If it’s much simpler it must be possible to summarise it simply!
Simplest way? “Gnothi Seaouton.” Know Thyself. But that might take a lifetime of disciplined practice. Or not.
I agree that human beings cannot understand or adequately describe the Ultimate Reality denoted by the word “God” but I cannot see how theism and atheism are two sides of one coin.
That one is simple, too. The opposition of the two can only take place in the discursive mind, the subject/object oriented mind, which we ordinarily use to navigate the sense world, often without breaking a leg on the way to the store, and sometimes spectacularly well. That mind is only part of the mind available to the human as the inheritance called “made in the Image and Likeness of God.” If one can quiet or silence the discursive mind and develop attention as the, well, intuitive mind, and entirely different mode of access and knowledge opens to the individual. It is in this realm that anything of significance can be understood regarding God. But that is not intellectual knowledge. It is qualitatively different.
And yet, on taking up the discursive mind again, it it that which is used to quantify, if that were possible, the experience. In other words, in the same way that people who have NDE’s name the Presence they encounter according to their religious background, so so people who have some access to this realm name that Presence.
Ultimately, that Presence is nameless and a cognitive leap is made as one become used to navigating this realm. And eventually, if one is fortunate, the “two” modes meld into surely what is the ultimate normal human mind: equiexistant and mobile in awareness in both states. But now we “see through a glass darkly.” More-so because we accept certain consensus validates cognitive paradigms in which this takes place. The ultimate awakening in this state will allow on structure as being its embodiment, those structures tending to re-enforce the intellectually assertive part as distinct from its practical living Essence. And that is how religions are born.
Very few are able to Balance the two modes in a living body, though history and contemporary times have many examples, but not relative to total population. And this is where the questions of origin of the Church and its actual Teaching can get emotionally loaded if one has an investment in a paradigm less than the acceptance within themselves or another of this kind of Balance. This is why so many find it difficult to see the value of a color scale referent to Conscious evolution, which is that same as “spiritual” evolution.
And it is why there is contention between what can be called the ascending/exoteric and descending/esoteric forms, traditionally East and West, of religion. Neither is adequate on its own, and slightly fewer can balance those than can balance the actual states that they mostly rely on. And that, again is why theism and atheism, as paradigms in mind, are of the same arguable ilk. They are incomplete in their inclusions and do not exist in the realm of useful experience. This is why one who has “been there” more than as an introduction can recognize intuitively the authenticity of any Speaker from any age and from any current expression. And it is why someone who yet has an emotional investment in a consensual paradigm may refuse to until they at last cannot see otherwise. It is, being based on the structure of Self/Image and Likeness of God, not possible to be otherwise.
As we approach the quantum level of perception, one cannot distinguish between objects or their state relative to “life.” There is only the cloud of quantum possibility and its mysteries. Knowing this on an experiential level might be called Enlightenment, Awakening, RApture, the Beatific Vision, whatever. But ultimately ii is Self knowledge, where “Self” has the the denotation of Subjective ALLness. But you see, words fail. One just has to be there, Realizing that they were never anywhere else.
I hope that helps.
