something I wrote on a forum

I am putting it here because it relates a little to jung and what I was thinking about the vatican 2 document.
"I always think that, in a way, a mature Christian (or a Moslem or a Jew too, for that matter) is an atheist in the sense that he gradually has to dispel any notion of 'understanding' who, how and why God is. Only when we have abandoned all hope of 'understanding' God (which is usually another word for 'controlling' - which, Lord knows, we try to do all the time) is any real meeting possible.
The great problem is Language. It is our only means of communication and perhaps because of this, and because of the million assumptions we have to make for it to make any sense at all, we forget so easily just what a limited palette it actually is.Take, for example, the word ZERO. The word zero has four letters. I can say it out loud and you can hear me say it. But what does the word actually mean? Nothing? An empty space? An Absence of Oranges? No fish? If it means an empty space, it certainly isn't like the space between me and my computer screen. It's something quite different and, when you start to delve more deeply into it, something almost unimaginable. And yet Zero is a word we use all the time. It's a tool. Complete understanding lies beyond us but because it points roughly in the right direction of its meaning, we can make do.
Let's take another word: AFRICA. When I use that word what do you think of? All the things that you think of will be quite different to the things that I think of because it depends so much upon our respective remembered experiences of that place, its people and its events etc. Africa the word becomes a tool which simply points, in our mind's eye, to an area of the brain where we have our own stored memories of that particular word. When we use language, it seems to me important to remember that we are not pointing so much at the Reality itself but at our own experience of that reality.
One more example: LOVE. To a young teenager who has been brought up in a gentle, happy, secure family with two parents and some joyful siblings, that word will mean something so completely different to someone (a boy I knew) who's drunken parents burnt to death in a housefire when he was 7 and who was sent to unwilling grandparents in a faraway place who ignored him and found him a nuisance and an intrusion.We are fooling ourselves if we believe that we understand someone else's words when all that we can possibly understand is our own perception of the words and our own relationship with it.
Coming to the word GOD. . . . . . Actually I don't think I need to write any more. If you got this far you will perhaps see why I find arguments between those who believe in God and those who do not about as meaningful as a conversation between an African tribesman and an eskimo. A smile,a handshake and a little topical present would probably be much more effective."