What's left to explain?

In order to know that two things are alike and/or similar, we must be able to perform a comparative analysis. Unless God appears in a way that we can compare God to an idea thereof, there is nothing to compare an idea of God to...

Okay, yes that is straightforward enough.

I'm unable to answer this until I figure out what I mean by ideas (in general), by God and if it is even possible to say we can have an idea of God.

I had a stream consciousness response which I removed where I debated the whole thing.

Upon further reflection, I think I need to say that God is not completely unknowable, it is possible to have an idea of God.

In my Zen training, I was taught that my ideas are only mental constructs and never grasp the thing itself. My ideas don't exist. Even concepts like good and evil are just concepts. Reality just is as it is. God even more so is beyond such concepts.

Yet, I think I must listen to why I left Buddhism. I experience that God is not merely a passive, philosophical abstract. Rather I think that this Absolute is actively loving, actively sustaining, actively illuminating. So our idea of God comes from God thru illuminated reason and other illuminated faculties.

Kabbalah has a strange position that as an ex-Kabbalist I need to consider. Ein Sof is the Source, the First Cause but is ultimately unknowable. We only know God thru Hus emanations, which aren't Him but reflections of Him. Many theists too are apophatic theologians and say we know about God mostly thru negation. Yet they still cling to revelation and their respective traditions.
It doesn't make any sense to say God is completely unknowable yet illumines or loves us or creates us. For we then know at least that much about Him in so far as He is active in our experience. God can definitely be mostly unknownable, we only perceive a small sliver perhaps.

Another issue to address, which is what you point to, is if God grants us the idea of God then why is our ideas so different from one another? Is it because as religions would suggest, the majority are impaired or mislead and only one certain group received it correctly? Unlikely.
Or is that we are given only the most basic sliver that mankind has added all sorts of vain imaginings too? Most likely
Or is it the blind men and the elephant where depending on each ones context and personality and baises, everyone sees the Truth but differing aspects as a prism captures only part of the spectrum? Maybe, but this has points for being a charitable view.

So I need to fully answer these questions before I arrive at what you are asking.

"You're in a life because there's a life-experience possibility-story about you". — Michael Ossipoff


so our lives are narratives?
— MysticMonist

Yes. Life-experience possibility-stories, inevitably, timelessly "there", just like any "abstract object.". ...and consisting of a system of inevitable abstract facts about hypotheticals., if-then facts. ...a complex inter-referring system of them.

...having and needing reality and existence only in its own inter-referring context.

That answers the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Those abstract if-then facts are inevitably "there". When something is inevitable, we don't have to ask why it is.

This is a completely parsimonious metaphysics, and neither uses not needs any assumptions or brute-facts.

If we really closely examine our physical world, we find physics. A physical law is a hypothetical relation among some hypothetical physical quantity-values, and is part of the "if" premise of various if-then facts. The other "if" premises are the quantity-values themselves. ...except that one of those quantity-values can be taken as the "then" premise of an if-then fact whose "if" premises are the physical law and the other quantity-values that it relates.

A mathematical theorem is an if-then fact whose "if" premise includes, but isn't limited to, some mathematical axioms (algebraic or geometric).

Such a possibility-story has two requirements: A protagonist, and consistency. Of course, if something impossible or inconsistent seemed to happen, we could explain it by saying that we must have been in error, of that someone else's report to us was false, or that it's the result of as-yet unknown physical laws--as has so often been the case, in the history of physics. So really it would probably be impossible to prove that a particular possibility story is really inconsistent. But seemingly inconsistent events are rare.

Someone could object: "When I was a newborn, the day I was born, I didn't know any physics, mathematics, or anything about how the world works. So how did that happen as part of a later-apparent self-consistent world??"

Well, do you remember the day you were born? If not, then there's no problem about consistency on that day.

What if you remembered something seemingly impossible or inconsistent? Well, you were an infant, and who knows what you might have dreamed..

We notice more consistencies as we grow up, and we instinctively are interested in noting them.
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The infinite possibility and infinite worlds is interesting. Are these determined by individual human choices?

I'd say "Yes", but indirectly..

How you choose to live in this life, how you're in the habit of living in this life, is definitely going to influence your next life. (if there's reincarnation. Reincarnation is consistent with this metaphysics)

But, when it comes to the time of recincarnation, when you're unconscious (no waking consciousness), and don't remember the just-ended life, but retain your subconscious hereditary and acquired inclinations, feelings, needs, lacks, etc., and your natural instinctive future-orientation, there's no such thing as conscious choice It just happens according to the abovementioned subconscioius attributes, your "vasanas".

There's a life experience possibility-story that is about and for the person you are at that time. Obviously you're in that story.

But I emphasize that this all valid even if there isn't reincarnation. In any case, you're in this life because there's a life-experience possibility story about and for you.

I'm not a propent of free will, but if one were to assert free will I think they'd have to go in this direction. There are all sorts of possible outcomes/worlds. I could right now leave my current life entirely and start a completely new life in another country. Why I would suddenly do so is irrelevant, only the fact that I could.

...if your preferences and the circumstances point to doing that.

I say there isn't free-will, because, even from our own point of view, our choices are determined by our preferences (heriditary and acquired) and the circumstances.

Vedanta agrees with me on that.

As for monism. Having one universal Source of reality doesn't mean we all have the same experiences. We can retain individual identities while having a shared source.

I think that that shared source is a metaphysical position that would be hard to explain or justify.

I used to advocate that position, because I liked the perfect Monism. But then later I wanted to only say what I can skeptically say. No speculation, no assumptions. Though the shared sources gives a perfect Monism, with just one Existent, I can't justify positing that, because it isn't evident from our experience.

Our experience is of being separate individual animals.

Of course we're identical at center, but that doesn't make us identical. A chocolate candy with an almond center, and a strawberry candy with an almond center are still different candies.

As I was saying, though, at the end of lives, nothing remains of us other than what's identical about us, because all identity is gone, and we have no idea that there ever was such a thing.

That's Timelss. All our lives, combined, are still finite and temporary. So you could say that, overall, our timeless identicalness wins over our temporary individual identities.

Michael Ossipoff.