Fair enough.

I'm simply saying, Steve, that spoken language and the written word are not capable of fully expressing all that we deal with in our lives.

They are capable of alluding to what we deal with, yes, but not fully expressing it. Spiritual disciplines are mostly aimed at dealing with the non-material experiences and feelings that we cannot fully express in words or grasp with our hands, and those are aspects of life we still need to deal with, even if they aren't physical in nature. They affect our physicality profoundly, because they affect our stress levels, our moods, and our health.

Most people are unconscious prisoners of their habitual word definitions. For instance, in the USA the word "socialism" or "socialist" conjures up such negative responses in most listeners that it is quite clear that they have a very different definition of those words than people in most of the rest of the world do. "Socialism" is virtually a dirty word in the USA! And that's really strange, wouldn't you say? It's not a dirty word in most other places.

Now, "God" is a sort of dirty word to some people, because it immediately summons up a host of negative thoughts and associations in their mind about organized religion, and they start thinking about all kinds of stuff they object to. I don't think of stuff I object to when I hear the word "God", mainly, I suppose, because I had absolutely no religious instruction inflicted on me by anyone during childhood or adolescence, apart from one single Sunday school class. ;-) So I never felt oppressed by other people's ideas about what they might call "God".

But you have to fully grasp what another human being means when he says the word "God" before you even know what he's talking about. What IS he talking about?

And that's where the problem arises.

If you don't know what he's talking about, and he doesn't know what you're talking about, then useful communication becomes virtually impossible.

Agreed?

So just talking about "God" and thinking that you're talking about the same thing another person is talking about is making a huge assumption....a leap of faith about the other person! ;-) Quite possibly, the two of you are talking about different things.

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I'd try to find out what the other person means by "God" first. (And in many cases you will find out that they're really not that sure what they mean by "God", because they haven't actually given it much thought.) But if you tried to find out what they meant, then it might help both you and them understand each other a little better.

We all want to make the best of life that we can, correct? Thus we all have a great deal in common. I don't see why we should ignore all the good stuff we have in common and get hung up on different ideas about God, which is just a fragment of what we think about and devote our time to. Most of us are trying to earn a living, have good relationships, find happiness and a sense of purpose, stay healthy, eat, sleep, have some fun...those are the things our lives are really about......NOT our fragmentary and usually very vague definitions of whatever we think "God" is.

I have no certainty at all about what "God" is or isn't, and I'll tell you why: I've never had a direct encounter with something I could call "God"...not consciously or in a way that was clear to me.

I have had direct encounters with some other quite mysterious spiritual phenomena or experiences, but not with "God".

I have seen prayers answered...on just a couple of very dramatic occasions...but that doesn't necessarily make me think there's a God...and I'll tell you why: Prayer, when it's delivered in a very powerful way, is a very intensely directed thought, an intention and/or a visualization. If it gets "answered"...meaning that the eventuality you focused the prayer on is amended as you wished...then there is more than one possibility of how that happened.

1. "God" (a ruling deity) answered the prayer.

2. You had a "lucky" break.

3. You yourself accomplished the intention of the prayer somehow by your own intense focus...intense focus raises adrenalin levels, increases strength, and increases your accuracy.

4. Natural forces around you were set into motion by your intensity of focus, and that was what accomplished the intention of the prayer.

I've considered all of those 4 possibilities regarding prayers I saw answered, and I don't know if it was one of those possibilities that made the prayer work...some of them...or none of them. It might have been something else entirely.

All I know was, the prayers got answered.

Again, you see, it doesn't prove anything to me about a "God". It just proved to me that something worked in my favor on certain occasions when I prayed with absolute intensity. (there have only been a handful of such occasions...I very seldom pray.)

I'm by no means convinced that it works on all occasions. If it did, EVERYONE would win big at the casino! ;-D It may only work when it's "justified". If so...that could raise some very interesting possibilities about the overall purpose and meaning of our lives.

I could have all kinds of "beliefs" about stuff I haven't seen or done yet, if I was inclined to do that, but what I would rather do is have actual experiences, and learn directly from those experience, because I can depend on that. I learned from those experiences I had...not that I was planning it that way...it just happened spontaneously because I reacted very intensely to the situation at the time.

Most people pray because they've been taught to do that. I was not taught to pray by anyone. I just did it in those few moments, because it came naturally at those moments, due to an intense sense of need or an intense desire to help someone else whom I loved, and I went with it without a moment's thought or hesitation...and it worked.

I'm grateful for having had those experiences, but I've no idea if a "God" was any kind of active agent in the process. Until I MEET, SEE and HEAR a God in absolutely undeniable terms, I am not going to assume there is one just on someone else's sayso. Nor am I going to deny that there is one.

I simply don't know. I must wait for the actual experience. Same as with everything else. You can't know what an apple tastes like until you bite one. Other people can tell you....in thousands of brilliant words...what an apple tastes like. But you won't know until you bite one. Nothing else matches the direct experience, and no words can fully describe it. Therefore, no one can describe God to me, you or anyone else...though they might try...or they might get a book for me to read...but I won't really know a thing about God until...and unless...I encounter God directly and I know and recognize what I am dealing with when it happens.

If there's a God....