assumptions about the world will have on what kind of definitions are sensible, let alone what we would consider possible. It is why, for example, I suggested that it may be helpful to suspend other ideas and (at least for a moment) consider that God is a different orientation to existence. God is a reshaping of our virtual world. I do not claim that this sums up God, but that it points towards a fundamental difference in how people see the world.

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Your whole diatribe on the “one less God” argument that precedes the first quote above, about how atheists reject all the man-made conceptions of God which are not in fact God, is again accurate but misses the point by a wide margin. Name a conception of God which is not man-made.
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Response: Diatribe? What I wrote is not bitter or abusive. I suggested it misleading, and that this was just as problematic for atheists as for anyone else. You may disagree, but there is no malice or mockery here. As for the other point, why should I name a concept of God that is not man-made? I wrote before and again just above that all concepts, that is for all phenomena expressed in human thought, is man-made. But that in and of itself doesn’t make God any less real than a quark or any less valid than 2+2=4.

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Even your attempt at describing such a being, utilizing words like Divine and Source, which is far from the worst I’ve heard, is you-made. It’s another example of what I like to call “defining down” God, which is a process by which all of God’s supposed traits are gradually jettisoned or made more and more amorphous, ambiguous, and meaningless, all the while retaining the word “God” or some equivalent, so that the concept becomes harder and harder to argue against. (The process works by maintaining the illusion that God has survived your opponent’s arguments, but the reality is that the only reason the arguments fail is because your position is ultimately without meaning – there’s literally nothing to argue against, and the whole exercise has cleverly become just a word game.)
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Response: I call the kind of thing you are alluding to “the (incredible shrinking) God-of-the-gaps”. I find those religious people who engage it in tiresome. It is practiced primarily by the group properly referred to as theists, those who set out to definitively prove the reality of God by a particular set of standards, typically involving logical arguments of God’s necessity. This terms is nearly always conflated with the etiology of atheist so that theist comes to mean anyone who claims to accept the reality of God. Mystics, pantheists, panentheists and others, who have other reasons for such belief, are assumed to all unequivocally share the beliefs of theists. Anyone who does not share identical conceptions of God or reasons for embracing them are then typically accused by those criticizing anyone who speaks of God as dumbing it down, of redefining God to avoid such criticism. The idea that the conception may in fact be ancient and not just a recent improvisation to reconcile an episode of cognitive dissonance is rarely entertained.

The idea that God is the source, substance and sustainer of existence is not new. The idea that such a God would appear to human logic as being simultaneously immanent (everything is divine) and transcendent (God is not merely everything, as in pantheism) is not new. These are extremely old concepts. That doesn’t automatically make them right, of course, but it does undercut the idea they are formulated to escape atheist critiques. In such a view theists are wrong in saying that God is merely a link in a causal chain, even the first link (i.e. the so-called First Cause). From such a view, which today’s philosophers have dubbed panentheism, God is the shape of the link, the material out of which the link was made, and the “space” in which the link exists. Hence God, or ultimate reality, would be understood as the raw potential out which phenomena arise as part of the historical world (that which is framed by concepts such as time and space), and such phenomena give expression to this potential. Again, the simultaneity of transcendence and immanence. This view has arisen independently many times in many places, and can be found expressed in religions and philosophies as distinct from Abrahamic religions as Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism. How each tradition describes it, how each one dresses it up in terms of their own culture and history, is different, but the core aspect is there.

While space (and my time) is limited, another relevant issue involves two distinct yet complimentary ways in which we conceptualize phenomena and that have a major impact on how we understand and relate to them. One seeks certainty, clearly defined phenomena contained in rational and readily described categories, things which are uniform and predictable and easily subjected to the grossest forms of empirical verification, phrased in math and historical statements; the other allows for ambiguity, creativity, and paradox, engenders humility and wonder, allows for things beyond our ability to fully grasp, pin down, or control, phrased in metaphor and poetic language. Spiritual and religious language tends toward the latter, which makes it challenging and at times confusing. Contrary to the assumption of many in the scholastic movement that emerged four or five centuries ago in Christianity that favored moving religion toward certainty and logical proof (which gave rise to the theists, and later, in a bastardized form, to the fundamentalists), the body of symbols, stories, art, music and liturgy in Christianity or any other sacred tradition isn’t to be understood this way. The idea that God, who as Hans Kung said best is beyond (he suggested it “explodes”) our limited dichotomy of personal/impersonal or person/non-person, must literally and only be a big-guy-in-the-sky, even the biggest and most powerful being, is the result of such narrowing and shallow ways of conceptualizing God. So again, if someone comes along and says that this kind of interpretation is wrong for the kind of conceptualization employed, one can, without regard for the context of the larger and deeper tradition in a single religion (let alone religion as a whole) suggest that in fact, such flattening of the concept really is the one and only proper way to understand it and anyone saying otherwise is just trying to avoid irreligious criticisms.

In the case of my original comments, I was not engaged in defining God down to something amorphous and meaningless. I was addressing core assumptions people hold about who or what God is and how God is to be conceptualized and discussed. To that end I indeed stripped away a lot exterior to get to the heart of the matter, but hopefully it clearer now that in fact my goal was never to box God in. When I wrote “God isn’t a thing, a being, or any other phenomena. God is like a shorthand for discussing the totality encompassing existence,” this was not some final definition, as if that was all I was willing to commit to in the kind of precise and absolute terms of the sort of conceptualization which hinges on the need for fixed certitude. It was instead a starting point for exploring beyond such limits, into realms of experience that defy such requirements. God is much more than anyone could ever describe in either form of conceptualization.

