BELIEVE

Paul Tillich: "Every step into the depth of the thought is a breaking away from the surface of former thoughts."

This is the third year in a row now that I’ve given up God for Lent as part of Theologian Peter Rollin’s Atheism for Lent de-centering practice: a seven week course traversing through the impossibility of theism without atheism. The course uses the idea of dialectics, starting with an affirmation of God, only to negate that position, and continue to negate what remains each week. This process descends into the minds of some of the greatest thinkers to ever live, attempting to understand their perspective rather than dismiss it. I have yet to find a spiritual activity that is more fulfilling of the true intent of religion. Below is the journey as I experienced it.

The first week starts with the traditional theistic arguments for the existence of God. In this first position, existence is seen as obviously better than non-existence, and as one steps back, this supreme Superbeing very quickly resembles something like One God prevailing from a long list of deities: someone larger than us who made the world and exists beyond it, and watches us, listens to our prayers but has a plan for us, and is good, and is all powerful and happens to be so much like us that He even has a gender. He becomes the answer that bridges the deep contradictions of the world, the points at which science has yet to discover (like the mysteries of the beginning of the universe).

Now, this is where traditional atheism comes in the second week, denying the existence of God as first naively described. This week pulls back the curtain and exposes that God as a Deus Ex Machina / Elilim, described through finite words that are organized in a book which religion uses to provide the answers to the universe through belief. An invisible being, suppressing questioning. A supernatural entity that allows evil, calling into question His goodness and power. A God that must be continuously qualified to justify things like the extermination of those who don’t believe in the same definition of this God. Beyond evil, a God who seemingly allows the senseless death of millions of children under the age of five each year through famine and sickness, yet answers prayers to win football games, or bends the laws of physics to save you from slipping on ice. It is important to note that this type of atheism always requires a shape of God to deny. This leads us to the next week.

The third week follows the Christian mystics (Dionysis, Eckhart, Maimonides, and others) who ignite the apophatic tradition, which doesn’t simply disregard atheists but recognizes the theological importance of the atheistic turn. They claim that any of the conceptual framings of a Superbeing God are always less than God, and are therefore surely idolatrous. Resultingly, they honor atheism as a type of spiritual purification process, to rid one of their fetishistic perceptions. They claim that true interaction with God happens only as part of a saturating, numinous, sensory experience which we are lucky to encounter. It is an experience that comes to us the more we’re able to rid ourselves of finite images of God. Religion, in this sense, is an emptying process. It is this group that says that one can’t deny that if God exists, He certainly exists as a Hyperbeing; something that is otherwise than existence as we know it, and greater than we can conceive.

The fourth week takes a functional turn and involves studying theologians and philosophers like Feuerbach who claim that if God is, in fact, greater than we can conceive, then the material religious dogmas and doctrines and words we use to describe this indescribable entity don’t actually tell us about God, but are what tell us the most about ourselves as human beings in the current epoch. In short, theology is anthropology, and in struggling to describe the indescribable divine perfection, we learn the basis of the ideologies of our current systems. God, in this shift, is revealed as a Projection; a greater version of our own beliefs which reflects the “oldest, strongest, and most urgent wishes of mankind,” as Freud claimed, and not the characteristics of a deity. If, for example, the powerful people in the current system happen to be oppressive, then campaigns of death become God’s will, the fear of God is used to repress revolt, and religion is built to justify that sanctified order rather than critique it. In Marx’s view, it’s the opium of the people.

If the fourth week anchored the mystical experience of God to a projection screen where we place our own ideas, then the fifth week lowers the idea of God further, into the earth. It is in this week that Paul TIllich shines by describing God as the Ground of Being. God becomes what everything arises from and shifts from the object of a question to the basis of it, preceding the subject/object relation. This God connects to the prior week in the agreement that our understanding of God is intimately tied to us and what we do, but describes God as the depth dimension of our acts. We know, against societal and instinctual common sense, that there are things more important than our own self interest or pleasure, and by engaging in the work of selfless things like justice, love, mercy, and care for the other we are affirming something that’s not reducible to the material world. Art, for example, is inspired by beauty, but the point of the artist isn’t to ever capture beauty, but in a sense to continue to fail to capture beauty, and the act of continuing to pursue amidst this failure, they testify to it as something ultimate. In this role, doubt and failure aren’t something to avoid but become our most important attributes. When we doubt we most fully affirm truth, because doubting presupposes that there is an underlying truth that is unconditional. In this interpretation, God is not found in the privileged mystical experience that only happens to a few lucky individuals, but indirectly witnessed by anyone who is grasped by something unconditionally: in the act of being ultimately concerned.

If the fifth week grounded the mystical experience back to the earth, then the sixth week pulls the floor out from under us to reveal God as a Groundless Ground of Being. In comes my subtle fascination with Simone Weil (and the initial inspiration of my book Klobberland). Through this dialectic deep dive we can begin to understand the ultimate power of Nothingness. Not nothingness interpreted as insignificant or worthless, but as the most influential and true aspect of reality. Nothingness doesn’t exist, it insists, and it is foundational to every human being. At this stage we start interpreting the unconditional ground from the prior stage as something more like a primordial lack. We are all driven by that which we don’t have. We all became subjects from a fundamental separation with our primary care giver. We all learned about life through mirroring. We were all initially intrigued by the same questions: What does my primary care giver desire? What do they want from me? But this was the one thing that we couldn’t mirror: the unknown desire of the other. So we create fantasies and beliefs to fill this gap of unknowing and live by them to protect ourselves from experiencing this unknowing. In this week we start to see how the Unknown dimension of the world is the only thing that’s “real,” as it is the only thing uninfluenced by others, but that it’s also the one thing that we can never know. In that sense, everything we experience and do is true to the degree in which we attempt to descend into the unknown. Religion then becomes an invitation to encounter something unknowable. Belief is eradicated and unnecessary and replaced with love, for love is the ultimate openness to the unknowability of the other. Religion also begins, at this stage, to lose its distance from science, biology, philosophy, politics, and such. My next book explores this concept of the unknown in the business / program management world. In summary, if we are all determined by our fantasies of what the other wants, then the sum total of these fantasies shapes society, placing all of us in a social play of control. Freedom is in the ability to see the system for what it is, and to understand the paradoxical / kenotic directionality required for health. Understanding this is a step to enlightenment.

If we stopped at the sixth week we could still subtly hold belief that there is an endstate of wholeness and complete nothingness which is the answer to achive. This can turn to nihilism quickly. So this last week helps clarify that the Absolute (true enlightenment) is actually a Hegelian claim: that Absolute isn’t that which bridges the contradictions, but the Contradiction itself between Nothingness and Somethingness. Contradiction binds us all. This is the deepest meaning of Yin/Yang. This is the deepest meaning of Tat Tvam Asi. This is the deepest meaning of Christ Crucified - the human/god atheistically/theistically crying out on the cross; the immortal God that dies. This week reinforces that there is something that we do know, and our faith is the degree to which we embrace it, and it is that we don’t know. The more we live in that space, the fuller our life becomes.

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