Key to Mr. Lockhart's book is his repeated citation of the work of Bernadette Roberts-- indeed, her paradigm is central to his thesis. Unfortunately the author completely misrepresents her view. Having attended nearly every retreat Bernadette has given in the last 25 years, and discussed with her at length each of her works, I am certain that Lockhart's interpretation of Bernadette's paradigm is inaccurate and errantly misleading.
1. Lockhart consistently misrepresents the loss-of-self Bernadette describes as loss "of the affective self." No, absolutely not true: what she is writing about is the complete loss of self-- as utterly different from Lockhart's reading as day to night.
2. Lockhart refuses to take seriously the very context of Berndette's views on self and no-self -- the Christian revelation of Trinity, Incarnation, and Eucharist. Lockhart relegates elements such as these, inconvenient to his paradigm, to a footnote. When presenting these Christian elements of her paradigm, says Lockhart, Bernadette "becomes for the first time, mired in what looks like theological sleight-of-hand. This is partly due to her background and training as a Carmelite..." In other words, Lockhart has high praise for Roberts' insight when it comports with his paradigm (unfortunately, he typically misreads her even then)-- but when her paradigm fails to cohere with his, he deems her writing under the spell her Christian "conditioning."
To underscore the cognitive dissonance in Lockhart's analysis: On the one hand, Roberts, he insists, is an expert on "awareness" par excellence; on the other hand, Roberts is quite unaware that the essence of her paradigm, which central foci are the Christ-event, the Trinity, and the Eucharist, is a befogged product of her Catholic conditioning.
Could it be exactly the other way around? Could Lockhart's Gurdieffian conditioning and his blunt-edged demythologizing, be blocking his ability to take Roberts' full spiritual report (and not just cherry-picked elements of it) seriously?
Too bad that Mr. Lockhart dismisses the heart of Roberts' paradigm: ironically, it is the most lucid exposition of the 'lost Christianity' he says he is seeking.
Some years ago Bernadette wrote "Forcing the Fit" (available at Bernadette's Friends website) elucidating point by point how several authors (who, like Mr. Lockhart, have highlighted her contribution to their paradigms) have wrenched passages from her books out of context to shore up paradigms incongruent with hers, utterly distorting her viewpoint in the doing. Would that Mr. Lockhart had read "Forcing the Fit" before writing his book-- though, given the dead weight of conditioning against the Christian revelation Bernadette writes of, one wonders if such reading would have made any difference. Only Mr. Lockhart can say.
If Lockhart's readers would like to understand for themselves Bernadette's paradigm, I would recommend their reading her work directly; she has written six books (three of which can only be found at Bernadette's Friends), Mr. Lockhart only lists two of her books in his bibliography.
Joseph Conti, Ph.D.
5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible information that everyone on Earth should read.
God is consiousness, not some white bearded man up in the sky....like we have been taught for all the wrong reasons.
God is found within, not outside of yourself like many religions would like you to think. The author clearly understands
the control and power behind religion. It is time now to open our eyes and see that we all are blessed with the same
divine creative power that created us. Religion separates people. I know that this book has the ability to clearly open your
eyes and your mind to new exploration and it gives very valuable information about the deep truth of life.
I give him an A plus!!!!!! You won't go wrong if you purchase this book. It has changed the lives of many.
It's high time we all woke up to our own inner spirituality, our own higher power - and stop giving it away.
Douglas Lockhart
Journalist and Author
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Going Beyond the Jesus Story – Sample Chapter
The Veil of Illusion
I am learning to see. I do not know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply within me and no longer stops at the place, where until now, it always used to finish. I possess an inner self of which I was ignorant. Everything now passes in thither. What happens there I know not.
Rainer Maria Rilke
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Introduction: 1.0
Existence is a puzzle. If we’re religious in the Christian sense, then that puzzle falls into a neat, manageable set of beliefs and observances. If non-religious, then into a pattern where we accept the vicissitudes of life and invest meaning in ourselves and in our fellow human beings. If a believer in some aspect of New Age philosophy, then we sail along as part of a mysterious “larger meaning” carrying multiple explanations and choices, and if an aimless I don’t give a damn about anything type of person, then we simply struggle through as best we can. These categories, rough as they are, describe the majority of people living in the world’s different cultures, and in that similarity lies our common humanity, our common search for truth, and our equally common disregard for truth.
The ultimate question facing all of us, of course, is this: Is there any such thing as a final, all-revealing truth, or is truth always bitty and piecemeal?
Will science’s “Theory of Everything” reveal a final truth that encapsulates and explains religion, or is it that religious experience holds within it the answer science refuses to accept? Or is there a halfway house in such matters? Might it be that science and religion will one day acknowledge each other’s strengths and form a pact that allows the best of each to surface? Or will Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have their way at the expense of Paul Davies and other winners of the Templeton Prize?
These are some of the questions facing us as we move erratically into the 21st century, and we should perhaps attempt to answer them speedily if we want to survive as a species.
The question of truth can of course be put another way: is there a God, or are we humans alone in our quest for meaning? This question divides us as surely as gender does, and past attempts by theologians, philosophers and scientists to answer it have delivered up a mountain of material few of us will ever have the time, the patience, or even the inclination, to wade through. Yet the question remains, and the fact that it is probably a non-question, a question that no one can ultimately answer because one would almost have to be God to supply a satisfactory answer, does not deter us from trying to sneak up on this question by some other route. There are tantalizing clues scattered in unexpected places, and researchers both religious and secular sometimes feel themselves to be on the verge of a breakthrough.
One such group of researchers is beavering away on behalf of the Westar Institute, an organization in the US dedicated to the task of spreading religious literacy in the world. Composed of around two hundred internationally respected Biblical scholars, philosophers and historians of religion, Westar’s Fellows are known as the Jesus Seminar, and they have in their time galvanized religious opinion with some startling observations and pronouncements. Some co-religionists denounce them as heretics, others laud them for unflinchingly taking on the difficult questions and accepting the often difficult-to-accept answers they come up with. With such well-known figures as Don Cupitt, Bishop Shelby Spong, Lloyd Geering, Karen Armstrong and Karen King in their midst, this is a formidable troupe of scholars who have put their reputations on the line for the sake of religious truths that are both credible and useful in the modern world.
But there are also hundreds, if not thousands, of secular scholars equally intent on pursuing answers to the really hard questions arising in religion, science and philosophy. These scholars are involved in research projects to do with mind, body, emotion, perception, experience and the nature of the self, and regularly share their theories and discoveries in learned papers for the benefit of the whole academic community. As with Westar scholars, they are not afraid of a fight; they will and do attack one another’s ideas in their search for the underlying truths of a reality that is proving itself daily to be even more complex than previously supposed. Self, other and world are not the straight forward targets of investigation they had at intervals hoped. They are curiously intertwined, one with the other, and are resisting attempts to be teased apart.
Strange as it may seem, some research projects in the secular area are concerned with definitions of God, mysticism, the soul, cosmic consciousness, meditation, death, morality, out-of-body experience, lucid dreaming, the paranormal and a whole gamut of other fascinating subjects of a religious or semi-religious nature. Hardly anything is left out. These researchers are not, on the whole, prejudiced against religion; they consider its claims in the light of what is known about reality, and demand, rightly, that a language and methodology be created whereby such claims can be coherently verified and tested. Some say that that is simply not possible, that religious experience does not lend itself to the harsh light of scientific or philosophical scrutiny. But what if science and philosophy prove themselves capable of empathy? What if some scientists and philosophers are also advanced meditators/contemplators capable of tracking their experiences, or the experiences of others, into the depths of consciousness?
What if some philosophers, psychologists and physicists have encountered realms of experience difficult to explain by the usual yardstick of their own professions? What then? And if, as I’ve discovered, the term “spiritual” is often just a way of naming and controlling what we do not really understand, then what are the possibilities if religious scholars link up with their so-called secular brethren in the quest for an understanding of existence that fully acknowledges its astonishing depths?
