I'm an atheist who has a personal relationship with God

The title of this blog post is surprising, right? How is it possible for an atheist to have a personal relationship with God?

Answer: it's easy. I simply define "God" a lot differently than religious believers do. As described in Atheists should redefine "God" as all that exists, I look upon God as being synonymous with reality, or existence.

So I find God awe-inspiring, mysterious, impossible to fathom. 

After all, the greatest mystery -- one which almost certainly never will be unraveled by humans -- is that existence exists. Or as the mystery often is described, why is there something rather than nothing?

I've written quite a few blog posts on this subject. It fascinates me. I never get tired of pondering it, even though I never get close to grasping a possible answer. (I'm in good company; no one else ever has either.)

Saying that God is the creator of existence is no answer at all, because the obvious question arises, who created God? 

If the supposed answer is no one, since God always has existed, the same answer can be applied to why the cosmos exists. There's no why, because the universe always has existed.

Which brings us back to the same question: why is there something rather than nothing?

Doesn't matter whether that something is the physical cosmos or a supernatural God. Each is something that must have always existed, since something can't be produced from absolute nothing. Thus the mystery of existence remains.

I love a good mystery, and this is the grandest mystery of all. 

That's why I'm pleased to have a personal relationship with God. I like being intimate with the mystery of existence. Like I said, to me God is synonymous with existence. 

It isn't that God is a person, obviously. I don't believe in a personal God. However, I do have confidence that I'm a person. Thus my personal relationship with God is all on my end, since so far as I know, existence can't have a relationship with anybody.

I do think that it'd be way cool if a personal God, a conscious being with all that omni stuff like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, actually was real. So occasionally I alter my strict atheist conception of God to include that possibility. 

"Hey, God, if you're out there, pay me a visit. Love to have a chat with you. You know where to find me, since you're all-knowing." 

Haven't gotten a reply yet. Thus I'm placing most of my philosophical bet on the God that is equivalent to everything in existence. This includes my conception of "God," since a concept is a neurological pattern in a brain, so it is existent.

I like my conception of God because it points to something that truly exists: namely, existence. Otherwise "God" is just an idea that refers to nothing other than itself. Imagine that "music" was just a concept and there was no actual music in the world. 

Then people would discuss the possible meaning of "music" without anyone being able to point to music that can be heard by the ears, rather than merely thought of with the mind.

This is the situation with every religion.

Religious believers chatter on endlessly about the glory of God, blah, blah, blah, but nobody ever can show that this God they're glorifying actually exists. Whereas I can play a huge variety of music in my living room by firing up the Sonos iPhone app and having it play songs on my speakers.

Further, music existed before humans did. It's possible to view birdsong as music, thunder as music, porpoise/whale communications as music. So my relationship with music has tremendous depth, because music is so much more than a concept.

I have a personal relationship with music. But music doesn't have a personal relationship with me. Same applies to God. My relationship with God isn't conceptual or a matter of belief. It is absolutely real, since the God I revere is everything that exists.

In short, reality. 

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

Hi Brian!
Love this post.
"It isn't that God is a person, obviously. I don't believe in a personal God. However, I do have confidence that I'm a person. Thus my personal relationship with God is all on my end, since so far as I know, existence can't have a relationship with anybody.

"I do think that it'd be way cool if a personal God, a conscious being with all that omni stuff like omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, actually was real. So occasionally I alter my strict atheist conception of God to include that possibility."

Search yourself. When Stephen Hawking speaks it is entirely personal, though his words come through a mechanism that translates text onto code and these into audible words he himself never spoke.

Your brain does this all the time through its connections to reality.

You always get your brain's personal take on the world.some symbols look just like parts of the world. Others look very different. But in all cases, 100% of the time, this is your perceptual field.

The brain is a symbol making machine. It boils the world down into a personal symbolic version for each of us, and builds a perceptual field for us moment by moment.

In deep meditation living symbols come forward. Personalities, ideas, even locations and events. Where did they come from? All translated through the brain into our perceptual field.

In meditation you can alter the field you are viewing, through focused effort.

You can, little by little, begin to see the mechanisms behind that machinery.

And meet other personalities there. You don't invent them. That would be imagination. When the brain misinterprets, that would be hallucination. But real things also get a perceptual label. Even the characters in dreams, degraded consciousness, are constructed from a degraded source.

