Mention of atheism prompts us to list yet another latent problem: this psychology effectively colonises proper religion, taking many of its finest concepts and bastardising them in such a way that when their patent falsity is finally revealed, the sceptic finds it immensely difficult to do anything other than throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hence the frequent whiplash-inducing swing from blind theism to blind atheism. I must confess, I cannot blame them. I have many friends raised in religious households who have left it all behind because of their youthful revelation, spurred by a realisation of the irrationality of what they have been taught, the ostensible impossibility of harmonising an omnibenevolent God with the world’s myriad suffering1 and, above all, coming to recognise the at times undoubtedly abusive nature of the received doctrine and community. There is an agonising ambivalence here. They too – like the fundamentalist who still clings to their belief – were tucked into bed with a soft prayer from their grandmother, and look upon this memory with sweet fondness. But they also still feel the sting on their cheek from when they, in total innocence, pointed out a scriptural inconsistency, or asked a particularly sensitive theological question, and received a slap and verbal chastisement for blasphemy (read ‘insubordination’); or when desperate prayers flowed from trembling lips to prevent what they were taught was a very real possibility: that they would burn in endless torment because their confused, newly pubescent brain had been unknowingly excited by the passing lace on a pretty lady’s blouse.
What is especially difficult to disentangle here is the sheer overlap of genuine truth and error. The misunderstanding, as detailed above, is mightily subtle, and its erroneousness most likely does not occur at all to the majority (it is, after all, a ‘forgetting’). Resultingly, a great deal of well-intentioned faith is rather unfortunately misplaced; much otherwise wholly beautiful sentiment set to work for rather ugly purposes. Religion becomes – and human leaders have quite gleefully discovered this – the most effective of all mediums for political maintenance, because people take devotional spirit which should be reserved for God alone and direct it instead toward earthly onticity, conjuring the most intense of human emotions to defend an institution rather than necessarily to simply be good to their neighbour. So we must counsel a vigilance. The indicator is fairly simple: if our devotional fierceness is in attachment to any particular that may be ‘set off’ (another Heideggerianism) against other particulars, and thus contains in it the latent threat of violence, it is misplaced.
A fairly salient symptom to look for is, of course, insecurity. The more firmly one clings to a given ideology, the more acutely one is aware, whether consciously or not, of the real possibility of its dismissal - and thus the more likely they are to spill blood in its defence. But are we really to believe that God is some sort of concept over which we may agree or disagree, of whom we may predicate ontic being either affirmatively or negatively? Again, this is the fundamental issue with his reduction to mere regionalism. If God is only a ‘part’ of life, set over and against the rest of the economy, he becomes only the sigil of a given tribe, a parochial deity whose clan must wage war against its neighbours (the ethical implications are immediate) in order to preserve their god’s dignity, which is insulted by both the prospect of their being threatened and even the placid, distant, harmless worship of another god. At least, that is, in a post-pagan landscape, where polytheism is anathematised by the Abrahamic religions whose dominance has shaped the world for centuries. It is rather uncanny, in fact, how closely these religions at their worst resemble nothing more than a particularly avaricious variant of pagan worship, discontent with (as was typical in, say, ancient Rome) the many cults and mysteries to which the individuals were privy, and demanding instead that all worship the one god who happens to be ‘mine’.
If God’s status as the Creator of the cosmos is truly understood and respected, it would seem fairly absurd to think that those parts of the cosmos from which my culture and tradition are absent are somehow entirely removed from him until the arrival of my civilisation and the pronouncement my confession of faith. If I believe this, colonialism is actively encouraged: indeed, if one believes in the imminent eternal torture of all those who fail to hear the news, it even becomes one’s moral prerogative. The violent conquest of all foreign lands and their drawing under the imperium of a given religious order is but a small price to pay to save their souls from Jahannam or Gehenna (to name from the two traditions which have been far and away the guiltiest religious colonisers in world history).