The philosopher Don Cupitt is a case in point. Now retired from his post as Dean of Immanuel College, Cambridge, he manages to integrate religion, science and philosophy in a manner that challenges pet assumptions and enlightens not a little. And there are many others. The ongoing debate between science, religion and the humanities is, for instance, richly portrayed in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, a source I’ve consulted regularly while writing this book, and in other technical journals of similar status. Taking on the important questions religion forces to the surface, these on-the-whole secular researchers give of their best in an attempt to unravel who we are, what we are, and why we are as we are, three questions religion has long considered its special province. But that, as we shall see, is no longer the case: the doors of perception have been thrown open, and we have little alternative but to step through whichever door happens to confronts us.
In the sleeve notes for The Sea of Faith, Don Cupitt’s 1984 book dealing with the decline of supernatural religion, Matthew Arnold’s metaphor of religious decline as the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the Sea of Faith is used by the publisher to perfectly capture Cupitt’s notion that Christianity’s dogmatic beliefs are worn out and in need of replacement. But with what? With “a spiritual path, an ethic, and a way of giving meaning to life,” according to the same sleeve note. Religion is a human construction, so it should be practiced without dogma in alignment with “the twentieth century’s bleak view of man’s place in the universe.” We are alone and must muster our own resources in the face of a universe that may, as Einstein posited, be unfriendly to our needs.
But Cupitt is not all doom and gloom; he suspects there may also be gains in the sense of “unexpected continuities.”1 But what exactly are “unexpected continuities”, and how might they help? Well, in Cupitt’s terms the answer lies in our collective “sense of loss,” a sense of loss that is only temporary; the “leap of faith” required of us now is that of embracing ambiguity and uncertainty in the sure knowledge that we will eventually answer the questions we currently cannot answer. Continuity of meaning will return if we can find the courage to hang in there. What was “given up will come back, though transformed and seen from a new viewpoint.”2
For Cupitt, critical thinking should reject dogma; it should question and undermine fixed ideas. René Descartes’ confidence should be our confidence. A comprehensive critique of tradition has freed us from supernaturalisms and the headaches of theologians are well-deserved. But as Cupitt is quick to point out, theologians are attempting to straighten out the whole mess; they are busy fighting off the advances of philosophers and scientists while at the same time doing battle with the faithful over changes they know in their heart of hearts cannot any longer be avoided.3
Going Beyond Paradigm Shift 1.1
According to the historian Morris Berman, “cyclical recurrence of heresy implies the possibility of a different future.”4 New futures in the sense of heretical breaks, ruptures and realignments with the past are necessary and unavoidable. They are, however, “rarely anticipated by those living at the time”; they surprise us in exactly the way the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ heretical agenda has surprised churchmen.5 Witness their concern over what they consider New Age heresies, or their astonishment over pronouncements made by scholars whose publications have progressively stripped the Gospel Jesus of his divinity. It is as if the very idea of Jesus being no more than a human being fulfilling a role in Jewish society has come out of nowhere, whereas in reality it has been gathering momentum for at least a hundred and fifty years. As with climate change and the possibility of a tipping point in weather patterns, so with ideas about Jesus and Christianity’s deeper meanings. We are fast approaching a point of no return, a point of dramatic, irreversible change where our pet notions about Christianity and its founder will undergo a metamorphosis. But it isn’t the ideas in themselves that are frightening churchmen. It is their shared sense that the tipping point has finally been reached, that the game of theological hide-and-seek is all but over. Cupitt puts it thus:
When we have fully accepted these ideas and have freed ourselves from nostalgia for a cosmic Father Christmas, then our faith can at last become fully human, existential, voluntary, pure, and free from superstition. To reach this goal is Christianity’s destiny, now approaching.6 But alas, such changes to the way in which we perceive reality may not deliver us from the habit of re-entrenching ourselves in other limited and limiting paradigms. Escape from misconceptions about reality will certainly take place, and that will be valuable, but when all is said and done we will, as has happened numerous times in our history, find ourselves returning to the selfsame questions in new guise. We will have shrugged off much that was holding us back from the clarity we crave, but that very clarity will again prove insufficient as we head deeper into our new future. We may very well find, as Morris Berman suggests in his seminal book Coming to Our Senses, that we have swapped “Descartes’ clock for Von Neumann’s computer” and failed to notice the similarity.7
Churchmen will nod their heads sagely at such thinking, but it applies as much to them as it does to any other professional group, and with a twist. Moves towards modernity in church doctrine will be viewed by conservative churchmen as destructive of Christianity’s inner core, but that may not be the case. An updated theology that uses real history in place of tradition will certainly cancel out most, if not all, of Christianity’s supernatural idiosyncrasies, but will it satisfy, as Cupitt undoubtedly thinks it will, our deep longing for, well, whatever it is we seem to have a deep longing for? Berman captures this point succinctly when he says, “far more important than finding a new paradigm is coming face to face with the immense yearning that underlies the need for paradigm itself.” Paradigm shifts in history are vital staging posts in our growth and development as human beings, but they can also be “gap-filling” devices that allow us to continue much as before. If really serious about change, then what we have to explore is not so much what is in a paradigm, but what we fear most, “the empty space or silence that exists between concepts and paradigms.”8
The controversial Catholic contemplative Bernadette Roberts puts it this way: The ideal is to begin our investigation with no prior assumptions, paradigms or belief systems regarding self and to allow the experiencing self to ultimately reveal its own eternal or non-eternal status, reveal its own origin and end. This way we avoid premature closure which only keeps the subject moving in an endless, pointless, self-perpetuating circle.” 9
Cupitt’s notion that all we require is a paradigm shift to offset, in religious terms, our “sense of loss” with regard to faith, may not be sufficient in itself to bring about that intrinsic change in perspective we require to survive as a species. He himself is aware of this deficiency when he says: “All theories are merely man-made and provisional. Sooner or later the time will come when they will be found wanting.”10 But Cupitt’s hope is, I think, that this ongoing process of reasoned replacement will eventually deliver the goods, a process he links to religious wakening in the sense of “an inner path of renunciation and progressive purging of illusions.”11. It is critical thinking that will release us from our stupidity, and that is to do “in a modern way the kind of demolition job that was done by the prophets and teachers of old.”12
Given the dangers we face in terms of climate and rampant religiosity, a new arrangement of symbols and signs attractive to our 21st century mentalities may not be enough to save us in the end. Yes, our technical abilities will advance beyond our wildest dreams, as will our capacity to answer some of the most obdurate questions of our time, but our tendency to drift out of control even as we gasp at our own brilliance will also undoubtedly gather momentum, and that will distort and disable our most ambitious utopian hopes and desires for the future. The intrinsic change in perspective required for our survival as a species may not reside in swapping one set of ideas for another, but in confronting what it is in our makeup that endlessly hinders us in our search for truth and collective sanity. We are so clever, yet at the same time so dumb it is a wonder we’ve even made it this far.
Self-realization and Presence 1.2
But Don Cupitt is perhaps not all that far behind Berman concerning the long-term relativity of ideas. He tells us that religion’s earlier forms were “collectivist”, whereas its newer forms are “more concerned with self-realization.”13 Self realizationrequires the “painted veil of illusion” to drop away, and that in turn requires from us a concerted effort to become more aware than we previously have been. But what does becoming “more aware” mean in real terms? Is it simply a matter of spotting anomalies in our reasoning, or in the reasoning of another, or of having a greater grasp of the sociology and psychology of our culture? Or is it to undergo change in the depths of our being to such an extent that we can, as Carl Jung suggested decades ago, step out of the historical process altogether? I doubt that anything as radical as that was in Cupitt’s mind when he wrote these words, but there’s no doubting Berman’s take on this point when he tells us that it is only “real presence, real bodily engagement with the world” that will free us from our inbuilt intellectual limitations.14 This strikes me as being well beyond “paradigm shift”; it is to articulate a premise that at first glance does not seem to make much sense, and at second glance causes us to feel decidedly uneasy. The human body as an instrument of change in its own right? What could such a directive possibly mean?
