by VorJack
I’m reading Robert Jensen’s work All My Bones Shake for an eventual review here, but I’d like to discuss one concept now, since I don’t think a full discussion would fit in the review.
A Relabeling of the Unknown
Pullquote: God is what we call all those things about the universe that we don’t or can’t understand.
Jensen describes himself as a Christian atheist, or a secular Christian. I think the “secular” label is most useful, since Jensen is seeking a universal way to be Christian rather than a sectarian way. Part of his mission is to find a way that everyone can participate, even naturalists. To that end, he brings in the concept of “God as Mystery.” As he puts it:
I believe God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that is beyond our capacity to understand. I believe that the energy of the universe is ordered by forces I cannot comprehend. (p. 47)
Jensen is not saying that God is a mystery. Instead, he is saying that God is mystery itself. God is what we call all those things about the universe that we don’t or can’t understand.
Let me put it in a more familiar way. This isn’t a God is in the gaps argument. This is an argument that God IS the gap. God is simply another name for all the gaps.
Poetry and Consequences
Pullquote: There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know.
I can appreciate the poetry of it. And it allows Jensen to hammer on an idea dear to my heart: the need for humility in the face of the universe.
To seek to always love God means, from this view, to seek always to accept our place in a Creation that will always be a mystery, no matter how much science teaches us about specific parts of that Creation around us and in us, through physics and biology…. Nothing in this view demands that we reject science, but instead reminds us to be aware not only of what science illuminates but also what is beyond its reach. (p. 48)
As I’ve said before, as an atheist I don’t believe that the universe is under any obligation to make itself comprehensible to us. There are things we don’t know, but that we will come to know. But there are also things which will likely be beyond the ability of our tools to measure, or our minds to understand.
But I do have a couple of problems with the “God as Mystery” idea. I don’t see what we’ve gained by relabeling all the mystery as “God.” Why is the word “mystery” itself not good enough to describe the situation? If nothing else, “mystery” is a better platform for adjectives; we can speak of solvable and insolvable mysteries, and even ultimate mysteries.
Frankly, I can’t think of a word in the English language that comes with more baggage that the word “God.” We’ve spent the past several thousand years associating Gods with big powerful versions of humans living in the heavens. Generations of philosophical theologians preaching that God is beyond human understanding haven’t broken us of the habit of viewing God as the ultimate monarch. Bringing it into the discussion is just begging us to start personifying again.
This seems to be one of those compromises that manages to offend both sides. Christians are being asked to give up their personal, interventionist God, while atheists are asked to obfuscate a fairly simple concept. So while I feel there’s something to admire in the idea of “God as Mystery,” I doubt its going to spark the next Great Awakening.
By saying that God is just another name for mystery, he’s tacitly accepting that, as humanity solves mysteries, God diminishes in stature. In his view, we are killing God through progress. While that works as a nice metaphor, it seems to me to be against Christian teachings about how great God is.
I can’t help feeling that, as with a few other people who I’ve heard express similar views, this writer is actually an atheist. I think he doesn’t believe in the supernatural aspect, but that he so loves those parts of his religion which are good (the social network, friendship, mutual support, etc) that he’s looking for a way to justify staying involved in all of that despite not believing in the central message: That Jesus is God, and they are a Deity.
Ultimately, though, this all falls down for a very simple reason: He’s rounding up all sorts of different mysteries for which we have already got names (and theories which we’re working on to solve them) and just re-branding them as “God”. Occams Razor applies – It’s not neccesary to say “Oh, yes, that’s all God, that is” when we’ve already said “Once we crack Grand Unified Field Theory, we’ll let you know exactly what it is, and we’re halfway there already”.
My only worry is this: when the mysteries are explained as is continually the case, what will God’s place eventually be? Like, say, when there is a cure for AIDS, or more efficient farming methods so there is less or no more starvation, and it’s clear that God is not punishing us for our evil ways?
Quoting you “Frankly, I can’t think of a word in the English language that comes with more baggage that the word “God.” We’ve spent the past several thousand years associating Gods with big powerful versions of humans living in the heavens.”
