There is absolutely no place at all in any suta where the Buddha says that any God or

deity plays any role in human happiness or the important human affairs.

He doesn't say that God's do or do not exist, it's not important for him because he views

that the fundamentally important issues that face human beings are the ways

we make our choices and use our own minds rather than the other, most of the spiritual practices of the Buddha's day were in some

way or another not only theistic but sacrificial they sacrificed animals they had all these kinds of rituals to appease God so there was a sense that in order to be happy

to be happy or to have a meaningful life you had to appease some trans mundane entity, some deity, and none of that was of any interest to the Buddhist.

So you could, without being incorrect, say that Buddhist practice is essentially an atheist practice in the sense that there is no

God that's positive of being important.

You can believe in God all you want, it doesn't matter.

You know, that's not an issue. No Buddhist will ever say that's wrong or right.

The Buddha was not even a religious figure. He was essentially a what we would call at best a kind of

of proto-psychologist. His sole aim was to reduce human suffering.

He had no interest and never, and refused to answer any questions about

why the universe exists or what will happen to it in the distant future.

While the Buddha refused to answer that I can tell you what will happen.

Eventually the sun will explode and it will essentially incinerate the earth in about 4 billion years and around the same time the Andromeda Galaxy

will collide with us and everything will be annihilated and then billions of years beyond that the universe will

essentially because it's expanding at an ever consistent rate will be pulled apart and everything will be ended.

So you might as well be happy now. So the Buddha says really the important thing is one how we use our minds.

He believed that human suffering as we'll see is largely a matter of how we act and think

and behave.

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