Carl Sagan and his fans (me among them) understand your sense of awe. I do think it's important not to forget that when you lose religion. I also think it's important, as Sagan probably did, for the secular world--for humanity--to reclaim it as part of being human (whether you call it spiritual or not).

> but the sense of awe after giving sufficient consideration is difficult to differentiate from feeling god

Do you think that, in a universe with a proven-real, interventionist diety—picture, say, the Architect in the Matrix—that "feeling god" would really be a feeling of awe?

I'd personally expect it to be mostly a feeling of fear, at how insignificant and easy-to-accidentally-kill you are.

Imagine the feeling of being made aware of an entire galaxy, one containing quadrillions of lifeforms, getting sucked into a black hole.

Imagine the feeling of knowing that if you ask a question, a million consciousnesses might be created and then destroyed in order to answer it.

In short, imagine the feeling of someone else having an omnipotent magical genie.

Feeling at one with the flow of the universe is, to me, the exact opposite of "feeling god." It's feeling that we're operating in a system with a static set of rules; a feeling that nobody has the capacity to declare humanity forfeit by fiat (but instead has to "work for it" through regular physics, in a way that we might be able to defend against through other physics); etc. It's a feeling that the universe is a fair game rather than a rigged one, at least on the quantum-chromodynamics level.

I agree the fact we exist and we can consider our existence is something special but still it won't help me with believing that things will be better tomorrow or that there is an afterlife.

when I was a child I wanted to become a priest, I read all the books and I was a believer, the giant mistake the priests and religion teacher made is to be dogmatic, like to still consider that "creation happened as it is said in Bible, that the world is 5000 years old and avoiding though questions with a story where X did Y and then God done Z. I seen on YT interview with smarter clerics that are not as dogmatic and acknowledged some issues and if my teachers were like that maybe I would have kept my faith.

At least the priest/teachers are paid from taxes to tell our children stories and contradict science /s (this is in Romania btw)

"that the world is 5000 years old"?

Don't blame 'religion' in general for such things when frankly only a tiny group of people actually believe that; mostly American frankly.

And also contemplate that there might be reasons why spiritual affiliations have a tendency towards dogma - it's a powerful social instrument. Almost all groups of every kind are dogmatic, it's what we use to 'fill in the blanks' and for most of illiterate or semi-literate history it was 'good enough'. It can be used for good or evil surely, but it's pragmatic.

Everyone seems to be arguing about religion but not focusing on what aspects of it might relate to the ostensible success of AA.