@coluber2001,
coluber2001 wrote:
God only exists to an egoless person since the divine experience is the experience of the whole and the ego is the breaking of the whole into parts.
The ego forms an image of god, but that is always a mistake. It's sort of like the idea of love is not the same thing as love. So, one can say, " I believe in love or I don't believe in love," but neither is actual love, since love is a subjective experience. The Divine is a subjective experience and belief or non-belief has nothing to do with it.
For as Heinrich Zimmer said, "The most important thing can't be talked about, and the second most important things refer to the first, and they are always misunderstood."
Yes, the story of Lucifer's fall from grace as an angel is a story of going from being an angel in service to God's will to being a competitor with God in a self-construed competition for glory and pride.
To construe God as egoistic requires construing Him as separate from us, His children. The moment we seek to be angels in harmony with His will, ego is gone and our only motive is to achieve goodness and do the right thing to the best of our abilities.
Construing God as egoistic also serves the (satanic) function of causing enmity between us and Him. I.e. if we think of Him as egoistic, then we will think of Him as bad and be opposed to him. It's like when you think of the police as bad or corrupt, you automatically feel enmity toward them, which makes you seem like a criminal. It's the same with God if you construe Him as bad, then you put yourself in opposition to Him.
To construe God and thus yourself as good, you have to hold the belief that the universe was created by a fundamentally good spirit and that the universe is in a state of deviation from ideal perfection (i.e. sin). Then, if you put yourself on the side of God/goodness/angels, you seek only to do God's good work of helping heal the universe of sin. Then you have to pray and hope for God to reveal ways of helping the universe without further harming it, or by harming it in ways that are ultimately good for it, i.e. the way a fever harms the body a bit to help it heal from an infection.
Now, if you read that last sentence, you should realize there are secular/atheists who will construe that as some kind of terrorist manifesto, but in reality it is just another way of expressing the biblical concept of positive discipline that a good father deals to his children for the sake of their own good. "Spare the rod spoil the child" doesn't really mean you're supposed to spank your children, necessarily; but it is a general metaphor for the importance of discipline, even punitive discipline, rather than encourage spoilage.