Perhaps it seems perfectly sensible, certainly to those who have lived with it all their lives, that religion should be something ‘insecure’ - namely, a set of facts to which we cognitively acquiesce because we have sufficient reason, and so which we must continually justify to ourselves and others in order to have ‘faith’. But there is a kind of suffering involved in such an assumption: an effervescence beneath the surface, a discontentedness which arises after one has, even if entirely unacquainted with the philosophical arguments against theism, encountered those profoundly troubling aspects of life which seem to shake the very foundations of one’s identity and affiliation, evoking a fear which seems so utterly terrifying that one naturally turns from it, suppresses it, tucks it far away in the deep recesses and pretends that it never really occurred – in short, ‘forgets’ it.
Even if one has fashioned a cohesive systematic of apologia or kalam, and possesses a seemingly endless cabinet full of clever tricks and rebuttals to proffer to every gripe of the cynic,2 one is never fully capable of eliminating this neurosis. So long as one entertains the possibility that their God is something that - like all ontic creation - can be negated, one subjects oneself to the perennial exhaustion of the sleepless dog, growling at the foot of the dormant master, fending off all manner of threats in the night. Certainly, one will feel a sense of accomplishment at having scared off this or that beast, and may even in their success mistake their master for something untouchable, but the tension never recedes, and the possibility of another enemy approaching in the night can never be foreclosed. But love of God is not tired, draining, exhausting warfare. It is love.
This is not, to state the obvious, an endorsement of the kind of wilful denial of reason so often seen in the type I am criticising. Quite contrarily, removing God from the fold of onticity allows us to debate all the more rigorously the religion and theology by which we seek to know him. It is, rather, to relinquish the cramped tension and white knuckles that we bear from clinging so tightly to our idols of mistaken ontotheology, the aggravated yells and squeals of Christian contra atheist, Muslim contra Jew, Hindu contra Buddhist as they vehemently argue in the street. My argument is that in this case, when a religion can impel us to actually hate another person with whom we disagree, we have already found ourselves in falsity, failing to grasp the meaning of a love of God, distracted so much by our fidelity to what we think a religion is that we directly oppose its original and continued intention - even if we are ‘rationally’ justified in our position. Truth is not limited to professed belief; it far outstrips the economy of phonemes, signifiers, symbols, and institutions imbricated upon each other to form an apparently unwavering bedrock of enclosed tradition. Naturally, then, in some rare cases - as with the deeds of men so sacred that they found whole religions, like the compulsively syncretistic habits of Guru Nanak, like the notable Toranic transgressions in the life and ministry of Jesus Christ - the holiest thing to do is to flout religious law or doctrine itself. If one thinks that religion is a matter of reading propositions off paper, and doing what one can to defend those propositions against all manner of reasonable critique, then certainly one will strive to do so with all their strength - extending fairly and honestly to physical violence if they deem that the circumstance demands it.
Debate over religion can - and should, for we are lovers of the truth - persist, but only in the knowledge that the Being which allows us to exist and debate at all, the Truth to which we are actually gravitating, is not a being amongst beings, a truth amongst truths. In the Orthodox tradition the notion of ‘theology’ is conceived quite differently to the guilds of Western academia; it is not simply some intellectual exercise, but an altogether holy one. ‘[Name] the Theologian’ is an honorific reserved for those who are believed to have experienced direct revelation, not simply for having been shrewd metaphysicians (which they also usually are). In the tradition of ascetic theology, from which Evagrius Ponticus and Maximus the Confessor both hail, theologia is the name given to the state of being following the prayerful and disciplined attainment of apatheia, the fruitful and blissful splendour of experiencing God after we have successfully excised ourselves from worldly pursuits. The broader emphasis on a lived and dynamic relationship with God is essential: what we must be wary of is a picture of our gravitation to Truth as though the latter were merely some unmoving entity ‘over there’ toward which we navigate by successfully and dutifully following the labyrinth of reason. Rather, Truth is something in which we are always already participating, before a syllogism or citation has been made. We must be good Nietzscheans here: the perspectives which allow for our relation to Truth themselves feature in Truth’s constitution. Such is the great contribution of the oft-misconstrued postmodernism to the contemporary world: a gentle prod to remind us of our propensity for intellectual hubris, a tongue-in-cheek Socratic question levelled at any who would presume to narrate reality according to an objectivist framework, quietly advising them of the Gadamerian prejudices innate to the epoch, culture, gender, etc. into which they are geworfen (‘thrown’ - last Heideggerianism, I promise).
