Beliefs are like sand in water, it flows with forces and lodges in bars and beaches, spits and shoals, each changing with the storms and droughts solid for a time even rooting life then dissolved and are carried a way to appear somewhere some day or even deposited to arise an ancient stone at an unfathomable time and place. The rivers and oceans, the forces, are unopposed by the sand except by friction and gravity and time.
Until I was 18 I believed that I was gifted of God. I was in a special place, in a special denomination, with special knowledge, and I was called to do special things. What an ass I was. So I went to a school for like type asses. I began to learn and unlearn. It felt so good. Learning was a real gift but it didn't support my beliefs of all those special things I was and from. I clung hard and tired not to leave the embrace of my belief. My nation however required that I follow another belief In conflict with mine of God. The Military had my butt, even if god had my heart.
Killing....hunting down...finding ...having killed... ordering killed...sacrificing deaths for deaths...sitting high...influencing destruction....corollary casualties calculated and caused... embracing my warrior I let slip my belief in God. On my return my embrace was a mere net but it contained both a GOD and a god. The GOD was outgrowing the net holding my belief and my god had shrunk so small that it slipped through the holes of the net. GOD now was too large to embrace and no net could hold him and yet he was no longer my belief. Not even an existence. Beyond existence he was just...GOD....beliefs for me could no longer access a God outside of being.
My sand sunk to the shelf of the ocean into which my river flowed.
It took a trip of my seven decades to fall there. Mixing with pollution and fish shit it may re-emerge maybe as stone.
Now I rely on the beliefs needed for simple evolution need to move the simple to complex to what ever random thing I may have to behold with to beyond my existence, beyond any belief, to experience the beyond existence GOD ever so slightly.
There is no god, but God that is not.