I am an "atheist" that believes in God, but am as some would call it, a panthiest.
I know that this is a wall text, but I have shared this idea with many atheists and devout people alike, and many seem to think that it is a plausible idea. I've given it much thought so I will write this as well as possible.
So I do believe in God, but am also an atheist; I will explain.
By being atheist, I mean I do not believe in the traditional sense of God. I do not believe that there is a conscious, morally just creature above. So, what I'm trying to say is that I do not believe in God in the traditional way people believe in him or it. This is important to my explanation and will be explained at the end. Before that I will first explain my personal understanding of what a greater being is to me.
I do believe in an afterlife, but I do not believe in heaven or hell.
I do believe that there is a greater entity on the cosmic scale larger than us humans and that it has a form of control over our lives. But, that control I do not believe to be conscious in our traditional definition of it.
With the knowledge of the billions of stars in our galaxy alone, and the billions of galaxies in the universe I am left to think that it is almost an infinite, timeless, continuum of kaleidoscope like, fractal like mutations of cosmic elements (also known as atoms).
Essentially, I am trying to understand the universe with just the observations that humans have made - which seems to be that the universe is simply a continually recycling hodgepodge of elements, chemicals, and essentially cosmic dust.
This is important because I believe that humans are simply an aggregation of this cosmic dust and nothing special, only statistically rare.
I do not believe in the soul in the traditional sense, but I do believe it in the sense that our ideas and spirits are carried onto the next generation as ideas, memories, and culture.
I do not believe in afterlife in the traditional sense, but I do believe in the afterlife in the sense that when this body and its lifecycle ends, its atoms will disassemble and be available for other entities and or objects on this planet, and the far future other planets possibly. so by afterlife I meant that my ideas, memories, impact on culture, and molecular building blocks will move on to other objects and entities in our cosmic address.
This all comes back to my main point, that I do believe religion was created with good intent and the right ideas, just simply in the incorrect format, being a story. I believe that the older generations that created the Bible had an idea that our cosmos was an ever living, breathing hodgepodge of elements, also known as life. I believe that God is really just the collective universe. Not one thing is God, but all the consummated parts equal God.
So I believe that science and religion are actually interestingly saying almost the same thing except in different shades or languages - that the universe is almost a living being that has control over our lives as humans, but once our turn ends as a human body and we return to the state of being cosmic dust we resume our connection with the cosmic level (God/universe).
But, in the end I believe we are constantly as a collective God/universe. I simply think that the human mind and inabilities to see nonmoving entities as living prevents us from believing that the entirety of the universe is life. So I do not believe life necessarily ends but there are just mutations and different cycles of it in the larger collective of the singular life that is God/Universe.
So, really I think that religion was actually on the right track (aka pointing out the timelessness of the universe), but assumed that the masses would not be able to grasp this concept, so created a story for people to understand and follow. I believe this because even today with so much knowledge, people still do not construct thoughts of their own. And by creating this story, people started to take it as literal truth and down the line like a game a telephone, religion and its ideas have shifted into what it is today, the idea that there is an omnipresent being watching over us with moral objectivity.
If you simply see the universe from the universe's perspective and not ours (which is filled with morals and emotions), you can see that there is no right or wrong in the universe, there is no pain or love, these are all constructs of the human condition of living. By having these concepts of emotions, we project it onto other things and thus try to understand the universe through this biased perspective.
It makes much more sense that the universe is morally unbiased, that it has no exact thoughts, that this god universe is just a beautiful dance of smaller microcosms of itself, slowly at some points getting to the point of creating what we humans call "life" - we humans are the universe talking about itself.
I have thought about this for the past decade, read many philosophical, scientific, and religious documents and textbooks to come to a conclusion that religion and science are pointing at the same idea, just in very different ways. Please tell me if this makes sense. Thank you for reading this.