Perhaps this is besides the point, but most cultures/languages do have a word/name for God, and is associated with something in that particular environment. UF is probably biased in the sense that you write about the Christian God most of the time. I appreciate where you’re coming from, though.
Mm, I can’t vouch for all cultures, but I can say, without a doubt, that when we say “Deus” (singular, masculine, proper name) in portuguese (which means ‘god’ and can be applied to any deity) it’s often understood to mean the God of Christianism / Judaism / Islam, at least in every day conversation. Likewise, the word Deusa (singular, feminine, proper name) is associated with the female pagan entity. The generic usage of the word (“deus”, uncapitalized) usually requires further specification about which deity.
That’s in ref. to Brazil, by the way. I can’t guarantee (but strongly suspect that is the case) the same for other portuguese-speaking countries.
Ngai (the giver, or the one who shares stuff out), the pre-colonial God of my tribe (and now the Christian God) has no sex. We don’t have he/she in our language either.
I think you’re missing the point—it was NOT that God explains any particular mystery, that’s the god of the gaps argument. It’s that God is just the mysteriousness of the world itself. The sense that the world is mysterious is the sense of God on this theory (if I understand VorJack correctly anyway).
The sense of general mysteriousness is not diminished even when we get an account of something. In fact, the more science I learn the more mysterious it is to me because precisely to that degree it winds up being counter-intuitive and revealed to work in ways that still make me want to know “why like THAT?” even more. There’s always going to be an irreducible complexity on some level it seems. And that cognizance that there IS mystery to the universe remains even as each particular dynamic gets an account insofar as those accounts still boil down to how but not WHY.
And I think for a lot of people that is what they MEAN when they say “God” and so I see a use in this book trying to formulate that sense of “God” into an account that names those people’s sense of what makes them say there is a “God.”
Yet, I also share VorJack’s uneasiness that keeping the word in circulation perpetuates the general meme of God and most people interpret that meme in the personification way. What this winds up meaning is that you say there is a God and you mean this very sophisticated concept explaining this awareness of the universe’s irreducible complexity and your hearer more often than not thinks of a man in the sky instead. And so you’re both using this word and meaning opposite things and you’re now inadvertently still promoting the other person’s superstition.
That’s one way to look at it and it makes me queasy too. But, on the other hand, we might look at the reality of the situation and say that theists so far outnumber atheists that the goal of dumping the word God altogether is impossible to realize given the number of theists. But if we can influence people to change what they mean by God to something which is far more atheistic in substance while still letting them satisfy their need to have continuity with their tradition’s God meme, it’s a way to make a full embrace of atheism far more plausible down the road. I use the word “meme” instead of “idea” because a meme can refer to something whose meanings and interpretations change. The word God persists and is transmitted as a meme even as the ideas it stands for differ wildly in various contexts. Traditions pass on memes more powerfully than they do specific interpretations of them. And it is in the continuity of phrases and rituals and other practices that the community recognizes itself across time even as its interpretations of these things differ at various points.
The way I see it, traditions transmit forms—rituals, group identifications, special words, etc. The content of them can change to various extents as long as the forms and their basic forms and effects remain constant. People’s loyalties to traditions often make it so that they just want to interpret what they think is true as filling out the meaning of their tradition’s preexisting symbols rather than as challenging them. People don’t want to chuck the word God for what they really think. It’s too powerful a symbol and sharing in it creates too powerful a bond to the rest of humanity or their community—so instead they reinterpret the word God to be whatever they actually think about the greatest power or most fundamental nature or deepest mystery of the universe.