At the conclusion of Jesus the Heretic, my first book dealing with the origins and development of Christianity, I drew attention to Jacob Needleman, an American philosopher who helped clarify for me the heavily obscured spiritual premise ofChristianity.15 Having identified perceptual processes not generally associated with the Christian message, Needleman spoke of an energy within the self that required the development of “attention” or, as he so carefully rendered it, the force of attention. Carrying his readers far beyond Christianity’s virtuebound theories of the spiritual life, he offered a radically different interpretation of Christianity’s basic premise. At its most fundamental level, Christianity was not about “salvation”, “redemption” or “transcendence”, he said, it was about reconnecting us with our “somatic depths”, and through that enlivening experience with the creative energies of Being. As I had already happened upon a similarly oriented scheme of thinking in the writings of the Harley Street surgeon Kenneth Walker, I was immediately intrigued.16
As with Needleman, Walker homed in on “attention” and “awareness”, suggested that human beings were not properly conscious even when apparently fully conscious, and with a little help from the psychologist William James triggered off in me the disconcerting realization that I too did not seem to be fully conscious most of the time. As this was the same basic conclusion come to by Needleman in relation to what he perceived as “advanced monastic thinking”, I did a double take, for through a study of Christian heresy I had already reached the conclusion that there was much more to Christianity than most Christians realized. Reading this philosopher’s text with care (I had learned early on that it is one thing to agree with someone, but quite another to agree with them for same set of reasons), I found that we were in fact on the same track: our mutual premise stemmed from the experiential work associated with the relatively unknown Armenian thinker George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff.
Knowledge of Gurdjieff had arrived for Needleman via the writings of a certain Father Sylvan (an amazing story in itself, and one we will return to later), and for me via Kenneth Walker,whose’50s book carried the name “Gurdjieff” in its title. The enigmatic Mr. Gurdjieff, it seemed, was our mutual key, Christianity the lock into which this intricately cut key fitted. As I completed my research for this my third book dealing with Christianity’s dilemmas, I literally stumbled over Morris Berman’s 1990 Bantam edition of Coming to Our Senses on the floor of a local bookshop, and as I flicked through its pages I knew I had been favored by the gods yet again. I should say immediately that I do not think for one second that this encounter was somehow arranged by Fate; it was simply a book that had fallen from a shelf and I just happened to be the person to pick it up. But certainly fortunate, there’s no doubting that; for as I discovered on reading this well-written, well-argued text, Berman had traversed much the same territory as myself, and his conclusion was all but identical to the one I was busy formulating.
According to Berman, we had come to deny, or ignore, the importance of our physicality. Our bodies had become no more than biological mechanisms to be prodded at and manipulated by medicos. It was as simple as that; or as profound as that if you appreciated what had been going on century by century. Our physical experience of the world, embedded as it was in the larger culture, had been usurped. We had taken on the position of artificial intelligence advocates and accepted Douglas Hofstadter’s opinion that dreams were no more than “confused brain patterns”. We had accepted “cybernetic holism” and “systems-theory analysis” as the defining paradigm for the 21stcentury, and were in danger of succumbing to a new totalitarianism.17 And even more importantly, we had all but ceased to sense our bodies as an important source of information. The somatic level of experience, the still small voice of our physical existence had been dumbed down, its visceral voice all but silenced.
What surprised me about Berman’s study was his mention of G.I. Gurdjieff and Jacob Needleman. Gurdjieff was referred to in the rather odd context of having “possibly” instructed Himmler’s Jew-hating prodigy, Gregor Schwartz-Bostunitsch (formerly known as Grigorij Bostunic) in occult practices, whereas Needleman was hailed as the writer of Lost Christianity, a book dealing with the “bitter and recurrent struggle of heresy vs orthodoxy.” Later, however, Berman also linked Gurdjieff to Needleman, and this led him to speak of “presence” in the context of our physical engagement with the world.”18 As “presence” or “presencing” had been the underlying theme of Walker’s book, and Walker’s whole approach to the mind/body problem was based, like Needleman’s, on Gurdjieff’s ideas, I knew we were heading into difficult territory. Knowledge of Gurdjieff’s philosophical system had arrived for Morris Berman via Jacob Needleman, for Needleman via Father Sylvan, and for me via Kenneth Walker. Gurdjieff was therefore our mutual touchstone, his observations what had driven all four of us to explore what it meant to be a fully conscious human being
The Enigmatic Mr. Gurdjieff 1.3
G.I. Gurdjieff was, however, a man with an unusual history and a perplexing reputation. Born into the Greek quarter of Alexandropol, in Russian Armenia, in or around 1866,19 he had gone on to become a major influence in the lives of many prominent individuals. Viewed as a charlatan by others, or just plain crazy, he nevertheless left an indelible mark on many of the most able minds of his time. In the sleeve note to a biographical study of Gurdjieff, James Moore describes him as a “potent myth (offering) sundry ill-assorted Gurdjieffs: heroic man of action; new Pythagoras, seeming charlatan; poet of surreal situations; white magician; black magician.”20
Louis Pauwels follows suit in his not always flattering portrait of Gurdjieff by asking colorfully: “Was Gurdjieff the satanist who designed the inverted swastika for Hitler” or “a secret intelligence agent of the Tsar?”Then, more soberly, “Or was he… painfully releasing the fabulous gifts locked up in our bodies?”21 Such questions have been asked for decades of those favoring Gurdjieff, and I suspect there is little hope in ever fully squaring this enigmatic character with the many apocryphal stories surrounding him.
As the West is culturally “Christian” in its orientation, so it is with Christianity and its doctrines that we have to deal when attempting to unravel our complex relationship to self, other and world. Cupitt, Needleman and Berman agree on this point. We are the product of a long and tortuous history during which Christianity, for good or ill, has helped shape our individual and collective psyche. Our fundamental ideas about the spiritual life stem from this close and sometimes disturbing relationship, and ignoring that relationship will not make it go away. And to further muddy the waters, heresy lies alongside Christianity as an important partner in the evolution of human thought, but not quite in the way many might think. Heresy, Berman tells us, “is an attempt to restore body cognition to the center of humanconsciousness.”22 This is what Berman thinks the heretical movements in the history of the West were all about. The principal argument in heresy vs. orthodoxy was not about “doctrine”, he tells us, it was about “experience”. The very fact that this central issue got translated into debates about doctrine is proof positive that the heretics seldom got to speak for themselves. The winners wrote the history books.
To my mind, Berman’s explanation regarding heresy is probably the most insightful I’ve ever come across. In his final analysis, heresy is not about “ideas” or “beliefs,” it is about the “cognitive, perceptual history of the West.” The so-called heretics rejected the dominant culture’s cerebral formulas for what they were, “formulistic,” and in turn directed attention back to the body as the seat of experience.23
This centuries-long avoidance of everything to do with the deep end of somatic experience has, in due course, had a disastrous effect on our view of physical experience. Caught up in the rarefied atmosphere of our intellectual processes (secular and religious), we have neglected, condemned or demonized the body as a potential threat to civilized life. Rene Descartes’ declaration, “I think, therefore I am,” has become the mantra of our commonsense approach, “self” no more than an offshoot of language and thought lodged firmly in our heads. Through Christianity’s imagined manipulations of the body by sentient evil (the Devil), the physical has become God’s antagonist, the conduit through which the conscious self can be subverted by evil forces. The human body is the Devil’s chosen domain of action; it houses “intermediate substances and transitional zones” 24 where heretics and witches can ply their craft of psychic deceit.
Self-presence 1.4
In Needleman’s terms, the lost aspect of Christianity is our ability to sense ourselves as a presence, to consciously hold sense of self in place while engaged in everyday tasks. As a result of Christianity’s evolution, however, this deep sensitivity towards the self as “presence” has been swapped for a set of rote beliefs about Jesus and God. And so we have a one-dimensional response to life and living, whereas it ought to be two-dimensional in the sense of fully occupying the space in which we move and have our being.25 What we’re looking for, indeed hunting for, is not some great spiritual force outside of ourselves, some grand spiritual revelation to once and for all time silence our questioning minds, but a sense of our own intrinsic worth, a sense of being fully awake and aware. We are ourselves the missing element in our own existence puzzle; we have evaporated into thinking and doing and got lost among religious fears and philosophical wranglings.
