Anything related to politics and religion is a landmine, but I think I can handle this gracefully.
I was raised Christian, going to church regularly until middle school when the family got too busy. I attended Sunday school as a child and played trumpet in the choir for a couple years.
I took courses in Western and Eastern philosophy in college, which has informed some of my perspective.
I’ve recently been influenced by ideas of Gnosticism, in part due to Prof. Jiang on YouTube.
Our religions have oddly specific similarities to each other, whether it be myths of a great flood, designs of temples, or reverence of astrological cycles. If these civilizations did not have direct contact with each other, this suggests a subconscious connection along the lines of what Jung proposed.
A rational, scientific person would say that there is no direct evidence of God’s existence. A more skeptical person would ask how religion has so much power even in our secular current day.
This leads to a rabbit hole of how the religious elite performed rituals to get closer to God and how these practices were gatekept from the people, resulting in the fake feeling religions we have today.
As long as we don’t know what human consciousness is, this will remain unanswerable.