In my most recent atheist discussion group meeting, one person suggested that we all inhabit different realities, and that what is real for one of us may not be real for anyone else.  She of course understands that, physically speaking, we occupy the same material grounding.  How we see and experience that grounding can be, however, vastly different.
     To this, another replied that, "Can't we agree that, for example, if we put our hand on a hot stove, we will burn?"  Though the first speaker did not deny this, I think that he (the other speaker) missed her point.  If we insist that our way of looking at the world is always and evermore the only way that we can look at the world, we miss something highly important about the human being:  God intended for us to see the world in different ways.  Indeed, he comes to and encounters each of us in a different way.  Even if we all believe in him, we will never see him in precisely the same way.  God's too big for that.
     What we believe may be the same, but how we see it is not.  Whether we are Kantians, averring that there are objects separate from us or postmodernists who insist that what we know is created by our perception alone, we should understand that, regardless of what we think, we all inhabit the same "here," a "here" ultimately mediated by God.
     After all, how can we who are "here"--and nowhere else--really know--or make--what it is?  Unless anything else is "here," we are in truth how the Smashing Pumpkins many years ago characterized us, that is, rats running around in a cage.
     The story never really begins.