The Bat Phone in Our Head

"God" is a meaningless word. Or if it is a word that means anything, it means "the image that a person holds in their mind - one that they they try to focus on as much as possible in the belief that doing so will provide wisdom, meaning, and at least a chance at eternal life - that is essentially an infinitely inflated, eternally perfect, all powerful image of themselves."

Christians don't even believe that they can live up to this image, however, even after they die (which is apparently why they are so willing to fail so much at living up to that image even while they're still alive, even though many think they are living up to that image whenever the very people they are trying to "save" think they are only acting like the devil).

To put it more simply: when a "believer" says they "believe in God," they are really saying they believe in a more perfect image of themselves, that they carry around inside of their head, which they just happen to call "God."

"Believers," in this sense, have a kind of split consciousness, where they think "Jesus" is an actual person that they can communicate with through "prayer," which is talking to yourself under the "belief" that you are talking to a divine image of a "God, who listens intently on the other end of a immaterial "Bat phone" that everyone is born with implanted in their minds, that Jesus never actually answers and mostly just ignores.

What's interesting about it, however, is that the Christian really thinks that with this "Bat phone" called prayer, even though God ignores it most of the time, they can understand the "infinite mind" of a God -  with the help, of course, of nothing more than one of the bloodiest and most self contradictory books ever written in history - even though they can't understand why atheists who are just as human as they are think that's completely crazy. 

And that simply choosing to "believe" that such a perspective is the most sane thing anyone could "believe," is even crazier.  And the craziest of all is the "belief" that, if enough people don't adopt and maintain this "belief," the world will end and countless people with be thrown into an eternal furnace, by a "God" they claim is 'all loving and merciful." 

(NOTE: Even if no one goes to hell, it should be pointed out, the mere fact that God created such a place, or at least wanted us to believe he had, is like worshiping a pedophile who tells everyone he keeps a dungeon in his basement, for never abducting any children in the neighborhood, but thankful he has such a dungeon nevertheless, because knowing he does is what best keeps parents in line through the sheer terror of the idea.) 

Couple this with the fact that we live in a society who's ethos is "fake it til you make it," which basically makes lying the highest virtue of all, but Christians blame our propensity for dishonesty, not on the purely man made systems that run on such an ethos (and which in turn therefore make us "in their image"), but on an imaginary nemesis called the"devil."

Nevertheless, Christians want atheists to "believe" that Christianity is the best or only means of obtaining a clear understanding of this word "God" nevertheless, even though they are so often forced to admit they have no idea how or why all of the suffering in the world is simply fodder to be used as "part of God's plan,"  or even why we should "worship" the author of a plan that only ever capitalizes on suffering. 

Christians understand God, to put it simply, because they "believe" they do, and the highest virtue is to "believe" that that's all the proof they should ever need, no matter how much evidence points to the contrary.