People rather fluidly shift their anthropomorphic idea of God to something more abstract which represents a much different actual concept without realizing at all that they are no longer talking about the same thing. They feel very comfortable to say that they STILL believe in God but now they just know better what he is like EVEN THOUGH the content of what they say “he” is like means that they are referring to a completely different type of being existing. It is as though they thought there was a bear outside and instead they find out it is a monkey and they say, “I still believe there is a bear outside, I just see now that bears are different than I thought they were.” Multiple contradictory descriptions are all taken to be acceptable meanings for the nature of God such that we can completely disagree about them and still use the same meme. And we can switch from one to the other and feel no existential angst like most of us do when switching to declare ourselves atheists. So, the easiest way to think like an atheist, for most people, is to just reinterpret the meanings of their tradition’s words in atheistic ways that still retain all the outward forms.
While we also need us atheists as part of the tug of war of interpretation of reality pulling people further away from personification, there is a place to have these religious moderates closer to the middle of the rope, using their influence on those who share their use of religious terms to persuade them to mean more rationally acceptable things by them. So, even though I worry a great deal that they’ll just perpetuate the meme which will the shallow will persist in interpreting in crude and obviously false ways, I think there is also a real function served by moderates in dealing with the reality that religion will not vanish overnight and so making it a better kind. And the more they find ways to give people transitional interpretations of their traditional memes that move their meaning closer to actually mapping reality, they provide an important service.
Do you think that the continued existence of “God” as a concept is dependent only upon the tradition reinforcing “his” existence?
That is, in our uber-enlightened state, if we were to completely distance ourselves from the tradition of God, that the idea of “God” would entirely dwindle away to nothing?
The reason I ask is that this seems unlikely to me, although it is assumed by your “traditions transmit forms” argument. “God” as a concept had an origin in some aspect of human nature or experience. I seriously doubt that human nature has changed enough to negate this initial “push.” We haven’t (if our penchant for lies in advertising means anything) become much more dependent upon or grounded within reality. What is to say that religious ideas wouldn’t spring up even after religion was completely eradicated? They arose somehow in the first place. Even if religious ideas are replaced by scientific ideas, that is not in itself enough to ensure that religious ideas no longer continue within their “replacement.” Ritual and an attempt to explain the unknown might in themselves be enough to spark religious ideas, or in concert with human nature even be able to kindle an idea of a personality-based “God.”
excellent, probing question (as usual, Jon Jon). Please forgive me for being able to give only a rough sketch in reply right now. For the time being I’ll say this much—what I was stressing is that the reason that people who become dissuaded of the existence of the God they were raised to believe are so reluctant to break with the word is deeply influenced by the forces of tradition. In other words, why don’t people just say, I don’t believe in God, I believe in a source of all being?
(Some do, of course. Some are irreligious and shift over to “belief in a higher power.” Interestingly that happened after Christians created AA and tried to make God talk palatable in as ecumenical way as possible and as part of a certain (questionable) theory of how we come to best recognize and accept our limitations. And then the meme of higher power circulated enough that it has become a standard, religiously non-committal way of speaking.)
But most people in the West today are radically secularized and do not believe in most literal religious claims. Yet they refuse to break with the traditions. I think that, while you’re right there may be some psychological causes of belief that are purely within human minds since it’s so widespread and universal a human phenomena—in that belief in gods is in every culture—that nonetheless there are powerful, subsconscious, visceral associations with “faith” and religious traditions that keep modern people who have had the world demythologized for them reluctant to simply disavow their religious traditions.
People have too hard a time just shedding these particular false beliefs for me to think that they address them at all as simple cognitively addressable questions of truth and falsity. They struggle with these questions in a way that bespeaks complicated social relationships. And some people with very little religious ritual or obedience to moral codes will nonetheless get angry at insults to their religion as though you just attacked their family. And I think that’s because you have done exactly that.
I think we associate certain loyalties as superseding reason and faith traditions ingrain precisely this allegiance in people. And I think it helps explain why people don’t just keep saying they don’t believe in God but some other mystical force or source of mystery or principle of being or what have you. They like to say “God” because then they’re still in the club and part of their tradition. And the tradition allows people a surprising amount of flexibility in personal definitions to accommodate everyone—setting only boundaries at heresy, atheism, and explicitly different Gods.
