God Outside Religion?

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Does God exist outside of religion or within it? Were the founders of all world religions influenced by the same Creator at different times & places?

Since the founders are long dead how can you ever find out?

Obviously, this question is not aimed at them.

I'm inclined to think one creative energy/force/being, filtered through peoples' cultural lenses.

I believe so, too.

If you read accounts from the mystics of various traditions, their experiences are generally expressed in a very similar way. It's only when those insights become crystallized into formal religious practice that they take on cultural coloring and, eventually, come out looking very different from one another.

I think that God must be separate from religion. Religion is corruptible - people can pervert it to fit any ideal that they please, until it becomes difficult to distinguish the truth from the fiction. I think that the true discovery of God must be through individual experience, because the dogma is largely influenced by man, and man is largely corruptible. And I would hope that an understanding God or Gods would not care how people perceive their shape, but how people choose to live their lives and treat others.