I just had this conversation with a christian cousin.

God is something you believe in. It is recognition that we humans are not almighty and despite all our valiant effort to try to fix or chart a course in many things in life, we still somehow fail and stumble. It will show if u you have done enough self introspection and be brutally honest with yourself. And you will then have to admit your failure and incompetence and submit a Higher self, trusting that He will lead you to where you want.

How I came to discover his existence is - I sunk very low in life, heading into depression, and got into addiction to booze and smoke, and doing a lot of things without regards to people and consequence, and things where I just tell my moral feelings to shut up.

Then one day I woke up, I realized, yeah life sucked, tried hard to fix things, yet things just don't change and f***ed up events keep happening. Then for the first time, I made a sincere prayer. Time to tell myself, my methods sucked, stop trying hard and banging walls and getting nowhere, just go with the flow and let go of trying to control everything and believe that things will turn out ok.

So, God is just something you believe in.

Then instead of beating urself up over screwed up events in ur life because u think what u did sucked, u'll be able to start asking perhaps God wanted it to happen to teach u a lesson, or to bring up some unresolved issues in childhood that u need to resolve before u can move on to better life etc.

This is similiar to the attempt to "stop judging yourself and start observing your feelings" kind of thing that self-help guru and books teach, so you can also say that the better way to achieve that is to put a name to a higher entity and surrender the right of judgement to Him (because He knows better), and you just stay put as an observer.

This post has been edited by LanEvo7: Jan 6 2010, 09:38 PM