Why do religious people think God is real because of a book?

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I’m with David Moore, this is a great question. I’ll give my own take having come around to it a different way than most.

I did not believe God was real, the Bible certainly wasn’t enough to convince me. But as I grew into adulthood and left home, I became aware of an essential emptiness to life and existence. Or rather, that emptiness became something I could no longer ignore. I had to seek out experience, knowledge, wisdom, and I eventually found them in the form of the alternative spiritual community that’s been a part of American life since the 1800s. I learned how to meditate and I learned how to connect with gods and goddesses.

I didn’t take to personal spirituality easily, but I took to meditation like a duck to water. I meditated everywhere I could, any time I got the urge, I was diving into trance. It brought to my life the sense of purpose I was missing. But whenever I’d sit down to pray, or connect with God or other deities, nothing really solid.

I progressed down that path and obtained my spiritual awakening, the way to think about it is like when Daniel-san finally gets Mr. Miyagi’s teaching method. Only instead of karate, spiritual awakening is about the wide wide world of spirit stuff, from angels and demons to astrology and alchemy to telepathy and telekinesis. All simply instances of spiritual reality, the connectedness of our minds to the physical world.

And of course, Jesus, the Bible, and Christianity.

Before my awakening, I would pick up the Bible and see interesting stories, with some scattered spiritual lessons available. After my awakening, the Bible just came alive. I’m reading the product of a people who were just like me, people who no longer have to wonder and guess at the nature of divinity. They know, and their books were written with the knowledge that they’re going to be primarily read by other people who also know.

It took ten years of focused study and experiment to obtain that knowledge. I’m a talented and gifted person who had a good childhood. Without any and all of those prerequisites, I would have never pushed through hard enough to get to awakening. Ten years isn’t an insurmountable amount of time, and one can certainly integrate it into a normal education, assuming of course you have decent teachers, mine was one of the best.

And the weird thing about spiritual knowledge is that it’s not consciously transmitted. Spirit itself finds a way to keep itself alive. But that just, kinda sucks right? Wouldn’t you like to live in the world where everybody just knows and is on the same page there?

And so for at least a few hundred years after Christ, there was this teaching tradition. As society diluted and became more modern, the teaching just gets less and less powerful, less able to produce the knowledge. Eventually over a thousand years later, the ability of society and tradition to carry that spiritual spark on just diminished to nothingness, political concerns became more and more important.

And so society hollowed out again, this hollowness is felt by most, but the understanding of it is only available to those to can actually see what’s missing.

I don’t know how many Christians have a hollow belief in divinity and how many have the knowledge. But even hollow belief is way better than nothing.