"Buddhists must simply not Know God as *I* do!"

Many people have a real personal and "magical" relationship with what they think of as a personal God.

Buddha supposedly said it is better to believe in a personal God than it is to believe only in this material reality, since at least then you are hoping to overcome selfishness.

But I find that the belief in a personal God is often just a way to obscure the selfishness and subsume it into the idea of serving God (to say nothing of holy war). Of course, there are folks like Peace Pilgrim who seemed to have a "better" God to talk to, but the problem is that her God is not the same God that others are talking to, so ultimately the idea of getting answers from God is almost as bad as getting answers from a magic 8-ball. The real answer you need to get is, the answer to the question, "Are questions simply appearing automatically in this mind due to conditions?"

First of all, what is God? Many people think that God is the "being" that created the universe. Of course, if the universe had a beginning, then logically God must also. If God is beginningless, then the universe could also be beginningless (i.e. Big Bang after Big Bang etc.), thus making God just a useless conceptual addition. In any case, nobody has ever had any evidence that the God they talk to is the creator of the Universe, so what really are we talking about?

Basically, people are talking to some "being" that seems to know everything, and is all-loving, and has some kind of divine quality that can't be easily described. "I" "myself" have talked to such a God on various occasions.

But the one thing that this all-knowing "God" being never seems to know about is dependent origination. Why? Because if God were to explain dependent origination to someone, then they would realize that there is no self, and thus no God either. Instead, this "God" character usually seems strangely concerned with how to help the one talking to him to have a better life and avoid danger--in other words, how to better "live the dream" (the dream of self).

I used to be very hesitant to accept Buddha's teaching of no self/dependent origination, because of these amazing God experiences I'd had. It wasn't until I read "What is Self" by Catholic nun Bernadette Roberts, that I realized that God is merely that which is beyond the self. When perceived from the point of view of a self, the "beyond" or "divine" becomes reified into this God being. Once self is gone, the personal God too is gone, and the "divine" is all that remains, without any beings/labels/concepts to split it up. I think that in Buddhism, the term for this divine nature of all things is "suchness." It is pretty hilarious to imagine using a term like suchness instead of "divinity," I admit!

Here is an excellent post by Soh Wei Yu on his experience of divinity post-realization of anatta (no self).