The Existence of Gods.

No. You don’t get it. Gods exist the way Socrates (Historically), Siegfried(Mythically), and Gandalf(Fictionally) exist.

Given that enough people study the wisdom of that mythos that emotional and intellectual norms develop from the ‘ritualization’, those gods exist in effect on our behavior if not in cause.

These gods function as a standard of measurement at our most intuitionistic and most universal scale.

Sympathy with shared experience and Synchronicity due to universal subjectivity to the same temporal streams of information, achieves what we consider supernatural, but is simply the consequence the culmination of patterns of behavior in concert with momentary information.

I talk to gods every day. For the technique to work, whether with the god, a therapist, a friend, or yourself, you must be unable to lie in the role-play (prayer).

If you can manage emotional and intellectual honesty with any god (collectively shared pattern of values), then you can obtain the benefit of the character’s frame of reference.

The reason being that it is extremely hard for us to be intellectually honest with ourselves, and the act of speaking whether external or internal, forces continuous recursive disambiguation, which forces our brains to test our thoughts, just as we test our thoughts while we are speaking to others and anticipating their responses. By and large this system works extraordinarily well.

If you combine that with self authoring and the virtues and select characters from history to represent those virtues and goals, and if you read enough about those people, you will in fact, obtain their wisdom through role playing discourse (prayer) – assuming you can practice intellectual honesty.

Now, some of us lack the agency for this and this is why we have doctrine. But admission that you require doctrine is admission that you lack the agency to call yourself fully human.

This is acceptable as long as you do not claim to possess the agency necessary to influence the decisions of others.

And as such those of us who have agency must police those that do not, such that those who do not possess agency do not attempt to spread their lack of it.