I'm a clinical psychologist, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, an author, a pod caster, public speaker, and today I'm surrounded by 25 atheists.

It seems like I do know what I'm missing. Is there something that I missed over years of study, both this issue formally and living out religion, so deeply?

My background is in studying to become a traditional Catholic priest, daily mass, daily rosary, going on long retreats, deep into the magisterium and biblical hermeneutics like I was thoroughly in it.

My experience with atheists is twofold, is that they have a very reductive notion of what constitutes God, let's say, in Judeo Christian tradition. And they've often been hurt by someone who was religious or by the religious enterprise or perhaps by God himself, so to speak.

You've defined religion so broadly to include any sort of having aim in life, any sort of cultural archetypes, having a metaphorical substrate. And atheism to you is a very specific type of, like, three people in the world that are these Raskolnikov type — they wanna get away with a perfect murder. It seems like you have the reductive view of what an atheist is.

You obviously feel that you missed something when you were practicing for the priesthood. Your aim was off then. So there's always the possibility that it's still off now.

There are as many gods out there as there are believers because everybody has mutually exclusive and different views of what God is.

If everybody had mutually exclusive views of what God is, no one could speak to each other. The mere fact of communication presumes a commonality of assumption and definition.

The Bible can't precisely say anything because there are so many different exegetical and hermeneutic views of this particular book and that everybody has agreed or everybody has disagreed historically on, it seems like, even the most benign detail about a book this big. It seems like you can only say that the Bible says something if you first presuppose that it's univocal.