So I’m not really saying that tradition alone invents the idea of God, I think it must have some psychological origins prior to tradition. But what tradition does is it prescribes the limits of what that term can mean, gives it its primary symbols and associated rituals, associates some broad values with it, and then let’s people interpret within those boundaries what they mean.
To recap, then, your argument is that the goal of those who “oppose” what you perceive as the religious disconnect from reality should be to gradually drag ritual to a place where it corresponds to something “normal?” (Or perhaps more accurately, that moderates are at least useful in doing this?)
If I haven’t botched that too badly, can you explain exactly how ritualized behavior can approximate “reality” more closely, or at all? Unless we arrive at a consensus of the exact nature of reality, then a ritualized understanding of it is limited in the extreme, since it can only be based on imperfect models but will be held more and more firmly by tradition. In essence, I’m wondering why ritual makes sense as a useful tool under your rubric. I also wonder how it could be incorporated into any theoretical model of society as a positive influence unless one assumes that the prevailing worldview is “right” or “true” in an absolute sense.
Always appreciate your thoughtful comments :)
Thanks JonJon, and, again, I always enjoy reading you on here and interacting with you. Your questions always strike me as eminently honest, perceptive, open-minded, and probing.
By ritual, I include ritual recognition of symbols. I think that traditions try to perform balancing acts of trying to preserve received wisdom and keep people united both as contemporaries and down through successive generations. I think they rely on ritual practices which psychologically (and, in the case of group physical repetitions, physiologically unite people as functionally one and identifying themselves as one with the group. I think these practices are not in the interest of reason primarily but (a) curbing untested ideas from destroying what has worked, (b) preventing levels of individuality that would destroy group unity, and (c) making sure that practices that worked in the past retain their influence.
Tradition just functions to preserve itself, that’s what it does. It resists all novelty by its nature. And in faith traditions (or to the extent that faith enters into even secular traditions), one of the ways it polices loyalty is by demanding group members be theoretically willing to trust tradition itself either against their reason or when there are an absence of reasons. This loyalty to the group even at the expense of one’s intellectual (and maybe even moral) conscience is faith. Faith is this willingness to subordinate to the group where reasons are either insufficient or even non-existent.
So, I think that humans, as evolutionarily conditioned to trust authorities for obvious practical reasons, have their trust and conformism excessively exploited by traditions, which make them viscerally feel obliged to still accept some modicum of faith. Faithless people strike even the nominal, go-with-the-flow believers and many de facto atheists as suspicious and anti-social. And I think it’s because of this sense of ultimate willingness to defer to tradition is missing and being conformist animals, even those who really don’t believe the propositions of faith traditions very much, still mistrust those willing to abandon all faith since it (irrationally) is taken as a signal of possible willingness to break faith with the group in other ways.
So, in all of this, what I’m saying is that for most people, being faithless is too hard an option. So the option is to take one’s modern, anti-supernaturalistic temperament that rubs against the received symbols and just say that one’s thoughts are what those symbols really mean. This is their way of feeling emotionally faithful while not suffering from permanent cognitive dissonance. Their faith beliefs “really” refer to things compatible with modern or philosophical sensibility.
My hopeful interpretation of this is that if we cannot eradicate religion, we can at least make its interpretation so modern that its backward, irrational, indefensible traditional aspects which no longer have rational support (but rather have positive countervailing reason against them) will diminish in power. The goal would be to so secularize religions’ interpretations of their symbols so that they no longer conflict at any points with Enlightenment values or scientific outlooks or rational habits of thinking. Insofar as they will remain faith traditions, the dimension of irrationalistic loyalty and unjustified belief seem likely to remain active, influential factors within them by their very nature as faith traditions. But nonetheless, if most of their practices and interpretations can be modernized, maybe this will serve as that halfway house to full secularism. Religion only in form, filled completely with secular content suits the Danes just fine and atheists are heralding them as models of secular peace and prosperity that prove that atheism doesn’t lead to anarchy. And that’s because atheists get it—as long as the Danes are only paying lip service to faith out of habit of tradition and symbol and ritual but in their hearts are entirely secularized and not irrationally religious in any anti-rational or immoral way, then they’re across the goal line in most of the most important ways. Sure, a full-blooded total abandonment of religion altogether some day might be a nice utopian ideal. But de facto secularism is good enough for as long as outward religious forms must persist. And given the rate of human progress over centuries, it looks to be quite a bit longer that such outward forms will continue to propagate themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still an advocate of pushing for complete secularism today. But I’m a realist who has hope that at least in some ways, secularization from within religions is a valuable intermediary to that ultimate goal.