This is Needleman’s extraordinary insight: in spiritual terms we are not seeking the presence of God as such, but rather the ability to remember, or re-member , our own psychophysical presence moment by moment. That is the missing factor in our lives, in our prayers, in our contemplative or meditative moments, in our relationships and in much of our scholarship. We have lost sense of our psychophysical wholeness to such an extent that we have become strangers to ourselves and a danger to everyone around us. Not to mention the planet.
But we are of course still influenced by our bodies, and by the bodies of others. We still “know” one another at the primeval level of smell, taste and touch, by the way we move, or by tone of voice. We are still connected to our bodies, to the deep visceral experience of the body-self, but have become overly cautious in what we allow of this realm to surface. There is a deep-seated fear in us of the somatic level; the “subjective” level of mind and being is our enemy. Our bodies are an embarrassment; they remind us of the “gap” across which we have to communicate, not to mention the firmly entrenched “split” in our own body/mind relationship. And so we hold visceral reality at bay. God forbid that that reality – the reality of our separate bodily presence – should break into any given moment and disrupt our mental processes. This is of course a well-grounded fear, for unbeknownst to the conscious self there exists within us the sublimated body of the child, a core understanding of our undifferentiated level of being that we can’t quite get to grips with. But it’s there, and it does not go away.
But looping the self back into the self via “self-presence” is a bit like trying to see the back of one’s head without a strategically placed mirror – it puts a creative strain on the sensory system. Meeting psychological resistance, our tendency is to become “submerged” in thinking and doing, to choose the easier route and sink thankfully into streams and dreams of almost continuous conscious engagement. So great is the effort required to initiate self-presence that our surfacings are no more than momentary flashes. These glimpses of the somatic self as a “presence” are infrequent, infinitesimal in duration, counter-intuitive and seldom of any intensity. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger captures our problem in his 1945-1946 letter on “Humanism”. In relation to our sense of “Being” he says: “Being is the nearest to man. But this nearness remains furthest fromhim.”26
We do, however, sometimes break through when listening to great music, or poetry, or when grief-stricken, or when in physical pain. We are not altogether cut off from ourselves. Being “present” to ourselves is not an easy thing to accomplish; it is downright difficult to sense ourselves as a presence as we go about our daily lives. We continually forget to physically re-member ourselves as a presence. We get caught up in doing and thinking and self-presence disappears into a miasma of jumbled thoughts and internalized arguments. As Guy Claxton points out in his intimate history of the unconscious, The Wayward Mind, we are undoubtedly conscious as we mumble our way across streets or drive our cars on what we term “automatic pilot”, but something is missing, and that “something” is our sense of ourselves as a self.27
For Needleman, Walker and Berman, real spiritual experience is not about mystical ecstasy and wondrous visions, it is about openness to ordinary, everyday experience in the sense of being aware of our own psychophysical existence as we “think” and “do” our way through a day, hour or minute. And for Berman this means learning, or relearning, how to navigate the difficult territory of somatic experience and energy, a subject we will return to. Wittgenstein appears to have been of much the same opinion; his concern was to free the analytical mind from its frantic involvement with thoughts and reunite it with its estranged physical roots. Claxton homes in on this point and suggests that philosophers and schizophrenics “may be paralyzed by the compulsive explorations of disembodied possibility.”Why? Because they have lost their “common sense” and are apt to neglect intuition, feeling and sense of embodiment.28 To help clarify these issues, Berman refers us to the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann’s argument that individual consciousness passes through the same stages as that of the human race, and that mythology is the map of that evolution. The first myths were creation myths: the Earth was in a submerged state and was brought forth from a watery chaos. The human ego (read “hero” in Berman’s terms) became enmeshed in the archetypal territory of “journeys” and “conquests” where it did battle with unconscious forces and, if lucky, emerged victorious.
The ancient myths were therefore about “emergence”, the emergence of the “self” from the “not-self” (the so-called unconscious), and this process of emerging into ever greater awareness was/is far from complete. Morris Berman notes that the American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg posits six stages of moral reasoning ranging from “Piaget’s ‘moral realism’ to a growing awareness of the role of the intentions of others to an emphasis on abstract principles of human rights and justice,” and that Kohlberg and others hold these stages to be developmental and not merely cultural – individuals in every culture studied went through the same developmental stages.29
The Fluctuating Self 1.5
There are, however, ongoing problems with this view; there are still technical things to sort out concerning self and its place in consciousness. We may have successfully emerged from the unconscious, but the idea of further emergence, never mind what actually does the emerging, is still under debate. According to Kenneth Walker, John Hughlings Jackson (founder of the British School of Neurology) and the much maligned philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the notion that “self” was the continuous form of personal awareness we assumed it to be was a misnomer. Noting anomalies, Jackson argued that consciousness was neither a fixed quantity nor quality, but something that underwent change moment by moment. Nietzsche was of the same opinion.
Consciousness was not of fixed magnitude; it was “intermittent” in nature. Getting down to specifics, Nietzsche observed that because we believe ourselves to already possess consciousness, we give ourselves very little trouble to acquire it. We may not be quite as conscious as we think we are.
This was also Gurdjieff’s observation: in his scheme we are all but oblivious to the fact that our conscious life is conducted mainly at an unconscious level. So taken up are we with mental and physical activity that there is seldom any attention left over for an experiential consciousness of the self by the self. Being embedded in “thinking” and “doing”, we disappear into a submerged conscious state, and enter a state of “conscious sleep”, a state from which we only occasionally emerge or awaken.
What struck me as important about Nietzsche’s observation was the idea that we do little to “acquire” greater consciousness; we just assume ourselves to possess it in full and continue on merrily. It does not occur to us that something is amiss, that we spend a great deal of time in a mumbling, cut-off state of consciousness within which our empathic natures have difficulty in operating. We have, as it were, stepped into a crack in time and space where only the object of attention rules, a subjective domain where the self-aware subject of consciousness resembles drifting smoke.
In this sense “self” is not of fixed duration, an opinion backed now by much recent research. There is, we are told by numerous professionals, no fixed form of self at the center of conscious awareness. Consciousness goes through continuous fluctuations, and as such cannot sustain a permanent “I” structure, only a fleeting or intermittent one. Continuity of self is therefore an illusion, a chimera, a concept without substance in psychological reality. There is an “I-structure”, but it is composed of a “procession of I-moments” cleverly synthesized into what appears to be a singularity. Identity we certainly have, but it is no more than a backgrounding haze conjured out of past memories. Everything is in a state of flux, a state of coming and going, a state of existing and not existing. Or, as the philosopher David Hume put it, mind or self is believed to be a unity only because of the “felt smoothness of the transition which imagination effects between point and point.” Our idea of having a continuous self is pure supposition.
Picking up on this idea in a more positive and helpful manner, the Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann observed that the logical statement of identity – “I am I” – is in fact a tremendous achievement because it is an act “whereby an ego is posited and the personality identified with that ego – however fallacious that identification may later prove to be”.30 Out of this process comes a “self-orienting” consciousness, and it is our capacity for self-orientation that makes all the difference. But note Neumann’s qualification: however fallacious that identification may later prove to be.
