Yeah, that's exactly what I believed as a child and as a young person, Jack, although there were a couple of incidents that made me think that ghosts might exist....and that did imply that death does not irreversibly terminate conscious life, but only physically embodied conscious life. That made me wonder. So I began to consider the possibility that there was some kind of spiritual existence after life, but I didn't think there was any God involved in it. This was primarily because I grew up with parents whe didn't think there was any God, and I adopted the same views from them.

My father had seen men's spirits leaving their bodies during the war when some men got killed in battle near him...but he didn't think there was an afterlife. To explain that...what he thought was that the spirit left the body...then simply dispersed and ceased to have identity after that.

I began to wonder and ask questions about all my usual assumptions after awhile. This led to considering possibilities such as souls, an afterlife, and a spiritual purpose behind physical life.

The questions I was asking led me to read many different books including: science books, philosophy, Taoist writing, Buddhist writing, various alternative Christian viewpoints as well as conventional Christianity, North American Indian religious ideas, New Age books, really everything I could find that looked interesting.

I gradually began to feel that there was a spiritual dimension to life, and I approached it through all kinds of different traditions. I also began to feel that there was a "God" involved in it, but I wouldn't define that God in terms of a "being" exactly, because a being is too limited to encompass what I saw as "God".

Beings exist. "Exist" means to "stand out"...as apart from other things...to be a visible phenomenon. This could not be the God I was looking for, because the God I was looking for isn't a being. It isn't something that stands out apart from other things. Rather, it is the source of being itself. It is implicit in what exists, not explicit. It is prior cause and governing principle. It is contained implicitly in everything that exists, and everything that exists is contained in it. It is too large to see or measure, too small to see or measure, it has no measurable characteristics at all.

It is not definable in terms of something that exists, because it has no observable characteristics, measurements or dimensions, but it is implicit in everything that does exist. Is it intelligent and purposeful? I think so, but that's simply my most favoured assumption. I can't be 100% sure about it at this point, because it can't be proven. It can perhaps be experienced...but this is not proof to anyone except he who has the experience.

And so, I continue to ask questions...and to keep looking further into the matter.

I find that most people's view of a deity is of a being (similar to other beings, but all-powerful?)....and if they don't believe in that being, they say, "There's no evidence for it."

Well, yeah! You cannot find evidence for the source of existence itself. It doesn't itself exist. It has no defining limitations, therefore it cannot be seen, observed, measured, categorized, etc.

But if it is implicit in you and in everything else, and if it allows you to be what you are (rather like a page allows words to be written and made visible, to use a metaphor) it can probably be experienced in a conscious way, and that is what people try to do through religious contemplation and prayer. They attempt to make conscious contact with the source of their own being, and the source of their best moral sense and their best purposes in life.

Whereas, the rational atheist tries to do that too...only he looks strictly to himself within his own mind, not to a prior or larger spiritual source from which he came. He thinks he's alone. The religious person thinks he's not alone, but in company with a higher purpose that was there before he was and is always present.

People will ridicule this by calling it a "secret friend". Again, though, they're envisioning a little imaginary Deistic being of some kind (like a Divine Parrot sitting on the person's shoulder or an old bearded man on a throne), not the measureless, pre-existing source of everything that now exists.

It can't be seen, touched, described or measured...unless you realize this: it is in everything, yourself included. Everything is its proof, in one sense....but that's not what people call "proof". By "proof", they mean various observed details that are separately seen from the other separate things around them. The source of existence isn't separate from anything, because it underlies, informs, and gives birth TO everything that does exist...and will remain absolutely undetectable to those who must imagine it defined as something that just "exists" the way they do...meaning separately.