I disagree with this definition of faith:
“This loyalty to the group even at the expense of one’s intellectual (and maybe even moral) conscience is faith. Faith is this willingness to subordinate to the group where reasons are either insufficient or even non-existent.”
What you have just described is someone having faith in a ritual or set of rituals. What you are saying is that faith is merely loyalty to ritual. While faith can certainly cause loyalty to a ritual, equating the two is a stretch.
Other than that, I have no major problems with what you just said, except for the fact that I think non-secular, traditional religion is under-appreciated (which I understand is not a particularly popular idea right now, but oh well…)
“There’s always going to be an irreducible complexity on some level it seems.”
There is no such thing of “irreducible complexity”.
Only those people that have absolutely no sense of science use these words to hide that they are ignorant. Instead of doing some little research or ask a scientists, they just invent these words and invent a whole fictional story around it.
The examples of “irreducible complexity” I have seen so far are all BS since there are clear scientific explanantions about it that can be tested. The human eye for example is falwed in design the light receptors are built the wrong way. But this flaw can be easily explained by evolutionsince the light receptors had other functions before.
That’s not what I’m talking about when I say “irreducible complexity” but I realize that I used a term with a technical meaning that I did not intend. All I mean to say is that we can figure out how the universe works in greater and greater detail without ever knowing why is the universe this way, with these laws, or existing at all. Those are just not answerable questions. All we can do, as far as I understand, is map how everything works. But solving the riddle of being itself or “why” the principle of non-contradiction is true, etc.? No account of how existing beings behave “explains” such things. They simply are. They’re the bedrock where we cannot ask anymore questions or get any more accounts. We must only stare at the mystery that there is existence and a law of non-contradiction. That’s all we can do.
But, yes, any particular interactions between beings or any puzzle about how they come to be as they are from within the basic laws of the universe and given the basic elements we happen to have in ours are in principle open to a scientific account and require no God to fill such gaps.
And if somehow science could even explain to me how being came to be at all, then I’ll be extraordinarily impressed. But I’m not expecting it. And “God did it” is a non-answer.
But… what is the point of a God defined as “everything we don’t and may never know”?
And how “loving God” is different from everyday awe at, well, everything?
And how does that even relate to Jesus & Christianity at all? Is he son of the universe?!
Me no understand :(
I think that the reality is that people feel deeply attached to traditional forms, including such ways of speaking. So the purpose of defining God as “everything we don’t and may never know” is to take on a different idea without the difficult task of rejecting a key traditional symbol.
So in the end it is all about one guy who is, in fact, an atheist, but clings to the belief that God exists – even if “God” is a meaningless symbol.
Well it might be a way for more de facto atheists besides just Jensen to similarly cling to a symbol that is not CULTURALLY meaningless to them at all.
Yes, that’s what I meant; I expressed myself badly.
The idea – the culture – of belief in Something (a deity, a force, whatever) is too strong to be simply abandoned. I suppose that’s a good origin for the New Age, one-with-the-universe mindset – the abandon of traditional shapes (god as the personified good and evil), modernized (god as an energy, a driving force) but not altogether abandoned.
The problem is that the christian god is a being to be worshipped. They don’t worship and give their lives to the traditions. They worship and dedicate their lives to the god itself, whether they call it god or jesus. So changing the meaning of the word “god” isn’t going to take in the first place. You can’t replace a theist’s definition of “god” with some general concept. They believe it is a real and specific entity that takes an active role in their lives. Asking them to replace that with some generalized notion about the mysteriousness of the unknown is a waste of time.