Here then is much the same observation as that made by Nietzsche, Jackson, Hume, and countless others, whereas in Neumann’s terms the disconcerting discovery that our idea of being a self may be an illusion is turned from a negative into a positive. The illusion of having a self, of being an individual entity, of having a personality constellated around an “I structure”, becomes an achievement of which we need not be ashamed. The appearance in consciousness of a “self-orienting principle” was an evolutionary event of major psychological importance, an event without which we would lack the internal focus to exist and function as self-aware biological systems. The psychoanalyst David Black concurs: “Where there is no subject, nothing is of any importance.”31
The Catholic contemplative Bernadette Roberts follows suit: self or consciousness is not an entity or a being; it is not an individual person, a soul or a spirit temporarily dwelling in the body; nor is it divine, eternal or immortal. Self or consciousness is, however, the experience of all of the above –entity, being, soul, spirit and so on. Self or consciousness is a specific, unique experience or set of experiences. Take away self, and all its experiences go with it.32
If Berman and Needleman and Walker are correct in their conclusion, the appearance of “presencing individuals” in our societies may herald the next significant development in our evolution as a species. Our bodies may seem to be no more than vehicles within which our minds travel like passengers, but they may be much more than that. They may in fact be the means by which we can free ourselves from the natural limitations of our struggling intellects.28
I have no trouble with your definition of nontheist. Nontheist, however, excludes only one type of God. As an atheist, I am a nontheist, but my nonbelief covers more than just a theist God. I wish there were a term with fewer negative connotations than atheist.
Since the dawn of time, we’ve fought the bifurcated extremes of religion vs. logic/atheism. Now, for people with open minds and hearts, there’s an emerging third cosmos… Come take a look… http://www.wheretonowstpaul.com/brad/
Like many born Jewish, I’m an atheist. I became a formal and very regular attender in more or less thirty years ago, and joined twenty years ago. For the past few years, I’ve stopped going to Meeting because the discussion of searching for God just doesn’t speak to me.
Ministry speaking to the human condition appeals to me, but figuring out where God is, seems as distant to me as discussing how many angels could stand on the head of a pin. I just don’t care.
Jim, Yes! exactly! I DON’T CARE!!! It’s not so much that I’ve figured it out and God doesn’t exist, it’s just that there is so much richness and plenty to worry about simply among the visible living things on earth, I have no need to look for something else. For me it’s more like that jumble of aliveness IS God, rather than that I embrace it and turn my back on God, but whether it makes sense to call it God or not isn’t even much of a concern for me.
Ah, well
Hmm. This atheist Jewish Quaker does care about others’ ministry about God, mainly because a lot of Friends couch some genuine and extraordinary messages relating to the human condition in God language. I can easily separate my notions of what is good and real and important from God language, but for many others it seems the two are inseparable. And so, I have no wish for them to separate the two, as that would do violence to the ministry.
Of course, there are some God-related messages that don’t touch me at all, often because the language sounds like parrot-talk rather than the speaker’s genuine struggle to express experience that is hard to find words for.
I just “discovered” this site. Thanks, all, for previous comments. I was fully aware myself being rather “nontheistic” even before I sought membership in the Society of Friends back in early 90’s. I was quite relieved when a weighty Friend (ah, she was “Jewish” Quaker too!) in my membership clearness meeting told us that the reason she became Quaker was nothing to do with God, but rather to do with Quaker testimonies and social action. I was studying the Hebrew scripture in grad school at the time, and I became increasingly aware that God in the Hebrew Bible (or Christians call it “Old Testament”) is more or less like humanity’s collective disire for peace and justice; thus just because historical people (Jesus of Nazareth or George Fox) used the word “God” doesn’t mean we have to follow the practice. They just used the word God because that was the word universally understood at the time. Early Quakers were called “Seekers of Truth” not “Seekers of God”. Quakers often use the phrase “That of God in everyone”: it’s not “God in everyone”. The “That” in the phrase, as I understand, is the characteristics of God, which to me is “pease and justice”. As Pam says, “I don’t care” if someone believes in God or not; what I care is to work towards peace and justice, and I see there’s no connection between the belief in God and actions for peace and justice in real world.
For the record, this post-Christian Quaker nontheist is an atheist too, though I’ve decided to use that word less often. Not because I’m afraid of the negative connotations (any more than those attached to “anarchy”), but because I find that some people find it emotionally disturbing. I’m more than willing to disturb people intellectually, but not emotionally without good reason, and I find “nontheism” still does the one without doing the other as much.
Responding to the end of your post James, I think this is a provocative way to frame the issue — nontheism as a “big tent” that includes “theists” who have “nontheistic” (perhaps “nontraditional” is clearer) conceptions of God, along with people who don’t believe in or talk about God. Part of me thinks this is a more fruitful way of continuing the dialogue, yet it also seems inherently unstable: the phrase “nontheistic theism” sounds either like confused thinking, or a mere stopping-point on the road to “nontheistic atheism.”
Zach.
These are fuzzy words and tricky targets to hit. But I didn’t mean to frame things in such a way that there is such a thing as a “nontheist theist.” Spong, I think, claims a faith in God but would not describe himself as a theist — not in the way that he uses the word.
What I think I’m edging toward, is that there seem to be some for whom God is an experiential reality but perhaps not an objective reality. More imminent, less transcendent. Definitely not a being with a distinct consciousness.
This is not my own view; in fact I’m not sure it is an entirely coherent position. In some ways it seems to betray a conflict between intellectual integrity and an emotionally based nostalgia for images and conceptions that no longer function. For me the word God only serves as a metaphor, and a rather flawed metaphor at that. But it does seem to me that these folks are doing important work in moving religion away from superstition and magical thinking.
Moving religion away from “superstition” and “magical thinking”, in my way of thinking, is done by helping all parties, atheist and theist, to drop the “supernatural” expectations. The scope of nature is absolutely sufficient.
To stop talking about “gods” and contemplate “God” with a discipline not unlike that of science.
For instance, the idea of a god that is not all inclusive to infinity is sophomoric and prone to anthropomorphic projections.
So, infinity is the reasonable starting point. It is ever-present as the dimensionlessness of Now.
For a discussion of the term nontheist see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist
I do not want to be called an atheist because of the “fundamentism” of many atheists. I reject their dogmatic position in the same manner as I reject organized religion. It seems to me that what is called god or gods is a projection of our own being. Carl Jung provides, for me, the best understanding of the nature of god:
“Experiences of the self possess a numinosity characteristic of religious revelations. Hence Jung believed there was no essential difference between the self as an experiential, psychological reality and the traditional concept of a supreme deity.
It might equally be called the “God within us.”[The Mana-Personality,” CW 7, par. 399.”
This is from the definition of the “Self” found in the Jung Lexicon: http://www.psychceu.com/Jung/sharplexicon.html
John,
I didn’t mean to call you an atheist. People have the right to describe themselves with the words they choose, or to choose to not describe themselves. When many of us use these words in different ways, this causes some confusion, but that’s OK. It’s mostly honest confusion about questions that are hard to get a grip on.
However, some God-believers describe themselves as not believing in a theistic God (for me the essential meaning of “nontheist”). Bishop Spong is one of these. I also know some folks associated with nontheist Friends who stop a little short of saying “I believe there is no God.” I am making a case for a definition of nontheist which is broader than atheist, and can accommodate these positions as well as my own. I think there is some precedent for this, and some communicative value.
The word atheist is another story. I reserve this for people who, like me, hold NO belief in God, and do not find it fruitful to redefine the word God until they can be included in the circle of people who “believe in God,” who believe that “God exists.” I might actually have more of a problem embracing the words “believe” or “exists” here, than I have with the word “God.”
It has been a decade or more since I last read Jung, but in my memory he made more of a distinction than you are acknowledging here. Indeed, he spoke of his own personal “knowledge” of God in the manner you describe, but he also took some care to distinguish between this direct, personal reality of God which cannot be legitimately denied, and the assertion that there is an objective God outside the self, who created the universe. While he held a tentative belief in the second, objective conception of God, he explicitly stated that his inner experience could not be accepted as legitimate evidence for the existence of an external, objective God. He was a scientist as well as a poet.
One more point: having had many conversations with unbelievers and believers on the progressive edges of religion, I can say that there is often a hair’s breadth between what one cals belief and the other calls unbelief. And yet they feel reluctant to let go of the conceptions of themselves as believers or unbelievers. This is certainly true of me.