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Ultimately, we have to decide whether it is more likely that we are actually talking about something real when we get to the point of the “defined-down” God, or whether our feeling of the divine is simply a result of natural processes related to biology and psychology combined with our inherited ideas from society, history, and culture. Maybe it’s just me, but one of these seems far more plausible than the other.
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Again, this view comes from a particular set of expectations, a particular orientation toward existence that shapes how we conceptualize our experiences phenomenologically and how we interpret the conceptualizations of others. I am not attacking or dismissing this view, but it’s important to recognize the and appreciate the distinctions in how we come to shape our virtual worlds and how we interpret the descriptions given by others. There is nothing that says the experience of the divine is any less genuine if it is shaped by biology, psychology or culture, any more than my experience of seeing the letters “PEN” types on a page is shaped by the same factors. My eyes and brain, my mind, and my cultural influences are all involved in the experience, and if any were missing or defective I would be blind or illiterate and hence unable to either see the word “PEN” or to attribute any meaning to it. Yet none of that undermines the fact that “PEN” does refer to or point me toward something that is real, nor does it suggest that my experiences of what we call light and what we call sight, which also enabled me to see the word “PEN”, are just “in my mind”.

Neither my conscience nor my own exuberant curiosity about the true reality of existence allows me the hubris to assume my conceptualizations or those of others are fully perfect representations of the world in which I live. Nor will either allow me to dismiss out of hand that which doesn’t neatly fit the current definitions of the empirical-only paradigm when we know (as well as we can know anything) that there are phenomena which appear to us to be irregular and inconsistent when applying typical empirical standards (such as those outlined by science) necessary for measurement, comparability and thus correlative-predictive explanatory power. I believe there is much beyond our ability to intellectually comprehend or logically imagine, and it is worthy of serious consideration. Just because an epistemological source such as science, religion or spirituality has been abused doesn’t invalidate its insights.

Hence, for example, I do nor presume that when mystics of every age and from around the world sing the same tune, that there is a depth to our experience which opens us to a shared limitless existence which they can only compare to boundless wisdom, love and compassion, I see no reason to immediately dismiss it as delusion or psychosis, especially when even glimpsing this depth is associated with intense serenity, altruism, mental clarity. Moreover, whatever it is they are experiencing, it seems to be extremely beneficial to them and to those with whom they come into contact. This is not the kind of thing one can externally “prove” to someone else. These sages say so themselves. They merely point the way so we can, if we so desire, see for ourselves and have the evidence of direct experience.

And that is where I will leave it. No one can live another’s life for them. If I had sent this comment to myself 10 years ago I would have dismissed it without hesitation as a bunch of airy-fairy speculation and nonsense. We must each seek the truth in our own way and in our own time. Be well.

I grew up in a non-religious environment, and I am sincerely grateful for that. To be fair to the younger generations I think that the child should be at an age where they can consider the evidence for or against religion, consider what they have to gain or lose by either, and then have the opportunity to make an informed decision about their belief- without the pressure of stereotyping. I was first exposed to the concept of Jesus and God when I was eight years old, and I honestly, even then, did not understand why that should be believable any more so than the tooth fairy, or any other magical being that had no evidential support, or basis in the observable world.

Children are unbelievably impressionable, and I feel that teaching a child in religious ways is no different to teaching a child that we are actually just batteries for machines that live in a virtual reality. Both seem equally invalid to me, neither provable or unprovable. Try telling me that there’s an invisible purple spotted elephant in my room that I cannot perceive with any of my senses, I cannot say it doesn’t exist- since I cannot perceive it at all, and yet I cannot prove it does exist for the same reason.

You wouldn’t tell a child that there were fairies and expect them to believe so for their entire lives, and then ostracise them when they thought that maybe that wasn’t true. I don’t see much of a difference, having been raised believing in evolution and the big bang- both logical and valid theories that are today being expanded upon and refreshed with better information. God does not evolve as freely and quickly as scientific research, and so many atheists believe it holds humanity back.

I’m from Australia, with hundreds of different cultures and religions all coexisting within our country. We have no specific religion and as far as the general population goes- I’m quite sure we have more non-theists than theists. And a large number of those that consider themselves religious do not actively practice it. I feel very free in this country, and you cannot understand how much religious tolerance can be achieved until you have lived here.

This sort of thinking has been present since Darwin’s time, and we’re making progress whether we are conscious of it or not. I hope that we can broaden our knowledge, in an understanding and peaceful manner, and people like you, make me more hopeful that this can be achieved. I hope that the religious friends I will make in the future, can be as rational and kind as you.

You give them a much better appearance than any Christian I have yet come across.

Mel

Religions are boxes and boxes are necessary to hold something. When the something outgrows the box, a bigger box is required. That is creation, the old holds until the new replaces it. When the focus is on the building and not the destruction. Destruction happens in the process of building.

Take a perfectly beautifully shaped apple. Put it in your mouth, let your teeth bite into it and its shape is destroyed. The energy of the apple being transferred into energy for the body.

I would hope that we as the only human form would begin to build the future because the old will pass. Cut down the tree and make boards, posts, planks and build a house or cut down the tree and put it in the fire. Both are valid. One provides heat, the other provides cover.

Question becomes what are we struggling over? Is it really god versus no god. The word god in the Bible begins with plural gods is most of the time plural gods. We are the plural gods, the hologram of the whole, whatever that is. We are the plural gods that created the world we live in. I hope that we haved learned some lessons and build a more beautiful tomorrow.

I was born in the great depression of money, water, jobs.
The great depression today is of a different kind.
A depression is but a hole, a container, a box waiting to be filled.

Bright