I’ve never been in a war, never been under fire (literally), so I can’t assert the truth or falseness of the statement: “There are no atheists in fox-holes.” But I have lived in my own version of fox-holes, have found my way into and out of them, and can assert that I’m not an atheist. An atheist is SURE there is no God. Well I’m sure there is – but I can’t convince you of this, life convinced me, the cumulative sum of my experiences have opened me up to my inevitable experience (and thus conclusion) that there is a GOD.
Now, Agnostics are a different breed – they don’t know if there is a God, nor do they have proof there isn’t a God. They are firmly on the fence – there may be, and there may not be a God – their motto might read something like: “We won’t know until we know.” Maybe they haven’t spent as much time in fox-holes.
But knowing there is a God doesn’t necessarily mean that God is our Savior. For some that may be their experience, they can point to dramatic or miraculous events where their life was literally saved (or their Soul was saved – which would amount to the same thing). For others, aligning with Spirit places them in the Stream of Life (or as the Navajos would describe as Walking in Beauty, one is restored to harmony), no longer at cross-purposes to the basic principles of the Spiritual Universe.
Praying to be saved, to have our life spared, will leave us beholden to God as Savior (if we were to survive). Praying to be restored, to be guided to teachers or guides who share their own Journey along the Spiritual Path, we become our own Savior – instead of one single event, our lives become a series of events. Each day we find ourselves affirming our desire to grow in awareness, to discover what it means to Walk in Beauty.