God

“Many people behave as if they do believe in god”, but “not many people believe in god. They want, hope, think, wish, try, very hard to be devout, and for some periods they do actually believe and think they are better for it” (Daniel Dennett). I think this is an accurate assessment of religious people. Most view belief as a benefit to them and a way to make up for the original sin and their existing sins. Due to the lack of evidential support (including personal contact and communication) it means that a believer must take a leap of faith.
This road can be a hard one to travel, as there are questions asked and left unanswered, a presence sought after and yet an absence felt as one looks outside of themself for phenomenological experiences to transpire. “Mother Teresa, who is likely to be canonized, admitted that she had begun to doubt God. [Her] life, shows that she felt alone and in a state of spiritual pain from around 1949…[a]lthough she publicly proclaimed that her heart belonged ‘entirely to the Heart of Jesus’, she wrote to the Rev. Michael Van Der Peet, a spiritual confidant, in September 1979 that ‘Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak. More than 40 other letters, many of which she had asked to be destroyed in her will, show her fighting off feelings of ‘darkness’ and ‘torture’. ‘Lord, my God, you have thrown [me] away as unwanted unloved’… ‘I call, I cling, I want, and there is no one to answer, no, no one. Alone. Where is my faith? even deep down right in there is nothing. I have no faith. I dare not utter the words and thoughts that crowd in my heart.’…’I am told God loves me, and yet the reality of the darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?’ She even compared her problems to hell and admitted that she had begun to doubt the existence of heaven and God. ‘The smile,’ she wrote, ‘is a mask or a cloak that covers everything. I spoke as if my very heart was in love with God, a tender personal love. If you were there you would have said, 'What hypocrisy'." (Richard Dawkins.Net)
This is a common mistake for most people who dedicate the whole of their existence to a separate male being. Instead if they would look deeply into themselves and see that it is the interconnectedness of all life obtained through deep self-examination as displayed by the life of Ramana Maharshi. When this is practiced one would begin to understand the whole of themselves and that all existence is what is most commonly referred to as god. Within communication with their spirit and with spirits in all things that are living is their relationship to it (god). This is not to say that emergence into anything will always be fulfilling, as with all things there is ebb and flow, balance. But, for the person who is of the persuasion to believe I would challenge them to focus their energies inward and then they will begin to see what so naturally springs forth.