[baudrunner]

I know God to exist because He, or one of His people, found me and gave me peace in a time of great turmoil, when my world was falling apart around me because of my helpless state when as a young child I was incapacitated because of injury and while so helpless bearing witness to the disastrous death throes of a marriage that should never have been. He eased my suffering with a spiritual infusion and He kept me company in the spirit through those trying times.

I know God to exist because He saved me once many decades later when my doctor had given me three years to live and I experienced a miraculous event that was no dream and which saved me and left me clean and without affliction. That was almost fifteen years ago.

I believe in God as do so many others because of so many other direct experiences by far too many people precluding them to so easily shrug Him off as just an infatuation of hope. He is with people who have had Him in their families' histories. One of my grandfathers brought his community back into the church, and rekindled their faith. He started the church choir with his five sons. My other grandfather was as a young man an employee of his parish, the only lay person allowed to touch the tabernacle to polish it, to prepare the altar for mass, to collect the tithes and keep the accounts. One of his daughters became a nun, two others were missionaries during the war, doing God's work.

I am not devoutly religious because I do not need faith, nor do I have hope. I have knowledge of Him. I have knowledge of that spiritual realm when as a curious investigator into the occult I experienced the parting of my spirit from my body on several occasions. I no longer need the experience to convince me.

It is unfortunate that mysticism and literal interpretations of ancient messages have made unbelievers of so many people because they had no understanding of their true intent, and a practical perspective escaped them. The stories are just that, stories. I believe that God was once like you or I, that a billion or so years ago He and His people developed the ability to shed their corporeality using highly advanced science. Their knowledge and understanding of the fundamental nature of things was complete, and they used that knowledge to create a society, a hierarchy in that spiritual realm, which they refined and in which they dwell. They managed to expand their scope of being to encompass more then that narrow band where we find ourselves within the entire spectrum of existence. I capitalize the pronouns that refer to Him out of respect and praise. I do this because in the hierarchy of that spiritual realm He rules because He is King. That is who is God.

Belief goes without saying. I know.