Dear Shelby, I have been attracted to your posts all these years because I like you.
Perhaps you should just consider me a lost cause, dear JT, and give me up to my God and my beliefs.
There is a lot of suffering in the world; and much of it can be attributed to beliefs of the Divine as somehow separate from our own authentic be-ing. Believing in this mistaken disunity, our wholeness shatters and is painfully stolen away. Our ultimate and foundational significance is mistakenly seen to be a separate thing; a detached junk out in space and time somewhere; a limited and circumscribable object, deity or personage so small as to be defined by a name. Only in our mind's beliefs of what "God" is, and what "we" are, is endless perfection broken and the blood ooze.
Your language Shelby, seems to me to strongly support separation as you reduce what is important to a nameable object set apart from our most intimate existence and conscious-being. This disunited divide is a lie. It is the biggest and most harmful lie ever told. What the word G-O-D points to is NOT so diminutive as to be separate or absent from our own true Identity and genuine Self. We are not what we believe ourselves to be.
I know what you really are Shelby, you can not be a lost cause. It is only words and beliefs that mistakenly separate and divide us and cause much suffering that I address....not you, dear one.
j