Do you have to believe in God?

Do you have to believe in God? 

Wow what a loaded question! Recently, a new friend asked me this , thanks Dawn. How would I "do what I do" without a belief system that honors the Creator of the infinite universes in existence? I believe it would be impossible for me,  but you may or may not be able to "do what you do" without that same belief system. 

When I say "do what you do" I mean, live your life. There are many components to living.. like how you do your work, parent your children, make your decisions about how you spend your time and energy and loyalty. You can function well without any sort of belief system that includes a scripted version of God/ess, Great Spirit, Higher consciousness... the God of your understanding for lack of anything else to say since the list could go on and on. You may simply prescribe to a moral code of right and wrong. Your code of ethics may be more or less evolved than that too. Who should say? We live in a society that allows for religious freedom, or even the freedom for non-religious belief. Spirituality is a religious expression and yet is not a religion. 

I'm fairly certain that there are as many different Spiritual belief systems as there are people who exist. For example, I am a Spiritualist. A Spiritualist is someone who believes in the continuity of the life and the soul. I have met many Spiritualists and have yet to meet one that holds my SAME belief system. Every person has a very different way of walking their path. Spiritual paths are very personal. 

My parents thought that every person needs to have the maturity to find and then choose a path that makes the most amount of sense to them. 

I think finding your path is a great first step..... but that every step of your journey on that path will better form your understanding of who you are in relation to the world around you and to the God of your understanding. I don't think one has to believe in God. I think everyone believes in something different even if their path is fundamentally similar. Even for those who believe in nothing, that's still a path. There are differing paths for Christians, Catholics, Muslims, Hindus, Taoists, Buddhists, Atheists, Agnostics Wiccan, Santerians, Spiritists, Sufis, Rastafarians, Sikhs, Swintons,  Druids, Voodooers and Jewish folks and every person who aligns to one of these or any other path.

I'd like to think that there is an animating force inside each of us that is a spark of life that is in existence but not limited to the physical mechanics of the functioning body. That spark of life may be important to understand or not. Who or what created that spark may be important or not, just like I don't really need to know who created my car in order to buy one that works well. I can get my car serviced by someone who knows how to fix cars since I don't know how to do it, I can put gas in my car even though I don't know who created the gas, I can enter an address into the built in GPS system and arrive at a final destination even though I don't know who created the roads for me to get there. I can benefit from many aspects of having the car without ever cracking the owners manual, or even knowing who wrote the manual. The owners manual may be helpful at times if something is wrong and I don't understand the lights on the dashboard, but I could choose to fumble through the difficulty and hope the warning light just goes away. 

Life is sort of like having a car... you may drive your life without ever considering who made the life, you may put fuel in the tank without considering where the fuel came from or who created the fuel, you may head towards a destination without checking the internal GPS and still get there, you may get the car serviced without checking the mechanics credentials and you may have drive the life for a long time never having checked the manual even though warning lights may have been flashing for quite some time. You may never care about the fact the owners manual has been right in the glove box. You may have aced the drivers test and got a license to do so without ever really learning the rules of the road. Life is as deep as we want to make it, we will most likely get more use of the vehicle we have if we take the time to study more about the instructions that are already in existence and meant to help achieve a smoother or more direct route to our final destination. Life is like that, and you get to decide if you want to read a manual. 

Believe in God or not but just know that the choice was always yours. We have free will and I for one would fight to defend your right to decide what works for you.