Framework of understanding
Part 4: A life of faith is a legitimate choice for everyone
Of course, this experience of God does not provide any compulsion to believe. Life offers all sorts of great experiences, but we don’t have to take them all up. Moreover, God has lost his role as judge and arbiter of who goes to heaven and who to hell. Life after death may still be a reality, but this is in the realm of speculation, which we ruled out of order earlier, if we are to argue our case entirely from the atheist’s side of the debate of scientific materialism. So, our life of faith has to stand for its value in this life alone – which the list above clearly shows it can – but it’s still a matter of personal choice as to whether or not each person takes up this way of life. Though, to repeat the point, why would you not want such a life?
Our new understanding is now “confining” God to within our minds rather than being an external, independently existing personal agent. However, this experience operates in exactly the same way as an external, independently existing personal agent (See my ideas on God as the voice we create in our heads). Nor are our ideas denying that there are alternative ways to achieve fullness of life. All sorts of ideologies could achieve similar – though it is hard to imagine any of these producing something better than our new basis for religion does.
In the same way that we ruled out life after death as just speculative, we also need to face the fact that it is just speculation that God ever actually does anything to alter the physical universe. In this respect, God does not answer prayers in terms of producing a different outcome to what the material universe would have suggested in the first place. However, this still leaves in place all of the immensely powerful and beneficial effects of what believers experience as their personal relationship with God. So, God continues to change the world for the better, and to transform believers’ lives, but entirely through human agency.
Spiritual Devotion 