10 Pontifications on Your Creator
1. Your Creator made everything for a purpose, but that doesn't mean everything automatically fulfills the purpose for which it was created. Things created with free will have the ability to thwart the purpose for which they were created.
2. If you ask your Creator to make you what he (for lack of a better pronoun) wants you to be, he won't do it, because he obviously wants you to be a free-will creature, and free-will creatures can't be forced to do anything. However, they can usually be persuaded, but persuasion can be unpleasant, so it's usually not the best thing to ask for.
3. If you want to be what you were created to be, you should ask your Creator to tell you what he wants you to do. Better yet, say, "I believe [X]. If I'm wrong, please correct me." Binary questions are usually easier to answer than open ended ones. Correction is likely to come in the form of adversity. It looks like punishment, except that you asked for it, and you can make it stop by retracting your request for correction.
4. If you ask your Creator what he wants you to do, you can safely assume that he will communicate sufficiently. Because if he fails to communicate, he cannot rightly hold you accountable for failing to do what he wanted you to do. If you ask for guidance in a particular situation, either he will communicate sufficiently, or he has sufficient reasons not to communicate. Some questions are best left unanswered.
5. Don't tell your Creator how to communicate with you. He knows that better than you do. If you believe he is communicating with you through religion, scripture, people, circumstances, whatever, then assume he is doing so for as long as you believe it. If you believe something to be "the Word of God" then treat it as such for as long as you believe it to be so. But never trust any second hand testimony about "God" more than you trust your own first hand experience of the God you deal with.
6. Your Creator designed your recognition of math, logic, probability, justice, and morality. Though this recognition may be eclipsed by social programming and/or emotional greed, your Creator would not design you to think one way, and then order you to think contrary to it. If a conflict exists between what you are designed to think, and what "God" appears to be telling you to think, you can't be mistaken about what you are designed to think, unless you have allowed social programming and/or emotional greed to eclipse it. Otherwise you must be mistaken about what God is telling you to think. Your Creator may, however, tell you to do something you don't want to do, even though he designed you not to want to do it.
7. If your Creator tells you what he wants you to do, you may not know that he has told you, or what he has told you, but he will cause you to believe what he wants you to believe he wants you to do. (Sorry. Some people require this level of precision.) Otherwise, again, he cannot rightly hold you accountable for failing to do something that you didn't believe he wanted you to do in the first place. But even if you don't know what he wants you to do, he can rightly hold you accountable for failing to do what you believe he wants you to do.
8. If you do what you believe your Creator wants you to do, you may still be wrong, so ask for correction on any questionable move. But even if you are wrong, you deserve credit for attempted obedience.
9. Communication with your Creator will be easier once you overcome your expectation of enjoying it -- or the result of it. You never know for sure that you're right except when it's impossible to be wrong. Knowledge will be gained, but hunger for more knowledge is only briefly satisfied by more knowledge.
10. The best protection against religious insanity is common sense. There are scripture wackos, and voice-in-the-head wackos, and follow-the-leader wackos, but there are no common sense wackos.
Who am I to pontificate? I'm a nobody who tests what he says before publishing it. If you doubt me, duplicate my experiments.
to think to be probable
It can also mean "to choose," or "to put trust in" but that is a willful action and is not the intended meaning anywhere on this page.
probability judgment based on remembered observation of consistent cause-effect relationships interpreted by inductive reasoning
It can also mean "generally agreed on," but that meaning is not intended here.