People´s belief or faith in God has a dimension of experience that itself refers to their spiritual-religious practice, when it began, and how it continued. That dimension involves some level of introspection and personal perception, and some kind of social interactions. Sometimes God, and gods, are referred to as a “human construct,” that is confused with “made up as a fantasy for social control and something that is only imaginary.” That is a widely unsupported assertion. University-based education and scholarship have elevated Scientific and other forms of Empirical Philosophy that reveals important domains of knowledge and phenomena, which are forms of Epistemological Philosophy. Anthropologists and similar researchers have observed such things as healing phenomena among tribal shamans, reincarnation events, and mediumship phenomena. On a daily level, different forms of Psychology underlie Transpersonal Psychology and reveal that treating the Universe as merely objectified as Science does is a fallacious oversimplication and even an abuse of Scientific Philosophy. From music to pets to human relationships to the environment to socially responsible business and shopping, non-objectified modes of relation enrich modern life alone. Fannie Lou Hamer, in the era and style of Martin Luther King, drew on the Bible in her activism and public speaking from voting in Mississippi to her Farm Co-operative. In the same 1960s period, secular Jewish Harvard Psychologist Richard Alpert stopped testing therapeutic psychedelics and traveled to India where he became named Ram Dass by guru Neem Karoli Baba. He founded the Seva Foundation upon returning, helping prisoners.
Closer in history to Jesus and the first generations of Christians is the often neglected is Anthony of the Desert´s pioneering asceticism starting in 270. Pachomius joined him and innovating cenobitic monasteries. In the 310s, Caesar Constantine´s victory at the Milvian bridge involved him ordering Christian symbols put on his men´s shields. He is said to have reported a spiritual experience as he looked at the Sun and heard, “In this sign you shall conquer....” His mother Helena soon converted and went to the Holy Lands where set up churches, and finding what she thought was the True Cross. These kinds of events became relevant as Christian history unfolded by Charles´ Martel´s defeat of Muslim´s invading from Spain in the 730s, all up to such pivotal events as Thomas of Aquinas and Universities in the 1200s, Luther´s Reformation in the 1500s, the Enlightenment afterwards, the US Freedom of Religion beginning around 1800, and FD and Eleanor Roosevelt´s United Nation´s vision in about 1945. 
How do these ideas relate to your thinking about God?
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