You lot should try to figure out who's the smartest among you; don't forget to include those colleagues in the gop base.
Out of curiosity,
@Moonbeam, what
do you think God is? I really hope you don't think it's an actual personal, egoic being. You use a lot of Christian symbolism, and as someone who's put over a decade of study into this stuff I can tell you the Christian God is a jumped-up Canaanite (Ugaritic, specifically) deity, not even the top of the pantheon at that. Heck, he's actually the syncretism of
two old ANE gods, El and Yahweh.
God is the Tao. If I gave Him a name it wouldn't be His. But............I can point as best I am able to as that's all I can do.
For me God is a word people who have had a particular psychological experience, one I sometimes refer to as awakening, decided to use to encode psychological information for the transmission into their culture and to future generations triggering devices that can provoke such an awakening in others. These include such things as ethical habits that promote positive mental attitudes, stories that parallel or analogize certain psychological processes, generally speaking then, wisdom for the ages, foundational shared information that other people who are awake can use to teach. But as soon as the original source of such light expires from the scene, everything goes sideways and is used by the egos of people who sleep, but not all of it because the original insights were real. However, time changes cultures and the nature of human blindness mutates.
Today people have many many good reasons to be anti religious. I wouldn't be surprised if people who know something aren't teaching it through banking or some other endeavor somewhere. Anyway.........
So for me then, because on my own very very limited personal experience, I would say that God is a conscious state, an inner experience that causes me to get a good night's sleep and maybe for somebody like Mohamed to have the entire Koran revealed in the time it took for a pitcher of water or some such thing to spill.
My sense is that a religion is for a time and a place and a people, a culture that is communally blind, that is to say, suffers from a common dominate concealed prejudice or assumption about reality. I think, in the case of Jesus, his mission was to tell the Jews they had fallen asleep under the assumption they could get to heaven, experience a God conscious state, simply by obedience to the Law. We know it isn't the letter but the spirit that counts. God is always found in a living psychological understanding, not in a mechanical state. That, I think, is what is meant by the kingdom of heaven is with us. That also tells us there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to become. It's all and has always been there. God isn't in heaven or on a cloud somewhere. He is here within us. He is what we are as it were. We are his image because we created Him in ours, but not that ours that is our ego, but the one that appears at in a God conscious state.
As Meister Eckhart said, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which He sees me.
For me, then. God is the joy of being real.
That means also that in my opinion, the god believers believe in and doubters doubt, is a god that does not exist, a god that the ego accepts or rejects depending of ones conditioning, ones hidden concealed prejudice. Both are both right and wrong because the paradox is resolved only at a higher state of consciousness.