Olympianism

Having lived in Olympia for about two years now, I've met a lot of different kinds of people. I've met musicians and audio nerds. I've met computer geniuses. I've met theater folk (both actors and tech people). I've met caregivers and people who have them. Students, workers. Parents. Gay people, straight people, bisexual people. Alchemists (I'm not even kidding). Olympia is a very diverse place.

I think the most interesting thing about it is that, despite Olympia's characterization as a godless city (which I don't disagree with), most people here are actually very spiritual in some fashion. Interlaced with the list above, I've met pantheists, Buddhists, mystics, one Thelema adherent (I don't know what you call them), and even universalists.

The funny thing about it is that if you dare to make your Christian beliefs public (at least the part about how sin is bad), you may face a rather large backlash from it. People here do not like the God of the Bible, despite the fact that, in their minds, he doesn't exist. Despite the fact that, to them, everyone can have their own spiritual beliefs and that's okay.

So if they hate God, why all the searching for something outside themselves?

Why the idea that everything is god? If everything and everyone is god, is anyone or anything really god? Why does it even matter that everyone is god?

I saw a guy quote John 1:1 and take the idea of "The Word" to mean something along the lines of some spiritual law or philosophy that cannot be contradicted or something because "the Word was God." What about the whole context of John 1, which clearly shows the Word to be not only God, but also a person who came to earth to rescue people? Why even quote the Bible if you don't believe a vast majority of what it says? Wouldn't that be similar to me trying to make an argument for Christianity by quoting the Quran or the Upanishads?

And if Jesus really did claim to be God, but he wasn't, then how can we trust anything he says? Doesn't that put him in the same category as the psychopaths who falsely claim divinity to rule over other people as absolute dictators? Or, if he genuinely believed it, wouldn't that make him deluded to the point where, in our day, he would be in a mental hospital? Can we really consider him to be just a good teacher with the claims he made?

Everyone here is searching for something, and it seems like most of them believe there is some kind of god out there, be it nature or philosophy or something. I don't know if they seek for their own pleasure, or because they feel there is something greater than all this, or because they just want there to be something more than all this. But the point is that everyone here is searching. But for what? And why?