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I want to share a few kind words about atheists. Looking at God from an atheist's point of view makes tremendous sense to me, and I believe that the atheist point of view is a necessary step on the road to ultimately finding God.

God is not easy to discover from where we stand as a race of humans on earth. As a matter of fact, He is so difficult to find that we have devised hundreds of way to find Him and describe Him. Buried deep down inside of each of us is the knowledge that we are each God. That knowledge is extremely threatening to the ego, and so the ego has taken the idea of God and twisted these hundreds of confusing, scaring, and even contradictory descriptions of Him and of what He wants, to the point that God has become associated with the absolutely ridiculous beliefs and actions so many of us have carried out over the millennia in His name. A job well done by the ego. Create a God that is so confusing with so many negative traits, that He's not at all worth the trouble to find.

Look at any religion and eventually, along will come someone who says, "Hey, that doesn't make any sense!" And he/she would be right because, in general, religions don't deal in sense; they deal in faith alone, without context or substance. Atheists, of course, can't be lumped together to explain their beliefs, but the kind of atheist who really takes the time to think about man's stories about God and endeavors to make sense of them is someone who is really trying to understand a deeper concept about him- or herself. This questioning and doubting is extremely important to every individual's personal growth, and it is a path that we must all eventually take, if we haven't already, before we can move beyond it to something that really does make sense.

Generally, the atheist begins as most of the rest of us, from the point of view that is presented at an early age; life on earth has an invisible, powerful creator. Depending where the child grows up, that child is presented, usually, with that location's prevailing viewpoint about God. We learn what we are taught, and we absorb what surrounds us.

There comes a point in most everyone's life where we begin to become curious about all things. For many, this simply means we ask a lot of questions as we grow up, and blindly accept the answers, no matter how incomplete that are. When it comes to God, there aren't a lot of very good answers, but that vagueness is also part of the answer; we just can't know yet. Wait until you die. In the meantime, just accept this vague answer as correct. For many, if not most, people, this is the way we live, and this is why religions continue and proliferate. We accept these tepid answers and live our lives without any real understanding of life's purpose, but that's OK. There's a lot to do even without a god.

For others, they continue beyond the incomplete answers and actually begin an active search for meaning. Generally, these people either go on to be lifelong seekers of God, or atheists. There is almost nothing else to become. Until one finds a complete answer, one must either continue looking or give up entirely. I believe that most of us become atheists after living many lifetimes of frustrating religious lives. It seems inevitable.

If we look at any and all religions , and we are honest about it, God is not to be found within. The atheist knows this. If anyone doubts what I say, please consider reading Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I agree with absolutely everything he says in this book. It is well-written and irrefutable. Religions are not only universally incorrect about God but they are very bad for society, simply because they take that incorrect information and impose it on society in a way that is usually much more destructive than helpful. Hitchens' book is full of very sad but well-known examples. Religious opinions are always presented as fact and are used to excuse the most egregious moral behavior.

As I said, many, if not most, people come to their understanding of God by their societal environment, and come to accept it, if not weakly. I came to God from another perspective. For some reason, I knew at an early age that there was a God. When I say "knew," I don't mean that in an arrogant way. It was not an in-your-face knowledge. It was a quiet knowledge that I never shared with anyone. I just was certain that there was a God. I didn't know how I knew, or why I knew. I didn't even question myself about it. But as soon as I began going to Lutheran church as a child, something seemed very wrong with what I was hearing. I didn't do anything about it. I never made waves or spoke up or even asked questions. I just thought it was all silly. There just weren't any explanations or answers that made me feel like there was any truth involved. It just seemed like a bunch of old men, standing in front of us in positions of earthly authority, making stuff up. So, I quietly went along with it on the outside, but rejected it soundly on the inside.

My religion, of course, was not all bad. Many religions contain moral codes which, in some cases are very helpful. As a Lutheran, I grew up with the Bible, and I always thought the teachings of Jesus were very appealing. But as soon as we got past the gospels, it all started going bad again.

So, as I said, I came to it from a different perspective than an atheist. I started out knowing there was a God, and eventually, after many years of reading and exploring, I concluded without a doubt that religion had nothing to do with God. So, instead of rejecting God because of religion, as an atheist might, I pledged to myself to find God in spite of religion.

When I first began my search in earnest after I graduated from college, there were some huge problems I had to overcome. Finding God first meant that there had to be a God worth finding. I was not looking for a God of vengeance. I was looking for a God of love. I was not looking for a God who was mysterious and wanted to hide things from me. I was not interested in a God who punished us or sent us to an eternity in hell for minor infractions. I wasn't interested in a God who demanded that His son be killed as a sacrifice. So, I began to listen to other people explain their strange versions of God and life, or their wild explanations of real life experiences that fly in the face of anything I had heard before.