Well, in a way, they really do worship and give their lives to the traditions. That’s what they’re actually doing. And it’s out of their loyalty to the traditions that they go so far as to surrender portions of their reason. That’s a significant way to give one’s life to a tradition.
And for those who just cannot handle the nonsense of a personal God but still want to play along, they can tell themselves God is the mysterious and the personal stuff is true in some weird metaphorical way. And then they can feel good that they don’t have to leave the tradition. They can still believe in “God.”
And for the superstitious who believe in the man with the white beard, they get the full package deal with no need for vaguery. Now THOSE people really worship “God” and not just participate in tradition while calling it “God”.
“Jensen describes himself as a Christian atheist, or a secular Christian.” Sounds oxymoronic to me.
“I believe God is a name we give to the mystery of the world that is beyond our capacity to understand.” Sure, if you don’t like how people define a word, just apply your own definition. I believe that part of the reason gods were invented was to explain things people don’t understand but, I’m with VorJack in that the word “God” has so much “baggage” associated with it that it has become meaningless as a definition or a basis for discussion.
“Christian atheist” is only oxymoronic if you equate Christianity exclusively with theistic belief. But religions are more than just belief statements, they’re whole sets of traditional symbols, rituals, practices, values, group identities, etc. It’s quite possible for many people to strongly identify with, and want to participate in, all of these other things even as they reject theism.
And even more prevalent than Christian atheists are secular Christians—Christians who oppose both theocracy and even the imposition of their beliefs into public discourse. The West is overall a very secular place now and it’s not all its Christians (who are the majority of Westerners) have become atheists, but because they’ve become secualrized Christians—whether only implicitly through their behavior or explicitly through their conscious attitudes and beliefs.
“Christian atheist” isn’t oxymoronic at all. Nor is “secular Christian”. I know plenty of folks who call themselves “secular Jews”, and I’ve taken to calling myself a “Catholic atheist”.
It’s an acknowledgment that, while you may not be a believer, your life has been affected culturally by how you were raised. I have secular Jewish friends who keep two sets of dishes and don’t eat pork – because that’s how they were raised. I tend not to eat meat on Fridays in the spring – not because of some fear of the wrath of God coming down upon me if I have a slice of bacon, but because I associate spring with fried fish, cheese pizza and grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup.
If you were raised in a Christian household, culturally you’re going to be a Christian even if you reject your upbringing. I don’t know any formerly Christian atheists who don’t celebrate Christmas, and all of them celebrate Easter as well. The former they celebrate with evergreen trees and exchanging of gifts, the latter with Easter egg hunts and family dinners. All of which is related to their cultural upbringing but none of it dependent on the actual religion that underlies that culture.
I don’t :p
Our only concession to Christmas is gifts and a “feast”. At my household, where I live with my mother, we don’t do trees – probably because we’re all grown up now. We may restart the practice when my little niece is born.
Our concession to Easter is chocolate foodstuffs (no hunt) and a “feast”. We usually don’t eat meat, but that’s more my mother’s objection (she was raised catholic) than mine.
Ironically, my mother (raised catholic) is now protestant and still a christian.
As you said, it’s a cultural thing, but I suppose that’s more of a Westerner thing than a religious thing. True, Christian tradition is deeply ingrained in the West, but I’ve several non-Christian friends, who observe both holidays in the aforementioned way (chocolate eggs, feasts, gifts) even while practicing other religions – including Wiccans, Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists.
It’s a bit different with secular Jews, I suppose, since their traditions remain quite specific to their specific group, but I don’t think it makes a whole lot of sense to have Christian Buddhists, Christian Muslims or Christian Jews on the base that they celebrate holidays that are now wholly ingrained in the national culture, even less when such traditions predate Christianity (such as the exchange of gifts, which is, afaik, an Odinist practice), in addition to their own cultural traditions.
I understand where you’re coming from, though.
Ugh, I lose.
Meant to say, “Ironically, my mother (raised catholic) is now protestant and that’s when she dropped the Christmas tree thing, as well as most of the relevance of Easter.”
