When people ask “does God exist”, my initial reaction is to roll my eyes. Does what exist, exactly?

What they really ask is “does my concept of God, based on this or that religious scripture, describe reality accurately?” Even atheists base their ideas about God on some religious scripture, so it’s always about that.

My response to that is layered. First of all, if I had nothing but religious scriptures as evidence on which I were to base my assessment of God’s existence, I would be an atheist. Old scriptures are really a very weak and tenuous reason for such a huge leap of faith, and without some direct and personal reason for believing in God, I would find it all lacking. The thing is, St. Augustine had the same situation. He knew about the Bible, he spoke with the priests, and he found it all insufficient for making the leap of faith. It was a combination of events in his personal life, where he felt God’s guiding influence, and gradual comparative understanding of both Manichaeism and Christianity, and eventually it clicked. So, it’s not about the scripture alone; you need to have valid personal reasons to believe that what was described there has a basis in reality. Only when you feel God’s influence in your own life can you have valid reasons to believe that something like that inspired the scriptures; otherwise, it might as well be pure fiction, and to base your life on a work of fiction is not the brightest idea.

Also, there must be corroborating evidence and witnesses. There must be other people who had similar experiences, because if that is missing, you might be crazy. But if several pieces of the puzzle fit, the picture starts to emerge and then you can say that you have sufficient evidence to make a leap of faith and say that “something” exists up there, and religion is the only thing that even attempts to make sense out of it, so you might as well go from there.

Unfortunately, this is how people become religious fanatics. They start by having good evidence that there is a transcendental, spiritual, benevolent force that influences their lives, and they make a huge leap from there into “certain knowledge” about Adam, Eve, Noah and similar mythology, and since it’s now all faith, it is usually cemented into a place that is not subject to any further inquiry or revision, and that’s actually sad. Religion is supposed to be an aid to spiritual growth, but instead it often becomes a rut in which one gets stuck and loses his way. Religious people who became religious because they had some kind of a spiritual experience forget that it’s not religion that brought them to God, because they had God before they came to religion. God was here first. God is therefore not some distant and vague goal for them, He is a presence in their personal lives, and religion might actually stand in the way of knowing God better. Because, what is to say that authors of the scripture got it right, that they got it better than you could with a bit more experience? And when you take a look at various “spiritual people”, they all copy each other’s bullshit, because they don’t verify ideas, and when someone comes up with one, the others adopt it and it becomes a meme that is actually never verified, it’s never put to a trial and tested, because everybody is afraid to do so because what would other spiritual people say?

That’s why I’m probably the only one with original ideas, because I don’t give a fuck about being spiritual or about what spiritual people will say. I’m not in it for their opinion, I’m in it because I wanted to figure things out. I want to know what is actually true, how things actually work. I don’t want to settle with something “everybody knows”, because “everybody” is usually an idiot. I wanted to learn the truth about God from God, not from some scripture. And I learned very quickly that God will actually respond, once you think of asking Him personally instead of going at it in some roundabout way. The response you get isn’t something that’s easy to figure out, to put it mildly. It took me decades to figure out some things that were shown to me in a matter of seconds, and I’m quite a bit smarter than your average bear. But the thing is, it’s a difference between eating fresh pizza and eating 2000 years old pizza that was chewed up by many people before you: fresh pizza is what you want, and the other kind is shit. You do have an alternative to a personal relationship with whatever marvels there exist in the transcendental realm, but you don’t really want it. You can’t taste food if you allow other people to chew it for you. Religion and its “sacred lineage” is a kind of a “human centipede” where each next generation in the chain feeds on the previous generation’s shit, instead of going straight to the source. So when I say that there is God, I don’t mean it in the sense that religions are right. No, I mean it in the sense that you don’t need them. God exists, go straight to the source, fuck what everybody else says, go see for yourself. You can use other people’s ideas as help, but if the entire Universe is inside God’s mind, that means that God is not really in you, it’s more intimate than that. You are in God, in the same way in which this article in a web browser is in your computer. There’s nothing closer to you than God and if you think otherwise you’re a stupid idiot.

But of course, not all “software” in the computer is the good stuff. Some is junk that will eventually be purged because it’s worse than useless. Humans are a special type of software that can decide to be either the most transparent window into the very substance of the computer, or junk mail and bloatware. God will perform a garbage removal event, and it will not be a tragedy, it will be a triumph of all that is good and beautiful and worthy.