This was in the early 1970s, and I quickly found some very interesting alternative literature about God. First, I found Edgar Cayce and Carlos Casteneda and Jane Roberts, and then I found Yogananda and Ramakrishna and Gopi Krishna and dozens of others. I was hooked on all of these interesting takes on life. They were all much better than my experience with any religion. I became what I would call a New Age, or metaphysical person, whatever that meant. I took all of these versions of life, and absorbed them into my being. I saw the similarities in all of them. I understood what they were trying to say. I was able to put it all together in my mind and come to a real and powerful understanding of God.

Except for one thing.

No matter how hard I tried, no matter what mental hoops I jumped through, I just couldn't reconcile one simple thing about God and all of the teachings I had read; how could a God of unconditional love create a world so absolutely full of countless ways to suffer that ends in certain death?

And this is a problem that atheists also have, and this is also why I am so fond of atheists who question the existence of God. Why do we need a god, and if there is a god, isn't he quite a flawed God to have created such an imperfect world? Even with the idea of reincarnation, allowing us to improve ourselves over many lifetimes to supposedly reduce our own suffering, I was still struggling. I was trying so hard to learn and understand, and yet my life was so miserable. I wasn't physically suffering but I was in constant mental anguish over romantic relationships and friendships and financial issues and career issues and just general meaning in life. I was a serious student of God, yet my life seemed a never-ending mess. What was wrong with this picture? I was a firm seeker of God, and yet somehow, on some level, I also seemed very close to being an atheist, simply because this life didn't work according to the spiritual material I was reading. I have never stopped believing, yet I have also never stopped doubting what I learned and questioning more. The only difference between me and an atheist is that I knew the answer was out there somewhere. Atheists, in general, don't believe in God because religions don't make any sense, and because they can't find a definition of God that makes any sense in the context of this flawed universe.

I came to A Course in Miracles when I was in my late 50s. I had first read part of it in the early 1990s after Marianne Williamson published A Return to Love. I couldn't read it somehow. After all the countless books I had read up until that point, it just didn't resonate with me. I didn't like the language and it bored me to tears. I picked it up again a few more times within the next 20 years or so, but it still never worked for me. Then I read The Disappearance of the Universe by Gary Renard when it first came out. I quickly realized that this was a powerful book but it said something about the Course that I had not noticed. It said that this life and this universe didn't exist. At all. That not only didn't sit right with me, it made me angry. The more I thought about it, the more was pissed off I became. Really pissed off. This was turning everything upside down, and asking me to throw out my life. It invalidated me at a deep level and I resented it. My ego was ready to take one for the team.

I had just moved to Las Vegas in 2008 and Gary was speaking there at the Hay House Conference in the summer of that year. I specifically went to see him so that when he asked for questions at the end of his talk, I could rant at him in a pissed off tirade about this being a dream. I had it all planned out. I was ready. When he spoke, I sat waiting for my chance but he never asked for questions, and even though I was disappointed, I was also a little relieved. It was just as well. I wasn't mad at him, I was mad at the Course. This apparently was also the conference where he met his wife Cindy, the Arten to his Pursah, or is it the Pursah to this Arten? I'm glad my anger didn't get in the way of that meeting.

Anyway, no matter how angry I was at what the Course said, I had vowed from the beginning of my search for God that I would never stop my searching and questioning. In spite of the anger I felt, I never stopped wondering if this could be true. Could this be a dream? I knew about the Om symbol representing the idea of Maya, the illusion, the thinnest of veils that separates us from God, so I was aware that this was not an idea unique to the Course. But I also knew that this was different. There was something here that intrigued me and scared me at the same time.

I thought about it for five years.

I thought about it a lot. It is no small thing to believe that this is a dream, that it doesn't exist, that it's a figment of my imagination, just like my nighttime dreams, and that everything I've done for the last 60 years or so has meant absolutely nothing, except maybe for the good thoughts I've thought. Do you really expect me to acknowledge that? Come on! This me that I supposedly am doesn't exist? Wow.

Unfortunately, the more I thought about it, the more credible it sounded. The more I thought about it, the more it started to sound like something that was about to change everything I had ever thought about myself, life and God. It scared me more and more as the enormity of it started to sink in. It scared the ever-loving crap out of me. I kept trying to understand that this life was real, as I had always done, but that idea was starting to lose the battle in my head. The dream was starting to become more and more understandable, and the idea that whatever was really real, was beyond my current horizon. One day, I realized that I had finally crossed that line. I had not only come to believe that this was a dream, but I also realized, much to my absolute shock, that this new belief was the final solution to everything I had always doubted about God, and was the final piece of the puzzle to really understanding what this life was all about. It was what I had always been looking for! It was the game changer. It wasn't just a difficult idea, it was the single most important idea I had ever come across, and the idea that allowed everything to fall into place. The dream that I had so soundly rejected was the answer to my dreams. God can very much exist and also be unconditional love because He didn't create this world of suffering! We made it. He didn't kill his Son for our sins! He isn't absent. We just don't want Him around.

