The Three Standard Questions About God

I have long thought I would be interested in "philosophy". (But why?) However, I've never studied any existing formal "philosophical" disciplines. As of today (Nov. 27, 2011) I've never taken a philosophy course. Today I think I'm really more interested in being happy, making my own personal philosophy, and finding people who think similarly to it.

This morning on the internet I looked up "philosophy" on google, selected the wikipedia article about philosophy, scanned the list of different branches of philosophy, and selected "philosophy of religion" as one in which I'd be interested. (But why?) Then, again in google, I found www.philosophyofreligion.info. That website poses this sequence of three questions:

1. "Is there a God?",
2. "If there is, then what is he like?", and:
3. "What does that mean for us?".

I shall answer these in my own way, below.

1:

"Is there a God?" Yes.

(But one may ask other questions such as: How would I know? And: Why are we even asking whether there's a God? It may be that many important questions are being left out of this sequence.)

2:

"If there is a God, then what is God like?" I don't know much specific about God (though I'll often opine, and think I know as much as the people around me). To me the word "God" means the highest, best thing or personage. My brief fleeting experience of God the personage was that God is the sort of person who says: "It's okay" and is comforting. I think God is like my parents James and Kathie, who didn't actually say "that's okay" but got the idea across somehow, and who, it seems, encompassed what mattered to me, for a while anyway when I was much younger.

3:

"What does that mean for us?" It means two things for me:

(i) Not much, in normal living and normal thought, because the benignness of the universe (of which God is a part, because "universe" means "everything") is more important than the existence or nonexistence of God.

(ii) When the moment comes when I dare to look reality and God square on, such as a time when I might as well die anyway, or when the moment comes that I'm so desperate that nothing else will be enough, then for me God can be a comforter which transcends (or, in a way, overpowers) everything else. I might have said this about the benignness of the universe, but God's more personal at such a moment, and one usually feels better being comforted by a person than by an inanimate fact, especially if that person encompasses or transcends all the facts.

I believe that God the person does not require worship, and neither saves nor condemns because of worship or the lack of it. I do feel that sincerity counts with God (somehow).

As for the "us" in the question: I don't know what the rest of us think. It's probably better if they answer for themselves rather than me attempting to answer for them.

The answer to both of my "But why?" questions above is: These are the vocabulary or frameworks that I grew up with. It's cultural.

-John L.