Why do you believe in a God?

[Confused Ape]

Placed side by side, many of the ideas bear surprising similarities to one another; they believe in a realm of the dead, some sort of soul/presence and the unifying power of a divinity(s) or holy spirit(s).

Anomalous Experiences

Anomalous experiences, such as so-called benign hallucinations, may occur in a person in a state of good mental and physical health, even in the apparent absence of a transient trigger factor such as fatigue, intoxication or sensory deprivation.

It is now widely recognized that hallucinatory experiences are not merely the prerogative of those suffering from mental illness, or normal people in abnormal states, but that they occur spontaneously in a significant proportion of the normal population, when in good health and not undergoing particular stress or other abnormal circumstance.

The experiences include apparitions -

A common type of anomalous experience is the apparitional experience, which may be defined as one in which a subject seems to perceive some person or thing that is not physically present. Self-selected samples tend to report a predominance of human figures, but apparitions of animals,[4] and even objects[5] are also reported. Notably, the majority of the human figures reported in such samples are not recognised by the subject, and of those who are, not all are of deceased persons; apparitions of living persons have also been reported.[6]]

There's also -

The experience of sensing the presence of a deceased loved one is a commonly reported phenomenon in bereavement. It can take the form of a clearly sensory impression or can involve a quasi-sensory 'feeling' of presence.[30] conducted a study of 293 widowed people living in a particular area of mid-Wales. He found that 14% of those interviewed reported having had a visual hallucination of their deceased spouse, 13.3% an auditory one and 2.7% a tactile one. These categories overlapped to some extent as some people reported a hallucinatory experience in more than one modality. Of interest in light of the previous heading was the fact that 46.7% of the sample reported experiencing the presence of the deceased spouse. Other studies have similarly reported a frequency of approximately 50% in the bereaved population.[31][32]

Sensing the presence of the deceased may be a cross-cultural phenomenon that is, however, interpreted differently depending on the cultural context in which it occurs.[33] For example, one of the earliest studies of the phenomenon published in a Western peer-reviewed journal investigated the grief experiences of Japanese widows and found that 90% of them reported to have sensed the deceased.[34] It was observed that, in contrast to Western interpretations, the widows were not concerned about their sanity and made sense of the experience in religious terms.

I've got the kind of brain that produces these experiences and they feel very real at the time. The human brain would have been producing these experiences ever since humans appeared on the scene so it's hardly surprising that all cultures have similar ideas about such things.

If I tell you I experience God and you choose not to believe me that's okay, but it doesn't invalidate my experience. It just means that you don't believe me. I can't stop believing in God because he has revealed himself to me.

I believe you when you say that you've had an experience which you interpreted as God revealing himself to you. I've had experiences which I could have interpreted as deities revealing themselves to me although I didn't interpret them this way.

Some years ago I had a dream about Apollo - he was an awesome presence and, in the dream, I knew he was a god. Then there's an experience I had which I reported in a topic I made on May 1st.

Today is May Day so I switched over to "New Age Perception". It's like I'm aware of the planet as a living entity. I also have an inner image of the Venus of Willendorf. This is just one of several Venus Figurines from the Upper Paleolithic period. Nobody knows what the figururines meant to the people who made them but modern Goddess worshippers have adopted the Willendorf figure as a symbol of the Great Mother Goddess. My unconscious mind decided to use it as well. It's not something I'd have consciously chosen, however, because I think it's grotesque.

I had a related experience when I visited the Anglican Shrine Of Our Lady Of Walsingham. When I was in the Church and Holy House I was aware of a powerful female presence but she was far older than Christianity.

If, for some bizarre reason, my brain produced similar experiences involving the Christian God or Jesus I'd treat them the same as the experiences I had of Apollo and The Goddess.