Originally Posted by SATCHMO

My two cents relating to everything beings discussed.

We'll start with the thread title: God is in Your Mind?

I'm inclined to say, Yes. God is in your mind. Most of the time, when someone says that something is all in your mind, it's a dismissal of its validity, however your mind is the point at which you apprehend everything you experience. Things that can be dismissed as mental aberrations can have a tremendous impact on our well being, both positively and negatively. It can be seen in the way that anxiety over events that have not transpired can manifest themselves in poor health conditions when not kept in check. Conversely, a positive attitude or a stable resolution that one can effectively deal with whatever may come one's way can be more critical to one's happiness than the events themselves.

They're are a lot of things-- concepts, beliefs, some of which that even the most staunch, of atheists subscribe to that are basically figments of one's own imagination, more specifically one's ego. Anytime you identify yourself as yourself you are making a distinction between you and everything that you perceive to not be you. This is the essence of duality and the function of the ego: This is me and that "out there" is everything else, which is not me.

Now the ego performs a significant and very practical function in our lives, because without it navigating the world, both physically, and our lives mentally, would be very difficult, but its drawbacks can be quite negative at times. it is where all of our irrational fear resides, our need for validation, our unquenchable desires, and our false and often times degraded self-image. It is the impetus for us to be smarter, thinner, faster, richer, funnier. It craves things from outside of it's perceived self for its own validity and satisfaction and more often than not, it is not satisfied with any one of these things for too long.

Religion's best intentions are to circumvent the negative effect of the ego, however the problem is that the ego comes into the fore when creating and promoting a religion. Essentially, in my opinion, religion is what happens when spirituality collides with bureaucracy. When adherents of a religion act out of a very egoic place self-righteousness erupts and ultimately, because 2000 years ago there was no separation of church and state-- church was the state, the core fundamentals of what all religions seek to express become perverted and maligned, doctrine and dogma gets set in place and the essence of what a religion like christianity originally sought to express disappears forever. Incidentally Tore, the confirmation bias that you spoke of earlier in the thread as pertaining to the way that most people stereotypically think of atheists also apply to Christians and other religious followers. I'm sure you know that, but I thought it would be an interesting thing to make note of.

Now religious fundamentalists and atheists commit two respective acts which are the directly inverted to each other. The religious fundamentalist takes that which is personal and subjective and tries to make it compulsory and objective, the atheist in turn applies that which was never intended to be understood literally and scrutinizes it objectively with the same investigatory method that one would use to examine a bacteria culture under a microscope, which is only a natural rection toward someone who is asserting that something is a valid natural phenomena.

For example, a fundamentalist Christian will assert that the book of genesis is an accurate account of the creation of the universe and mankind as well as mankind's subsequent fall. Anyone who's reasonably intelligent, has a rudimentary knowledge of science, is not a Christian, and somewhat rational will react by saying that such an assertion is completely false and this is why. what you have after some time is the evolution vs. intelligent design debate that is an ongoing feud and ridiculous and an ultimate waste of time. However, the atheistic stance is defensive and any subsequent investigation into what the book of Genesis says is usually done with the intention of finding errors rather than extracting the allegory and metaphor that exists within it. The book of Genesis is not an accurate representation of how the universe came to be, but it is an excellent allegory of the evolution of human consciousness from the point of humans being, for the most part, instinctual creatures to being largely egoic in nature. If anyone reads the bible with objectivity and a genuine desire to see what the original writers were trying to convey--not uniformly, of course. The bible is essentially an anthology and anybody who reads it should know that there are certain parts which are to be understood more literally than others, and other things which can be casually dismissed as either not occurring, erroneous, or simply not relevant to our current time and culture-- they may be surprised at what is actually in their, but needs to be extrapolated with a little effort and creative thinking.

To get back to my original thesis, God is in the mind. Where else would god exist. We have a vision in literal terms of thinking got has an office in some alternate universe where he has his feet propped up on his desk and he's staring at a mosaic of video screens keeping tabs on who's been naughty and who's been nice, but that simply ludicrous. God is everywhere, non-localized, and so are you. It's only your ego that makes you believe otherwise.