Just curious, Maxxwyat, but why do you care whether or not you believe in god? What motivates you to care?
Are you looking for some solace or comfort to come from such a belief? Do you wish, perhaps, to drive away some fears you harbor about your place in the universe or about the meaninglessness of life?
Do people significant to you believe in god and you want to share that with them for the sake of community?
Or is there some other reason or reasons you care whether or not you believe in god?
So far as I know, it is easy to believe in god. All most of us need is a strong enough motive. With a strong enough motive for belief -- not just in god, but in anything, really -- most of us will sooner or later find some way to believe. And not just those of us who lack intellectual discipline. Plenty of relatively intellectually disciplined people have found ways to escape their discipline in order to believe all sorts of things -- one just needs a strong enough motive, really.
But belief or faith alone is never certain. Even the most staunch believers, the most faithful people I personally know of have doubts. They go from belief to doubt -- quite often very privately -- and doubt to belief. Back and forth, like that. They are a little bit like addicts who keep falling off the wagon only to pick themselves up again and get back on it for awhile. So, I suspect belief or faith alone will never be much more than that for you. Of course, I could be wrong. You might be the exception.
Assuming all of the above is substantially true, would that suffice for you? Would you be content finding a motive strong enough to believe in a god and then wax and wane between periods of belief and doubt like most every person of faith that I personally know of?
Or would you prefer something different?
For there is something different. On relatively rare occasions, some people report experiencing what appears to be a sense of oneness that has been called by many names, including: The All, the One, God, etc. The significant thing here is that they typically do not see what happened to them as a mere shift in beliefs, but as a radically different kind of experience, and some even say that experience leaves all concepts meaningless. A belief, of course, is a concept.
Here is something those people sometimes say: You can be a blind man who believes leaves are green or a sighted man who has experienced leaves as green. The sighted man does not need belief, for he has experience instead.
Now, Maxxwyat, I personally question their experience on a number of levels. For instance, does their experience actually tell them something about god, or is it more like our common experience of color -- which might ultimately be produced by electromagnetic energy in the light spectrum, but which is not an actually property of that spectrum. Again, is their experience somehow produced by deity, or is it solely a product of the brain?
I have all sorts of questions for such people and, in my experience, the shallowest experiences of oneness produce people with the greatest conviction and dogma in asserting that they really experienced god. The most profound experiences of oneness, on the other hand, seem to produce people who hesitate to assert any absolute convictions about what their experiences mean about the nature and existence of deity, although they might still be certain they had the experience of oneness.
But if you are looking for more than a mere belief or faith in deity, I would suggest you begin by reading the accounts of people who claim to have experienced an overwhelming sense of oneness, a One, an All, or a God in their lives. I have spent about 35 years on and off studying such things and for me, at least, it has been quite an interesting journey. I do not regret spending so much time, year in and year out, with it. Speaking only for myself, it's like trying to figure out a rather large and intriguing puzzle. Fortunately, I have learned nothing of importance yet, so the puzzle is always fresh and challenging.
My last question to you is a bit different than the rest. Are you assuming that spirituality is the same as some notion, belief, or faith in deity? I ask because one way of looking at spirituality is to see it as the extent and manner in which a person deals with their psychological self, their ego, and all of the consequences and effects of being an animal with an ego or psychological self. In that sense, everyone is in one way or another, to one extent or another, spiritual. Even those of us who have no gods.
