"Like kissing my kitten in the belly/The softness of our reward."
- Jack Kerouac
What the hell do I know besides what I've experienced? Not much. And if you were to ask me, I'd have to say that thoughts about God are just thoughts, too. What is "God" anyway, but one big, highly-charged burly mental construct, loaded with cultural values? (Ergo: Beware of God.) Yet the Sufis and gnostics long ago perfected a way to "believe in God," but not shirk the basic problems of discursive thought and the need to condition one's mind via meditation/contemplative practice. To them, God is a mono-deity and archetypal Creator & Sustainer, but only in relative, metaphorical terms. God's reality, say the Sufis and gnostics, is beyond human comprehension. We can experience God, though, and that experience is a communion that comes in an endless palette of flavors. The religious life, if you ask these folks, is a life designed to maximize the time spent communing and minimize the time spent doing non-communion (i.e. otherwise dicking around and missing out on the joyride) - it's not rocket science.
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