James,
To the best of my knowledge you never called me an atheist. The point that I want to make is, that many people who lose their faith, or never had it in the first place feel they must, by default, be atheist or agnostic. I wish merely to point out that there is a lesser known alternative. And your definition of nontheist does indeed need to be, as you acknowledge later, considered in light of the term “believe.” That is the troubling term. My somewhat simple analogy is unicorns. Do unicorns exist(that other troubling term)? In one sense they do. I can Google the term unicorn and find 17,700,000 links. I can find books about unicorns, I find pictures of unicorns. The issue for me is not whether I “beieve” in unicorns, but, rather, can I find a correlation in the physical world. And, the same is true for god.
Jung considered that humans are endowed with a natural “religous function” that has nothing to do with god. Do you Karen Armstrong’s “A History of God?”
Kind regards,
JF
John, I think you make good points, and one can find legitimate meaning in something one calls God, without going so far as to affirm belief or existence, with the sometimes troubling implications of those words.
And yet, it feels important for me to make those distinctions, to clarify that I do not hold any *belief* in God, though the word God does sometimes help me to talk about some subtle and meaningful aspects of the reality of being alive. “There but for the grace of God, go I.” “That of God in every one.” And some more personal understandings of my own, along the lines of “take care of each other, and leave God to take care of herself.” Yet it feels dishonest to me to talk about God, without pointing out my extreme skepticism about any of the traditional understandings of the word.
Yes, I’ve read Armstrong’s History of God, and liked most of it a great deal. I actually preferred her more personal works, Through the Narrow Gate and more recently, The Spiral Staircase.
The one significant problem I have with Armstrong’s theological ideas, and those of a number of progressive theological writers, is their notion that literalist perspectives are late developments in religion, emerging from the scientific perspective. On the contrary, I see massive evidence that literalist, superstitious understandings of religion have been dominant throughout the ages, and are only now starting to fall apart in the modern, scientific age. Of course, there have always been those in religious traditions trying to undermine the silly, superstitious, literalist, magical thinking of the religious masses. But they have rarely if ever represented the mainstream.
Hi American Friends,
The word “nontheist” doesn’t exist in my native language, French. Though it perfectly describes what I feel. A pity! Because, on one hand, I can’t use the word “God” anymore, intellectually speaking, and, on the other hand, I will miss it whenever I won’t, emotionally speaking.
So I try and look for the church that could understand and accept the way I feel.
I’ve been theoretically Presbyterian for the last twenty years. Practically too, because there’re so few Protestants in France that attending a Presbyterian service is the best available way to live according to the kind of “faith” I’ve described.
I’ve been meeting French Unitarians too, from time to time. You’ve got the Christian ones and the non-Christian ones. The first ones don’t understand me because I don’t want to be considered a Christian anymore, neither do the latter because I’m not fond of neo-paganism (to put it euphemistically!). I don’t like walking around naked by equinoctial night in a deep forest with a flaming torch in my hand!
So, in the last time, I’ve been contemplating getting to the Friends’ Meeting in Paris, France. I’ve gotten in contact with them. I just wonder whether they will accept me as I am. But I’m glad to hear about American Quakers who are in the same mood as me.
“Faith-fully” yours.
Fabrice
Hello Fabrice ,
Most likely, they will in my experience — especially so if they are programmed Friends. I have also know programmed Friends who are equally accepting.
I am an atheist Friend who was seriously questioning the integrity of continuing my formal association with Friends when I stumbled across a book entitled, Godless for God’s Sake – Nontheism in Contemporary Quakerism by David Boulton.
My best regards to you,
Bob
Hi Fabrice,
I’ve been an attender of unprogrammed meetings in New York, Delaware and Maryland over the last 8 years and I’ve found everyone to be really open and friendly as I’ve been trying to figure out quite exactly what I am. Nontheist seems to be the word that fits best.
I hope that the folks in France are accepting of and helpful to you too.
In the last 7 years, I’ve come to a point where if someone asks me whether I believe in God, I don’t just ask “What’s your definition of God?” Now I feel that I must say “No” in order to be completely honest.
Yet, I find a lot of resonance with concepts such as “There, but for the grace of God, go I” and with ideas that there is more going on than I can presently measure scientifically. For example, when my Mom gives me reiki, it feels good even when her hands are too far from me to register temperature or magnetic fields. As another example, I heard the gunshot that killed my Uncle, yet he was hundreds of miles away.
I can’t explain these, many other events, and why I care about the people dying in Iraq. However, I don’t think I need to explain them to myself via belief in God or any organized religion. Also, I don’t mind if other people are believers, as long as it doesn’t drastically impact my life.
On a silly note, the mention of unicorns reminded me that my brother had a dream recently that I was a unicorn and that I went around purifying water and leaving hoofprints that became sacred ground where a profusion of flowers sprang up. What a lovely vision to try to live up to!
🙂
Crystal
I too consider myself a nontheist, and am moving towards the more narrow category of atheist. I grew up in an evangelical Christian home, and all of my family both intermediate and extended (both sides) are active Christians, so it’s difficult for me to take such a radically different path belief-wise from them, and for the time being its sort of something I keep to myself mostly, until my thoughts have solidified. Radicalism is what first challenged my faith (it first led to a redfinition of my faith, and I find that its now eroding away altogether). I went from being a Republican evangelical Christian, to a Christian anarchist, moved towards Marxism, and now I consider myself a post-Christian nontheist, libertarian socialist. I wanted to comment to you guys searching for a description of “God” in a non-theistic sense, that French sociologist Emile Durkheim said that religion “was an expression of social cohesion…He thought that the function of religion was to make people willing to put the interests of society ahead of their own desires…One of the major functions of religion according to Durkheim was to prepare people for social life…Durkheim thought that the model for relationships between people and the supernatural was the relationship between individuals and the community. He is famous for suggesting that ‘God is society, writ large.'” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89mile_Durkheim )
Sorry for the long quote. I think Durkheim’s theory on religion is very interesting and definitely seems to hold some validity. He also was the first to develop a theory that effectively explained differing suicide rates in countries and to this day his theory holds solid.
– Josiah
Personally I am delighted with James’ description of a nontheist as “someone who does not accept a theistic understanding of God.” As this statement has occasioned the question of whether there can be a nontheistic understanding of God (nontheistic or non-traditional theism), let me weigh in on that subject.
I am a nontheist because I can get along quite well without using the word “God.” Here I make common cause with atheists. I can also appreciate God-language when it is used poetically and metaphorically (as it is used by many Friends who consider themselves theists). But saying I can get along without God-language isn’t to say that I have no appreciation of an aesthetic dimension which poetic Friends might consider theistic.
“I affirm (1)a wider order of being to which humankind is indebted and to and for which it is responsible; and (2)a creative power to that being which is the source and substance of all existence.”
This has been my credo for some years now. I do not feel that it is theistic, nor do I feel obligated to defend it or speak on it (if at all in theistic terms). So can there be a nontheistic theism? I couldn’t say, but it is possible to be a nontheistic mystic!
Hi Peter,
In an essay called “Une philosophie du bonheur” (“Another Philosophy of Happiness”), unfortunately written in French (unless you can read French…), I suggested to equate God with the Universe, so a Quaker meeting for worship for instance could be considered by nontheist Friends simply a time for worshipping life or the Universe itself and feeling deeply rooted in it, in a mystical communion with it and with the other human beings surrounding us. A French thinker, Pierre Hadot, called this feeling “oceanic feeling” and said this was the real descent of every religion beyond poly- or monotheism. This is the real significance of pantheism as well, I guess.
