There is no God in the world because the world is mere illusion created out of consciousness, which is ultimate truth or Brahman . And Brahman is God.

Yoga and religion are only for beginners; for the more advanced there is reason.  Yoga kills the ability to know intelligently, so that when one believes or are told by the  Guru that one has seen Atman, there is no means of his understanding whether this is so. This is because Yoga suppresses thinking.

Religion, yoga and intellectualism are not the means to acquire Self-Knowledge or Brahma Gnana or Atma Gnana.  Without getting rid of the ignorance and trying to get self-awareness through religion and yoga is like a sleeping man trying to know what he is about, without waking up. As sleep is to waking, so is ordinary life to the state of realization.

The ultimate truth will interest only a few people; the rest will say "they have a religion, why do they have to bother about wisdom?" Religion is that teaching which pleases minds which lack vigor. 

Sage Nisargadatta Maharaj :- If you seek reality you must set yourself free of all backgrounds, of all cultures, of all patterns of thinking and feeling. Even the idea of being a man or a  woman, or even human should be discarded.

The scriptures are for the ignorant masses, who wholly accept the Waking experience as it presents itself. Wisdom is for those who have begun to realize that things are not what they seem. 

Yoga Vasishtha:- "Teachers, interpretations of sacred texts, the force of religious merit--none of these lead to the realization of that Ultimate Truth which is revealed in the clear reflection of the heart, engendered from contact with the good."

When religious  believers  say that God has sent him, his needs through human instruments, how does he know? It is only his imagination.

What is meant by sacred? Cow-dung is treated as sacred in India, but despised by the rest of the world where therefore there is a standard of sacredness. Everyone thinks what is sacred according to his own standpoint.

How can the atheist prove the god does not exist, unless one is a fool, he will never be an atheist.  Each sect concocts a God to suit its own purposes:  there is no  value for such concocted Gods with form because according to Vedas God is  formless and God is the innermost self, which is soul or consciousness. Consciousness pervades in everything and everywhere in all the three states. There is no God in the world  because the world is mere illusion created out of consciousness, which is ultimate truth or Brahman .  And Brahman is God.

Yoga belief is a self-mesmeric condition out of which it is extremely difficult to escape. The man himself suggests that there must be a God. It is an auto-suggestion.

Prayers and sacrifices belong to a premature stage of development.  As Time passes when no answers come to prayers, then priests say that the answers come in the next world.  As Time passes again Struggle for existence presses man, and doubt arises again.  Faith in religion weakens as the man pays more attention to the facts of life and this world. 

The scriptures have been passed down by hearing from one generation to the next. They were written down only relatively late. So, no one would know whether to rely on the times they give. Also, a lot depends on the translation. Each 'Shloka' (sanskrit verse) is open to many layers of interpretation.

 

Kabir lived in Kashi, a place abounding in scholars. They believed it was enough to read, to accumulate knowledge from books. They were well versed in the Vedas, in the Upanishads and the other scriptures, and  they looked upon Kabir as ignorant, as an  illiterate man. In one sense, you can say Kabir was illiterate. If you consider a scholar as literate, as a well-educated man, then Kabir was definitely illiterate. But of what value is the scholar’s knowledge? A scholar will go on and on about the immortality of the soul, but when death approaches you will find him trembling  and weeping and wailing. All this talk of immortality will crumble into nothingness because he has not known it..    --Osho -The Great Secret, ch. 2

Reason is the common ground for everyone  in modern times, whereas the appeal to scriptural relations reaches only groups. One day the world would throw up scriptures, hence they provided for the appeal to reason and met the objections of skeptics in their literature, no less than those of religious believers.

Those who argue that truth is only in their religion are vain logicians, depending on mere ideas, imaginations.  First one has to prove his standpoint true before it can accept the criticism or objection made from it. 

Sage Sri Sankarasays(VC) 59:_ The study of the Scriptures is useless so long as the highest Truth is unknown, and it is equally useless when the highest Truth has already been known.

60. The Scriptures consisting of many words are a dense forest which merely causes the mind to ramble. Hence men of wisdom should earnestly set about knowing the true nature of the Self.

61. For one who has been bitten by the serpent of Ignorance, the only remedy is the knowledge of Brahman. Of what avail are the Vedas and (other) Scriptures, Mantras (sacred formulae) and medicines to such a one?

 All agendas are within the illusion, which appears in the form of mind or the universe or waking experience. The self is within the illusion as its formless substance and it is without the illusion as its formless witness. The formless witness is the one which witnesses the body and the universe together.  Thus the ordinary awareness is physical awareness (waking) is not self-awareness.  In self-awareness the body is not the body but it is the consciousness, the ego is not ego but it is the consciousness, the world is not the world but it is the consciousness even though they exist but their unreal nature is exposed. Just as the dream becomes unreal when waking takes place, the waking also becomes unreal when non-dual wisdom dawns.