What’s the point then of calling something that is a mystery “god”? I still don’t get it. If anything, calling it a mystery is more honest. It implies that, even if we don’t or even can’t know the answer, an underlying natural mechanism is assumed. Calling such a mystery “god” gives it undue wonder and awe, and implies the supernatural. We might as well call all mysteries “magic.” But calling such mysteries “god” or “magic” would cause people to give up investigating them (because of the supernatural implications), and then the mystery becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Very unscientific indeed.
There is a fundamental difference in saying that “God is a mystery” and saying “God is mystery”. In a way that’s a kind of religious certainty. He’s not saying that he doesn’t know what God is. He knows what God is and God is mystery itself. The same question must be asked as would need to be asked of anyone who claims to know what God is. Prove it. Or (since I said it was a question) Where’s the proof?
At the risk of commiting a “No True Scotsman Fallacy” don’t you think that the term Christian applied to this guy is bit of a stretch. Maybe he goes to church out for some positive social function, but without some sort of tie to the bedrock idea of a personal God he really is just a Humanist. To my way of thinking he would even be more in line with Taoism. The dialectic tension he sounds like he is attempting to hold is at best what Roger said, oxymoronic.
That’s exactly what I first thought. What he describes and labels as “god” is little more than grossly described Tao – the essence of all that is, was and will be; the mysterious overachieving force that permeates everything.
It also doesn’t follow he is a “Christian” if he doesn’t, uh, believe in Jesus Christ as God (or son of God) – it’s the fundamental of what makes Christianity, well, Christianity.
Exactly. And there are apparently people who call themselves Christians who don’t believe these things. If that’s the case why bother with the label?
Personally, I wouldn’t stay in Christianity without the personal God and that’s why I left. Having been raised a fundamentalist, the choice of watering everything down was not an option I could tolerate.
But there is a case to be made that it’s foolish to demand that Christians interpret their tradition in the worse ways than in better ones.
Christianity has differed enough over time that it is not any one belief or set of beliefs. It is just a tradition. It’s like America—America is not any one belief or practice. It’s a place with a tradition and our traditional forms and defining belief statements can all be reinterpreted in different ways and have been differently interpreted throughout history. Christians can change what they mean by Christianity all they like—it’s only the fundamentalists and those who want to police heresies that try to clamp down on varying interpretations.
So, from outside the faith, why concede to the fundamentalists and heresy-punishers that they’re right and they have the “real” meaning of their faith rather than the moderates and liberals? If moderates and liberals are willing to philosophize and modernize their beliefs into more intellectually, morally, and politically acceptable interpretations, why not encourage those interpretations over intellectually cruder and morally more bankrupt ones?
The best reason to try to tie people’s interpretations of religious traditions to their worst meanings is to try to repel them from staying in the traditions and encourage them to embrace a full-bodied atheism rather than one tortuously articulated in religious terms. Ultimately, the problems with religion itself may be so offensive to us that we would rather not have it flourish, even in relatively more rational and humane forms since religious institutions always have the potential to corrupt the layperson. Plus, there is just a concern for truth itself that might make even beautifully reimagined religion still simply false and worth rejecting regardless of possible pragmatic benefits.
Those are the reasons that I am an atheist. But I am not sure the extent to which whenever we see a debate within religion itself, I shouldn’t root for the side that’s closer to my own rather than dismiss both of them as hopelessly lost until they agree with me all the way down the line.
I can’t even indulge the idea of attending church for social reasons without feeling the urge to vomit. I honestly feel like it’s horribly dishonest, not to mention harmful to the actual believers, who see your participation in their ridiculous fallacy as further evidence of its validity.
agreed. But for a lot of people, that’s just how life works.
God is Mystery to what – our puny little human brains? Absurd. There likely exists or existed civilizations somewhere in this vast, vast universe that would look at our brain development the same way we look at bacteria in a petri dish. There are conservatively 1 trillion planets just in THIS galaxy. To say God is stuff our little clump of neurons can’t comprehend is foolish.
quite a good qualification you make there.