Oceanically yours
Fabrice
I suppose this is to all whom have replied before this… I feel comfortable with defining the word nontheist as “What makes sense in the absence of a Deity or Deities.” I doubt we will be able to return to pre-Theism, or prior to when the concept of Theism originated in someone’s imagination somewhere, sometime, perhaps an original free thought gone wild. I have met only one Atheist that avoided ever attending a religious institution, and he is one proud Atheist, and proud of that fact. Perhaps the essence/ideal of a True Atheist. And perhaps thats what a nontheist is eventually. So there are those who wonder what makes sense in the beleived presence of a Deity and or Deities and, those whom wonder what makes sense in the absence of a Deity or Deities, and those whom make sense out of it all being unable to prove it one way or another. The characteristic of abrasiveness in regard to Atheistic fundamentalism does turn people off, but the transition from addictive beleif to going non-religiously straight can be an abrasive personal experience. Fundamentalism in any shape and or form is often accompanied with noticable abrasiveness. Fortunaely there are 3rd generation moderates and of course the progressives whom have finally figured it all out. But, mostly I see nontheism as a fourth alternaive. Sort of like when we say there is one thing that Theists, Atheists and Agnostics all agree upon. If we ever enter into a state of ablivion, only a Deity could hopefully entervene on our behalf. The nontheist comes from a fourth alternative… we invision avoiding going there in the first place. Hope this made sense.
You claim to agree with Bishop Spong that “God” as a “a personal being with expanded supernatural, human, and parental qualities” does not exist. You are actually in agreement with the theologians and informed laypeople of all authentic religions. With your ringing endorsement of ‘nontheism’, you are attempting to make distinctions and create differences where there are none.
You seem to believe that many people who call themselves theists believe in an individualized God. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With the exception of the crude beliefs of the fundamentalists of all religions, no one else believes in such a concept of God. Fundamentalists of whatever religion have only a crude capacity of spiritual understanding and so must invent concrete notions to characterize that which they aspire to know more intimately.As their fears subside and their capacity for spiritual awareness becomes more subtle and wider ranging, these so-called fundamentalists will embrace other avenues of their chosen religion perhaps even ending up in the more mystical approaches of their religion as they mature in spiritual understanding.
There is, for example, not one Christian theologian of repute who believes in a individualized “God” floating around on a cloud hurling thunderbolts and dispensing justice. Most have beliefs in God that center around the ‘ground of all being’ concept or the ‘cosmic consciousness’ concept. That you cannot understand what is meant by these terms does not mean that they have no meaning. It only means that you do not yet have the capacity to access their meaning.
The problems with creating a theist-nontheist dichotomy are that the distinction is based on false premise and that you polarize and politicize a non-existent issue with the effect of preventing communication between theists and non-theists and, even more importantly, placing more obstacles in your own ability to ever know the subtle, cosmic expansiveness and Joy of that which is God.
Albert Einstein recognized the difference between God and man’s ability to know and manipulate the universe when he said, “I want to know God’s mind. The rest is just detail.”
I am a Unitarian. I also have a belief that might be described as “non theist.”
A mathematical description will suffice concerning my “God Belief”: The set of all Gods may be empty. The set of all actions of all Gods effecting our lives appears empty.
The position of an atheist is illogical. The proof of the non existence of something that doesn’t exist is impossible.
The position of a theist remains without any proof.
As physics gains more insight into the basic nature of matter, we may arrive with evidence supporting the deist (the belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation). However, this remains to be seen and, since the God(s) seem to exert no influence on us, this is barren and needs no further consideration.
The pantheist belief (belief that God(s) and the universe are the same) is also barren since it still leaves us on our own.
The bottom line? We are on our own and we must define our own purpose for “being.” I accept that I am “my brother’s keeper.” I should, to the best of my ability, take great care to secure the well being and safety of all that I can, alive and inanimate.
Ronald,
Thanks for your comments. I agree with much of what you say here, but I think you misstate the position of atheism, or at least of many atheists. Certainly of this atheist.
I have met very few atheists–in fact, only one I can recall–who are willing to assert that the absence of God has been or can be proven. An atheist is simply a person who believes there is no God.
Peter,
I think you divide the religious world far too cleanly between “the fundamentalists” and “all authentic religions.” There is a far greater spread of religionists out there than you seem to acknowledge, and the beliefs of most are far more supernaturalistic than the beliefs of myself, or of the most liberal theologians.
Indeed, there are theologically liberal Christians who see the Christian myth as a metaphor for a god they acknowledge to be unknowable, and the supernatural stories about Jesus/God as poetical, and made up by people. But there are far, far more Christians who do not, who in fact subscribe to the various creeds and catechisms that completely fly in the face of the more sophisticated, metaphorical conceptions of God put forth by Spong, Tillich, and others. Tillich’s notion of God as the ground of being, yet most decidedly not a being, in fact not even existing as we generally use that word, has never been mainstream theology. It has always existed on the edges of Judeo-Christian religion, but never at the center.
I will also admit that many (not all) mainstream seminaries are wrestling with and teaching religious problems that most of them would not dream of unveiling on Sunday morning before the pews. For instance, a great many seminaries are willing to admit the unavoidable fact that the Gospels are contradictory on factual matters, and therefore all cannot be true accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings. But, again, very few pastors share these insights with their congregations. Many of them would lose their posts if they did.
So, for all your claims, it is still very much a radical and minority religious claim to say that there is no conscious entity that created the universe, and no conscious entity that can answer prayers, that prayer has no effect on the outside world other than the psychological effect it might have on our actions in that world.
I also need to call attention to your statement that “There is, for example, not one Christian theologian of repute who believes in a individualized “God” floating around on a cloud hurling thunderbolts and dispensing justice.” If you remove the purely rhetorical part of that statement, “floating around on a cloud hurling thunderbolts,” it is no longer true. Many Christian theologians believe God exists distinct from the world and dispenses justice. Some do not.
Definition of Nontheist Friends
I agree with this characterization of nontheist friends in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Friends
A nontheist Friend or nontheist Quaker is someone who identifies with, engages in and/or affirms Quaker practices and processes, but who does not accept a belief in a theistic understanding of God, a Supreme Being, the divine or the supernatural. Like theistic friends, nontheist friends are actively interested in realizing centered peace, love and happiness in the Society of Friends and beyond.
Friends have recently begun to examine actively the significance of nontheistic beliefs in the Society of Friends, in the tradition of seeking truth among friends. Explicit nontheism among Quakers probably dates to the 1930s, when some Quakers in California branched off to form the Humanist Society of Friends (today part of the American Humanist Association), and when Henry Cadbury professed agnosticism in a 1936 lecture to Harvard Divinity School students. In 1976, the first workshop on nontheism at Friends General Conference was held.
The main nontheist friends’ website [1] is one significant site for this conversation, as are nontheist Quaker study groups. Os Cresson began a recent consideration of this issue from behaviorist, natural history, materialist and environmentalist perspectives. See Roots and Flowers of Quaker Nontheism [2] for one history. Friendly nontheism also draws on Quaker humanist and universalist traditions. The book Godless for God’s Sake: Nontheism in Contemporary Quakerism (2006) offers recent, critical contributions by Quakers. Some friends are actively engaging the implications of human evolution, cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary history, evolutionary biology and biology in terms of Quaker nontheism.
Nontheist friends are a small group of individuals, many of whom loosely relate to the unprogrammed tradition in Quakerism. Friendly nontheists are attempting sympathetically to generate conversation with others who are more comfortable with the traditional and often reiterated language of Quakerism. Questioning theism, they wish to examine whether the experience of the reality of direct and ongoing inspiration from God (the inner light) – “So wait upon God in that which is pure. …” (George Fox in Royce 1913:54) – which some Quaker traditions see as informing Silent Meeting and Meeting for Business, for example, might be understood and embraced with different language and discourse.
I like the term nontheist. I have trouble with the word atheist becasue to me asserting no belief is in itself a belief system akin to putting all of the anarchists on one island to be together and share their belief in absence of government.
I think it is that we don’t want fundamentalism
nor fundamentailitic concept like “god”
some biology goes to wheather one belives or
dosn’t belive (a study in minnisotta showed this)
so the opposite genes of reality and no -god are
also exist.
