Why not?

"You have a Bible on your bedside table."

"Yes I do, it's my best friend's.  I keep forgetting to mail it back to her.  ...I like God."

"God isn't real."

PAUSE!

I'm sorry, you know what?  You kind of suck.  I'm tired of this ridiculous fascination with hating God.  Just because every other hipster in the world has a thing for Atheistic ideals doesn't mean that you have to follow suit and project what you read from "God is Not Great" onto me.  I may not be a very "Christian" person, but you want to know something?

I do believe in God.

And to me God is real.

Just as the idea of God not being real is completely valid in your mind, so reins the idea that he is real in my mind.  Because you have made the decision to trust in Philosophical readings by older men who have no desire to be anything more than just an infinitesimally small being in an ever-expanding universe, you will never believe in God.  And that is fine, because that is what you believe.  And what you believe is your reality.  That's the way this sort of thing works.

But because I have decided that I don't want to be a tiny atom in relation to the vast universe, I have chosen to believe that there is something bigger than me that isn't planetary.

You argue that God isn't real because there's no proof.  It's not like you can see him.

Well, how do you know air is real?  You can't see it.  Is "air" then too just a concept rather than a reality?

"No because you can feel air."

Well guess what, that's how I know God is real.  Because I can feel him.  Certain things simply could not be in the world if there was no God.  Allow me to quote Arthur Miller's "All My Sons" with this little tidbit:

"Certain things have to be, and certain things can never be.  Like the sun has to rise, it has to be.  That's why there's God.  Otherwise anything could happen.  But there's God, so certain things can never happen."

I don't live by some ideology of God presented to me by The Bible or the Torah or the Qur'an or The Chronicles of Narnia.  My God is an idea completely defined by my own notions out of the inability for a desire to live without a higher power.

I don't care what Prophets say about God.  I don't care what Christopher Hitchens says about God.  I don't care what Jesus Christ himself would say about God.  All I care about is the fact that in the reality I have chosen for myself, there is a God.  He is in my life.

I know he exists when I hear someone laugh.
I know he exists when I witness love.
I know he exists when I realize that of all the creatures on this planet, we are the only ones granted the gift of the lifestyle any man is capable of.

So go ahead, continue believing God is not real.  Because for you, it's true.  But for me, there is a God.

I will never ask you to believe in God.  So never tell me:

God is not real.