These questions can be potent things. I have seen sanctimonious, fire-and-brimstone preachers reduced to fury and then tears at the hearing of a particularly well-fashioned criticism, crying like a babe at the thought that the great edifice of their faith may well come tumbling down. We as human beings become mightily attached to those conditions of our being with which we are most familiar, and in which we have known the most beautiful and comforting experiences. I do not wish to diminish the sincerity of feeling, only point out how conducive to wrath its intimacy can be if nothing is appreciated beyond it. My suggestion is little more than this: that all of creation, including the religious endeavours by which we attempt to understand the Creator, must be duly understood as distinct from the latter. The path forward begins when one starts to force a conscious wedge between such things and the numinous, ungraspable, ontological force which resides behind them; a dualism which to the untrained eye may seem indistinguishable. Run well, but do so not because you like the idea of being a runner, but because you love running itself.
This is, I should note, essentially the entire telos of religious practice, especially in prayer, yoga, meditation, and so on: that is, to widen this division, to evacuate our desires of idolatry, to see ever more clearly the wondrous fact that all religion (and all creation) is not God; thereby making space for a manner of living which is not devoted toward any particular thing but that which resides in and beyond all things. Naturally, with this in place one moves away from the use of religion as though it were merely a familial, political, or cultural habit, and thus gradually progresses (to use the famous Platonic analogy) from the darkness of the cave to the clarity of the outer light. The motion here is also a curiously alluring paradox: the more clearly we see the dualism of God and cosmos, the more intensely (to think again of Ibn ‘Arabi, and a thousand besides) we perceive the essential nonduality that constitutes the latter’s contingency on the former, coming to realise that all of creation yearns above all to be one with its Creator, and is, in a real sense, not yet creation until it has actually achieved this – which (to add yet another layer of complexity) it technically always already has.
I apologise if all of this spurs innumerable questions which I cannot address here. Much ink is to be spilled; keep an eye out. But I shall conclude with a final word to the unconvinced. What I by all means seek to avoid is an importunate, frightfully clamant rhetoric which tries to grab the cynical reader by the shoulders and shake until I have received a confession of faith. The implications of my position actually lend themselves to a far more complaisant - and consequently far more optimistic - view of the relationship between differing ideas and the role of the evangelist who advances and defends one before another. We here begin to reach a point which may be difficult to grasp, given the faith we have in ideas themselves to serve as vessels for the Truth is revealed to be little more than a provisional, pragmatic necessity which, once drawn closer to their ineffable Referent, begin to dissolve. Even the structure of debate to which people often tend to cling - ‘I have my idea, you have yours, they contradict: let’s argue’ - is just as śūnya (‘empty’) as anything else, and thus cannot be relied upon as a universally valid structure for the relation between ‘Truth’ and ‘untruth’. It may be a false attribution (I cannot be sure), but Meister Eckhart is supposed to have said something along the lines of: ‘Theologians argue, but mystics agree’. This is not simply because mystics are so love-drunk that they, saccharine sentimentalists as they are, stumble over the demarcations of reason to embrace each other, spurning clear dogmatic irreconcilability. This is because they care most intensely for the Truth; because they know that the Truth is not limited by human conceptuality or rationality, but instead is always already ‘ever-greater’ than even the very sacred doctrines by which we humbly attempt to approach it, and so while preserving due reverence for teaching, also do not permit it to prevent them participating in the greater fullness of Life in God.