One must not get tied up in knotts about the
religisoty people
those that are against materialism and facts
find freedom in albert ellis book
the case against religiosity and this relates that
the sane kind of person dosn’t practice religion.
but there are subtitutes about there
for closer reality the nature poems
of japanese hiqu
then for ethics the 14 teachable virtues
and for examples such as no slavery and other ethics
aseops fables.
and aristotle
nomoekan ethics.
you have ayn rand virtue of selfishness.
and [ kung fucius –anelects…who is into
harmony of nature no mention of god]
john locke -essay concerning
human understanding..
with this possilbly a virtual reality
of what an atheist government would be
in its ethics
unlike the usa constitution
but a capitalist -atheist one …
where persons would be co-operative
that is openly able to be trusting
and continueing on in the free market
unlike the market shut down we seem to be heading to.
no more domestic disputes
better psychology
no chistain polution
more learning and no-put down indoctrination
forced into class rooms.
a lot closer to utopia.
thanks kindly,
RicH-w
Sign me up. Apparently, I am a non theist.
That explains a lot, thank you!
Jeanne
To my understanding the word also implies us Deists, who may believe in a higher transcendental being but not necessary a being as described by the major theistic religions
Maybe, Omar. The deist image of God is not the same as the theist image of God, though unlike *most* nontheists it seems to posit the literal existence of a distinct being understood as God.
My understanding of deism comes mostly from what I’ve read about some of the founding fathers, like Jefferson. The essential idea, I think, was a god of some sort who created the universe, but is not involved in history or human affairs on an ongoing basis. It makes few to no assertions about the nature of that god, which I like, but does seem to see an action of will behind the creation of the universe. If I had come of age before the cosmological, geological and evolutionary findings of the last hundred years, finding impersonal explanations for countless things that once seemed unexplainable, I might be a deist myself. But given our current scientific knowledge I don’t see any need to posit a god who created things. I’m still ultimately baffled by the mystery of it all, but the idea of a creator god doesn’t really help to dispel that bafflement.
But, yes, if you don’t believe in a theistic god, I think you can honestly call yourself a nontheist, if the idea appeals to you.
To my mind , the issue isn’t on the question of god at all , whether it exists or not, or even on a definition of non theism : there are as much ‘non-theisms’ as there are people on earth. The real quest stands in making others look at things as they are , without any kind of deity or supranatural forces.
This will be the main problem concerning atheists (materialists, humanists, all non theists generally speaking) and their relation with the rest of humanity in the future centuries.
If we want to open people’s eyes, there has to be more and more humanist teaching and objective programs in schools and universities, specially regarding religions and beliefs.
Waldorf schools and such humanistic scholar approach are already acting in some countries (nearly a housand waldorf schools around the world); but the challenge is to convey our reason in state funded school establishments.
James, I really liked the post.
I recently came to the same conclusion many in this forum have come to when I watched a documentary about the diversity of world belief systems. As I watched, I felt myself become slightly irritated as each person interviewed revealed their belief in what god was, was not, and whether he existed. I found that atheists and theists are all trying to answer the same question, but the question itself is bulls%@* (pardon the intended language, please). I realized that I did not need to ask myself that question: “What is God?” or “Does God exist?” I called it non-theism, and thought I coined the term (this thread proves me wrong). I am involved in religious based organizations, and do not feel like a hypocrite praying, but I simply refuse to talk about god or beliefs in any way. If some people I associate with in these groups knew my true non-theist beliefs, I would surely be kicked out of the club, so I just keep my mouth shut.
I would extend your definition of non-theism only to further differentiate it from atheism. Atheism and theism are reactions to the question of Does God Exist, but nontheism does not even acknowledge the question. Life goes on without it. Thanks again for the post. Best. CG
‘God’ a creative imagination of a mind looking for a way to purloin some of the economic surplus in the culture. Continues to this day, thousands of years later, as it is one of the best scams going. ‘God’ has the advantage for the Believer in that there is no need to take personal responsibility for decisions made by others.
I do not like scams, I stand on my own merits and decisions; therefore I am a non-theist.
Hey, Charles, welcome to the site. I’m sorry I didn’t see and approved your comment when you made it.
I can’t agree with what you say here, though. You are certainly right that God and religious ideas, and more to the point religious institutions, have been used countless times by countless people to exploit people. However, this is true of any powerful institution or ideology. Patriotism, love of country, has been at least as effective as religion.
In my view, however, the vast majority of believers are quite sincere in their beliefs, scamming no one, and are not particularly more pliant to the scams of others than unbelievers. In Quakerism in particular, ideas about God are far too diverse and unfocused to work as a coherent scam. And there are millions of thoughtful, educated Catholics who are quite clear in their minds about rejecting some of the more absurd elements of Catholic dogma and doctrine: they pick and choose. I would still say they believe some things that are probably not true, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve been scammed. All we can say with confidence is, they see things differently from you and me.
Thanks for the article. 🙂
The way I found out that I was a “nontheist” was by coming to a general conclusion on my spiritual, religious, and supernatural beliefs. You see, for me, believing in God, is, sort of, like believing the sky is not blue. I just can’t accept it. It’s not that I came to that conclusion through “rational thinking,” as an anitheist-atheist might say, but it’s just, sort of, my default belief, you could say, that I’ve had. And, I’ve had faith in this opinion ever since I was a child.
When I look at the Eucharist, I don’t see Jesus Christ. I recognize the strong symbolism, and how important it is for the human condition..etc….but the existence of the deity of Abraham just isn’t there for me. It’s just a very symbolic piece of bread, to me. And, since I don’t believe in “the real presence of JC in the Eucharist,” I don’t take it, out of respect to the religion; since I am baptized a Roman Catholic.
That being said, I do have to say, though, that I do believe in a lot of the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, according to its catechism. Honestly, if it wasn’t for the beautiful teachings of the social gospel, I don’t think I’d still actually consider myself someone who likens/tries-to-follow the Catholic canon. I just dig Catholic social teaching. But, I will honestly say that I’m not a true Catholic, or would identify as a “Catholic.”
If one was to ask me what are my spiritual beliefs and/or religious affiliations, I would tell them that I’m an “Agnostic Nontheist Cafeteria-Roman Catholic,” then place emphasis in explaining that “I am NOT a true Catholic,” and why that is true…
That being said, I am considering becoming an Agnostic Nontheist Cafeteria-Anglican; rather than an Agn…..teria-RC because of bad image I’ve been acquiring of the Roman Catholic Church, lately. :p
Anyway…now you might be wondering, or not, would you also consider yourself an atheist? No, at least not in the modern sense, I would not; and, for several reasons, really. Even though this word does have its exact definition, it has rather turned to have a differently unique definition, according to mainline public opinion. When people generally think of an atheist these days, their mind conjures up images of radical antitheists who believe in no supernatural what so ever; strict materialists, with sometimes strong secular dogmas themselves. And, I don’t want to be associated with that, what so ever. I am not an antitheist. I do have my own personal beliefs, though not many, in the supernatural/spiritualness-of-humanity. In addition to many other things that do not quite fit it in with the common stereotype of the “modern atheist.”
I mean, I guess I could consider myself an atheist, just in the classical sense, that I don’t believe in the existence of a deity; whether it exists materialistically and/or spiritually; and that this description of me would ONLY describe my belief of a deity, and not entail anything else; like my religious affiliations or my other spiritual beliefs. But, unfortunately, we live in a world where atheism is no longer looked upon as such. :p
So, that’s the tip of the iceberg as to why I consider myself a “Nontheist” rather than an “atheist.
I’ve been trying to figure out what I do/dont believe in. I think I consider myself as agnostic. I’m just confused. Always have been. I really don’t believe in God himself, but there must be something. I semi believe the scientific theory which makes more sense to me.Idk…help me out here.
A Friend for over 50 years. Member of Cork Society of Friends:
My knowing of my Maker is very simple:
A Vibration beyond my understanding.
I am given the Vibration of Thanfulness
I am given the Vibration of Peace within.
I am given the Vibration of Contentment.
I am given (when needed) the Vibration of Knowing.
The finer vibrations exceed beyond me.
I will be given what is needed when required.
The rest , for me, is belief.
(All of which is ‘second hand’