Now, what emerges when consciousness is raised? When it is heightened? Insight. Images of reality that most people don't see, like Einstein's thought experiments riding on a beam of light. Mathematics, solutions, musical compositions, even visions of subatomic particles and fields of energy.

Symbols emerge. Our brain does this for you.

All of that is a personal relationship to parts of yourself, and through their connections, a personal relationship to this one reality.

[Tendzin]

"Saying that God is the creator of existence is no answer at all, because the obvious question arises, who created God?"

Actually, only created things have a creator, so it's improper to lump God with his creation. Nor is it proper to assume that God is bound by material existence or the laws of physics. Whatever one thinks about the beginnings of the Universe, there is "something" at the very origin that was not created. This is an inescapable given, a cosmic truth.

[Ron Elloway]

Poets and artists try to explain 'this' (call it God, reality or whatever) in their work and often fall woefully short. in fact it seems that what we vaguely feel we cannot explain it. maybe its because our usual way to talk about anything is through thought which is memory derived from experience. There are no words to describe something we all vaguely feel but cannot experience. We are like the fish who has heard of this wonderful, miraculous ocean but does not realise that he is in it and of it, so spend his life searching for it.

Brian mentions the question "why is there something rather than nothing?" Well, it might be that everything comes from nothing. In Zen Buddhism there is a passage that says "Emptiness is form (things) and form is emptiness. And the Tao Te Ching begins with "The Tao that can be told is not the unvarying Way"

So what we are searching for we are already that, yet because our only way to come up with answers is through thought and as ur thinking processes is simply to maintain survival - to plan, find food and shelter and procreate, it is not equipped or able to explain something that we cannot experience. Its like the eye trying to see itself.

I guess that just like the Taoists, Buddhists, scientists and philosophers, we will continue to try to work it out and to continue to write thousands of books about, well 'that' which cannot be described cannot be reduced to thought.

[s*]

All of life.....,living ´beings´are in fact ´God..
To become aware of that fact is beautiful..

Life....

[Dungeness]

@ Ron : [So what we are searching for we are already that, yet because our only way to come up with answers is through thought and as ur thinking processes is simply to maintain survival - to plan, find food and shelter and procreate, it is not equipped or able to explain something that we cannot experience. Its like the eye trying to see itself. ]

The mystic demurs. He says there is an experiential path that yields
answers bypassing thought altogether via 'direct perception'. Here's
a reference adapted from medical researcher Deikman's study:

https://www.meta-religion.com/Psychiatry/Mysticism/mystic_experience.htm

[Sonia]

Hahahaha… oh, I don’t even know what I’m laughing at really.

I enjoyed reading this post. Really did… I love different perspectives. God is everything that is real. Hard to deny that. But lately I’m going back and forth between loving the mysterious wonder of it all, and loving the intellect that wants to question everything.

Don’t you have days where you get hit with all these existential questions and you’re like https://www.instagram.com/reel/CSzlLYTFOZ2/?utm_medium=copy_link

[um]

@ Dungeness
Thank you for bringing up Deikman's name ... it reminds me of something I read from his hand many, many years ago.

He conducted an experiment to see what the consequences were from sensoric deprivation and concluded that the brain, in order to stay alive has to process information and if there is no information to process, the brain will produce its own input in the form of inner experiences of sorts.

I hope it is correct how I remember it.

[Appreciative Reader]

(...)
Here's
a reference adapted from medical researcher Deikman's study:

https://www.meta-religion.com/Psychiatry/Mysticism/mystic_experience.htm
Posted by: Dungeness | September 08, 2021 at 06:25 AM

----------

Thanks for bringing up that reference, Dungeness.

Of course, that particular page did not in itself yield anything particularly revelatory, but it is cool to know about this Deikman --- I hadn't heard of him before this --- and his objectively grounded research into mysticism.

It should be interesting to look up some more about him and his work. For now I've bookmarked the search page with his name, as reminder, to be explored at leisure later on.

[✌🏻 at last ✌🏻]

At Last . . . . .

