Religion can be the biggest kind of atheism, because of this. Religion can be the biggest denier of the real God because it denies or cannot accept that God is other than myself, that I must transcend my ego separateness in order to know God. So right from the beginning of the biblical tradition, the people who received the revelation of God as the ‘I Am’, of the burning bush were not able to sustain this revelation easily. They were constantly going off and jumping into bed with other local cults and religions and false gods who were more like themselves. They didn’t have to bother about the ‘I Am’ mystery of God; they just acted promiscuously with gods who reflected their own desires. So the ego has a big responsibility for creating an illusory view of reality, which it does almost unconsciously. It’s like a servant who thinks it is doing what the master wants it to do but is not checking, ‘Am I doing a good job? Is this what you really want me to do?’ It makes too many assumptions and acts on its own initiatives. And that’s because the master isn’t properly checking what the servant is doing, it’s not checking that what it is doing is right and is what is really needed.
( The Brick Wall of the Ego 2 by Laurence Freeman OSB )
