The post below is from a response to a Jim Palmer Substake post.
God is not a being among beings but Being itself. When we reduce God to an object, even a supreme object, we create an idol.
The question ‘Does God exist?’ is flawed because existence is something creatures participate in. God doesn’t participate in being. God is the act of being.
This is why contemplation matters. You don’t think your way to this God. You wake up to the fact that you are already in God, and God is the depth dimension of everything.
So the shift is this: not belief in a being, but awareness of Presence.
A follow-up post is:
I am an atheist, but I highly esteem the Tao Te Ching. The Tao is the Ground of All Being. It doesn’t love us, care for us, judge us, want our worship, issue moral commands, or promise us rewards or punishments in a afterlife. The Tao teaches us but only in the way that gravity teaches you how to fall, and water how to float.
There’s an unbridgeable gulf between the Ground of All Being that even an atheist can accept and the personal god worshipped by 99.9% of all theists.
