You won’t believe in God if you don’t have sufficient evidence.
That’s a good cognitive habit.
Sometimes, life events seem to have a higher-order meaning.
At other times, they seem random.
No one believes in God because of glimpses of purpose in jumbled events.
They simply entertain the possibility.
There is a third category of valid knowledge besides logic and personal experience:
Other people’s experience.
Near-death experiences are largely consistent between human cultures.
They result in unexplained knowledge like the ability to repeat conversations that took place in distant rooms and to describe deceased relatives the experiencer had never heard of.
Experiencers report encountering God as the Infinite Absolute or the Sublime Radiance.
They speak of an infinite, all-powerful Love.
They describe life as a classroom.
These experiences don’t answer all our questions about why things happen.
But people who’ve had them have an unshakable belief in God, which they call simple, experiential knowledge.
They become more spiritual but less religious.
They resonate with the mystics of every tradition but no longer identify with the beliefs of any tradition.
These experiences are associated with joy, gratitude, love, and many other benefits.
Studies have shown that reading about them has exactly the same effect on the reader (as the experiencer).
My, that’s a simple spiritual path!
I believe in God just by reading NDEs.
Careful analysis has been done to rule out simple explanations like dreams, hallucinations, and confabulation.
There are millions of these experiences and thousands of recent descriptions.
Medical researchers have taken the time to study and compile them.
I find these compilations to be as good as any religious text and far better than any theology.
If you want to verify the existence of China, it’s just simpler to chat with your Chinese neighbor and read contemporary articles than to read the existing scraps of Marco Polo’s journals.
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