I can well understand your reaction to that situation, Mike.

You see, I have no trouble at all understanding why people don't believe in certain well-known fundamentalist concepts of God. I don't believe in those either...despite the fact that I don't know for 100% certainty. But it seems just tremendously improbable to me that the God of fundamentalism could possibly exist as he is described by fundamentalists.

There are, however, many other ways of defining God. If a person is saying that he doesn't believe in the specific definition of "God" that pops into his own mind when he hears the word "God"...hey! I can understand that.

Only thing is, his definition may not be the be-all and end-all, and there may be 100,000 other definitions out there. Does he disbelieve in all of them categorically? Or has he never even given a moment's thought to most of them? I would think it's the latter case. If so....well, it's just silly to say you categorically disbelieve in something that you've never even really thought about in the first place.

I don't think of God as a separate anthropomorphic giant spiritual being of some sort who intervenes in human affairs, sets down rules, and rewards and punishes. I think of God as the total summation of all consciousness and all existence and all that is...as an ocean is the summation of all that it contains, for example...or as a planet is the summation of all that it encompasses...or as you are the summation of all the cells and consciousness and energy in your own body. The planet does not intervene deliberately in any single person's affairs, it doesn't take sides in our issues, but it definitely exists and it provides a field of possibility within which its inhabitants act out their lives...and they are all part of it and they are born out of it, therefore they are related to it.

Are you telling me that you disbelieve in all consciousness and existence? I don't think so. ;-) You'd have to disbelieve in your own life force and your own existence to disbelieve in the God I believe in.

Therefore you may say that you disbelieve in God, and I get what you mean...you disbelieve in a specific fundamentalist definition of "God", but you don't disbelieve in my definition of God. See?

Tip: My definition of God has very little to do with organized religion as most people know it, and I belong to no organized religion. Why the heck would I want to?