So, after five years, I picked up the Course once again, and this time, something profound happened. From the first sentence, I got it. I was hooked. Every word made perfect sense. Well, not every word, but almost. I was absorbed with it and began to read it as fast as I could comprehend it. I cried through most of it. It seemed there was something on every page that touched my soul. So, after hundreds of books and decades of searching for the God I knew must exist, I finally found Him, and I finally found myself. A few weeks after I started reading the Course, I had a dream. I was standing outside on a sidewalk, and from my right side, a hand extended the Course book to me, and a voice said, "This is the last book you'll ever need." And that was that.

So, the problem for me and all of the atheists out there isn't that God doesn't exist; it's that he's very difficult to find because of all of the obstacles we have put in place to keep Him hidden. All of the gods created by religion are ridiculous. I don't mean that in an insulting way. I mean that from a logical point of view. They are nonsensical concepts. They are shadows, created by the ego, in the image of the ego, in the service of the ego. God is difficult to find because the ego has made Him hard to find on purpose. So, the first step in finding God is to reject these distractions purporting to be God. That's hard enough, and may cause many who are reading this to feel anger. That's OK. Many atheists focus on attacking God through religion, without realizing religion has nothing to do with the real God. If we can all stop believing that some sort of man-made religion is the only way to explain a deity, then maybe it would be possible to find a God that is worth believing in and one that makes sense in spite of the insanity of this world.

The second step, after letting go of finding God within any religion, is to then come to some understanding that there still may be a God, in spite of all of the ego evidence to the contrary. Even outside of religion, bad ideas about God abound. That doesn't mean there isn't a God! It just means that you have to have the courage to let go of the bad ideas. Everyone has an opinion, and just about all of them are ego-based distractions. The ego has made this search for God as hard a task as there could possibly be. Finding God is the ego's ultimate threat, and so the ego employs the ultimate weapons to thwart any real search.

So, what kind of a God could possibly exist? He doesn't exist within religion and, besides that, He seems quite absent in every other way, especially if you aren't looking for Him with any passion. It's quite easy to believe that we made Him up. He didn't create this, according to atheists, and they are correct. What do you need Him for anyway? So, after you have gone through your blind acceptance of a nonsensical God, and then your rejection of God and religion, then you have to somehow get back to accepting He exists, but then you have to ask yourself Who is He and where is He and what does He want? And then, after that long and confusing road the ego has laid out for you, the final step is to accept that, because God did not create this world, it doesn't exist, and neither do you. How does a normal Joe or Jane, standing in line at the Starbucks before work, get from where they are to that bit of radical thinking? The final step requires that you throw out everything you thought you knew about yourself and everything else, and give in to the idea that this world doesn't exist by overcoming your deepest beliefs that it is absolutely real and true. This is the scariest step of all because it requires that you become one of "those people," who are obsessed with God and uninterested in this life. Many of you may disagree with this statement but it is the inevitable result of finding yourself. Who you are now does not exist; your personality, your quirks, your likes and dislikes. None of it is true, and so it must go. All of your ideas about yourself must go. If it's hard to understand this world as a dream, it is even harder to understand yourself as one. Joe and Jane cannot work on themselves to gain entrance into heaven. The Son of God must stop believing He is Joe and Jane before He can realize that He's never left it.

Most of us get to these beliefs slowly over time. How long do you have to hang on to yourself before you can begin to let it all go? How many days will you awaken from sleep and give your energy, time and effort to this non-existent world and your fake personality? It is a very narrow window to find God. It is also a window that you must find on your own, through trial and error, lifetime after lifetime of learning and unlearning, of suffering and pain, joy and ecstasy, frustration and anguish, hope and despair. How does one find it? How can one travel to that narrow pathway that leads away from an all-encompassing, magnificent dream to a tiny, hidden corridor that holds only the timid hope that there's something more?

I only know how I did it, and so have many others. I also understand that even though I feel my searching for God is over, now I have the tremendous task of acting on what I have learned. Now, I have to wake up from the dream. I can only do that by withdrawing from it, by not giving it importance or energy or reality, by changing my mind about myself and everything else through forgiveness. So now the work begins. I will always keep an open mind to any possibilities that I might have missed, but after all of the paths I have pursued, and all of the doubts I have felt through decades and even lifetimes, I finally feel I know what to do. Everything I thought I was supposed to do turned out to be false and misleading. Now I know about the power of forgiveness and the purpose of my life here on fake earth. I understand why forgiveness works, and why it is my only purpose. Even if, for some strange reason, forgiveness turns out to be the wrong path, it still seems like it's quite a good direction to go in for a few decades, and I know I will feel better about myself for having pursued it. Now I know where to find God, on that tiny pathway in that obscure corner of my mind. And I understand why it's so hard for so many to find Him. I hope I can help a few as I walk in that direction.