777

[Tim Rimmer]

Hi all
I tracked this down and like Wallis’ integrated approach:
…“There is one thing that exists, and we may call it God if we seek to emphasize that it is worthy of veneration and appreciation, or Awareness, if we seek to emphasize its most universal quality, or the Light of Creation, if we seek to emphasize that it is a single dynamic field of energy”,
(Rec Sutras, p.151).
A useful way to look at things imo.
Best wishes

[Ron Elloway]

Dungennes. I would say that you don't need a mystic to see that which you already are, but having been there myself, l can see it may be a valuable undertaking.

After all, what we belive we are basically searching for is a happy continuation, though that usually drops away at some point as the mind/self structure is revealed

[Uchit]

RSSB drove me to not believe a man, a so called god, with a white turban, who sits high up on stage, looking down on everyone else. In the physical realm this is nothing but a triangle with gurinder singh dhillon on top and is loyal brainwashed sevadar next then the masses that are puppets and totally brainwashed. In the unseen you also have the hierarchy of entities applying maximum control of mind body and soul of the poor sangat - this is there prison. Realizing this made me run from man made religions and cults. RSSB cult and GSD is not god but the complete opposite, DONT BELIEVE THE BULLSHITE.

[Solomon]

The God question at 0.35

https://youtu.be/VS-Ns9WYRnQ

[Sonia]

The God question at 0.35

https://youtu.be/VS-Ns9WYRnQ

Posted by: Solomon | September 09, 2021 at 05:28 PM

He seems happy. The last two videos he seems happy.

I’m a Christian Mystic who has a personal relationship with a Sant Mat guru. Lol

[manjit]

This, along with the "Atheists should redefine God as all that exists" posts are great, a step in the right direction ;)

I consider TRUE atheists to be mystics in the truest sense of the word - genuinely accepting of their unknowing (unknowing precludes belief in a God), humbly aware of the limitations of their intellect (which, again, implies an inability to hold fast to any CONCEPT of God), and simply aware of and open to reality as it presents itself - and in this space of radical unknowingness, acceptance of one's own intellectual limitations, and open-ness to reality AS IT IS - is imo the first step to a deeper connection and relationship with "reality", "all that is", "God", "consciousness", "shabd" etc, the words or concepts used are irrelevant, the relationship is direct, experiential and beyond words, or the scope of human judgement and evaluation.

It is my experience that a genuine, radical "atheism" of this sort, abiding in that state of unknowing, or "hanging by the gallows" as Baba Faqir Chand called it, with a vulnerable & sincere openness to reality, that one can begin to partake of the silent mystery....

There is no point discussing the reality or not of the "supernatural" - you either experience things, or you don't (stay open to the possibilities though, surprising shit can occur :) - what does it matter if you don't, of what use or interest is the subject to you? Some people have an interest in these things, but are not mindless believers, more so curious as to the unquestionable prevalence of such phenomena in humans. Some people have these experiences themselves frequently, but are not so greatly moved or impressed by them, and it affects their beliefs or thoughts little. Other people believe in these things avidly, interpret every minor coincidence as a confirmative miracle, and believe a whole host of related bizarre and scientifically unproven concepts based on such experiences - such is the variety of life, who cares? None of us has walked in all these peoples shoes. If you have no interest in, or have not experienced these kind of phenomena, why bother discussing it at all?

Each to their own - and if you start experiencing weird shit, what with your new found openness and alertness to the semantic nature of the label "God" (:o), perhaps an interest will ignited - that doesn't mean your experiences, even if you did have them, are "true", or proof of this or that conceptual model of reality, or energy or whatever........it will STILL be a case of abiding in a space of radical unknowingness, radical openness to a reality or explanation that you haven't even yet considered, and in so doing build a relationship with the infinite.

This is imo the state of both the true mystic and atheist.

Religions, like RS, try to capture and bottle this infinity. You can understand the urge, it is a deeply rooted human tendency to believe it can understand reality via concepts and beliefs. But it is doomed to failure every time, at least on the "mystical" level.

[Sonia]

Yeah, well, I definitely don’t own many of the core beliefs of Sant Mat. However, when you’ve known someone for a thousand years, they become
a part of you whether you agree with them or not. Family does that. It brings people from radically different perspectives together. It’s part of the divine plan to teach us tolerance and that we don’t have to agree or even approve of everything a person does in order to love them.

If the Beetles were right, Love is all there is. How many people truly love you for who you are as opposed to what you can do for them??

[Anna]

I really liked this post. And Idk I think you might be impressed by how many people who claim to believe in a God share your or a similar definition.