In many religious traditions, the process of initiation – the confession of faith, learning of prayers or mantras, undertaking of certain sacraments or rituals, joining of a given community, and so on – is often described as a kind of resurrection; a death to the old life and a rising again in the new. And death is a scary thing. I do not want to underplay this, to pompously and peremptorily dismiss the deeper fear which so often manifests superficially as anger, vitriol, and acerbic attack. There is a petrifying agony entailed in undergoing such a transition; the violent kicks and screams of the prisoner sentenced to die, and the howling birthing pains of their emergence from the depths. To think that one needs to, in order to more fully love God, loosen oneself from the comforting familiarity of one’s unquestioned, often inherited (this being usually the most stubborn element of all) preconceptions about him and the world he created is not often a comfortable prospect. But comfort should be derived from the recognition that this fear exists only as a result of the very misunderstanding whence one is departing. This fear is merely the base reaction to the possibility of God’s negation, the possibility of the death of our perfect father, from whose insecure fiction we do not wish to depart, just as the child, though growing big, still does not want to say goodbye to their cuddly toy. The Upanishads perhaps articulate the solution most beautifully:
‘In the beginning this world was just a single body (ātman) shaped like a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself. The first thing he said was, ‘Here I am!’ and from that the name ‘I’ came into being… That first being became afraid; therefore one becomes afraid when one is alone. Then he thought to himself: ‘Of what should I be afraid, when there is no one but me? So his fear left him, for what was he going to be afraid of? One is, after all, afraid of another’ (Brhadāranyaka Upanishad I.IV.1-2).3
What are we to be afraid of? Foreign gods, the harrowing war cries of other clans, convinced that their god is truth whilst yours is profane falsity, and on these grounds finding themselves impelled to conquer by bloodshed. How do we abolish such fear? By recognising the superfluousness of such ideological tribalism, and the ultimate unity of all beings in Being itself. Not - again - that this in any way precludes the persistent diversity of religious difference, and the possibility of arguing for or against certain forms of revelation. But we no longer hang our identities on these revelations like our finest coats; we are far keener to appreciate the contributions of other traditions, possibly disclosing that Reality which cannot possibly be exhausted by any theology, however rationally plausible. This, incidentally, is precisely why I believe that all reason – all the words constituting this very article included – are really nothing at all if not solely one component participating in the broader fabric of a religious life (a term which, to my mind, is tautological). For all the scathing critique I have for this kind of psychology, I do truly believe that conversion is not brought about firstly by cognition or haughty argument, but by love. Which is why, to leave with one last controversy, it seems obvious to me, a Christian, that the atheist who loves their neighbour and seeks to better the world (like the Good Samaritan, without knowledge of or commitment to any articles of faith), is far closer to Christ than the baptised believer who uses their religion to castigate and oppress others, to appease their own crippling existential insecurity, and who thus fails to truly live through, in, and toward God.
Not that this is an issue easily explained, of course. But it only becomes an argument for atheism if we have first misunderstood God. We can charge God with cosmic mismanagement, insidiousness, or neglect only if we think him - again - some great ruler who is responsible for watching over us and shepherding us to those ontic desiderata which we so seek. If we understand him properly: namely, that is, as Goodness and Love themselves, then we know that he is the very moral metric by which we condemn sin, and so to reject him in light of evil seems utterly counterintuitive.
Such types seem to garner popularity as intellectual warmongers for their respective traditions: Mohammed Hijab always seems to me to take considerable pleasure and pride in loud rudeness to his discussants, and the sheer quantity of Frank Turek’s pre-prepared Microsoft slide shows is more than enough to distract you from the lack of philosophical rigour they tend to contain.
The Upanishads, trans. Patrick Olivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).