I may be wrong, but from the text I’m presuming Jensen wants to define God by his connection to things that are inherently unknowable (if such things exist), rather than simply things that are unknown at the moment.
But no matter what Jensen’s alleged connection between God and mystery is, I don’t see what is to be gained by making such a connection. God becomes entirely featureless when he is defined exclusively by his mysterious nature. If mystery is the sole defining trait of God, then there is nothing that implies that God is the traditional Christian God. Jensen’s god is even less specific than the deistic god.
I imagine Jensen wants Mystery God to conform to Bible God, but if so, he’ll still have to supplement this god with the Bible’s depiction of God. So what is the point to begin with? He either ends up leaning on the Bible anyway, or he ends up with something so insubstantial that it gives us absolutely no basis for any opinion about God other than his mysteriousness. Not to mention that I doubt Jensen has any argumental basis to begin with for claiming that God = Mystery, other than – you guessed it – the Bible, who depicts God as mysterious.
… he’s trying to divide by zero, isn’t he?
He wants to have his cake and not believe in it too.
heehee!
what we think is “inherently unknowable” may already be known – by another, far more advanced civilization than us. Conversely just because it is unknowable to us now does not mean it will never be known.
At least he is partially right. There is certainly an aspect of “God” (spirit) that is mysterious, foreign to us. Colossians 4:3 says…that God would open a door for the word to speak the mystery of Christ”. And to the first epistle to the Corinthians Paul states…we speak the hidden mystical wisdom of God, which God ordained before the world unto our glory.
Our glory? Hmm…why do the dead sea scrolls refer repeatedly to the “glory of adam” before the fall? What did Christ come to do? To restore? If the truth was truly beautiful, mysterious, beyond our highest imaginations and most importantly…true would’t it be worth knowing, worth longing for? It (this beautiful mystery) can only be known at the heart (spirit) level for He is too good to give us anything less than Himself.
Reminds me of the “Nine Million Names of God” (or was it nine billion) by Harlan Ellison(?). As the names were written down, the stars started to go out…
I think this is an important topic. When Einstein said “God does not play dice with the universe” was his “God” as much a target for atheists as the God of Creationism? Of course not. In my opinion, it is vital for atheists to target those whose anti-scientific beliefs do genuine damage, to themselves, their children and society as a whole. That means just shrugging our shoulders at those who mislabel mystery as “God”. In my opinion, those who opt for a God, in the hope of ever lasting life, or meeting their loved ones in the afterlife, or whatever, but whose forelorn hopes do not impinge negatively on their lives, nor on anyone else’s… atheists should have no problem with them. Their “beliefs” are akin to those who refuse to walk under ladders, due to some residual superstitious belief about tempting fate. This can be dismissed as a mild form of OCD.
Also, atheists don’t do ourselves any favours when we opt for a biological determinism that tries to explain everything. It is vital to concede that when it comes to games, a sense of humour, falling in love, altruism, poetry… there are limits to what science can say. And what we can say will never get to the heart of the matter. In my opinion, it is a reluctance to concede this that forces intelligent people to toy with the God metaphor.
Additionally, the designer concept that falls down as it fails to explain who designed something powerful enough to design man poses a dilemma for atheists and believers alike. Those who feel there MIGHT be some higher power at work cannot be talked out of that belief. Doing so would require scientists to PROVE that we had found the ultimate building blocks. Atoms, nuclei, neutrons as well as protons, quarks, strings? Then what? What are strings made of? This is a never-ending search. The difference between mysteries for scientists and religious people is that we have the intellectual tools and ambition to push beyond the limitations in our knowledge. This is what we need to emphasise to impressionable youth, to get them on our side.
@Len – Arthur C. Clarke “The Nine Billion Names of God” (1953)
We should replace God by “42″.
This way we have the answer to life, the universe and everything!
Oh what if you have multiple gods?
They won’t like it if we call mystery = god.
God = Mystery. It’s not exactly traditional religion, but certainly no stranger than the zombie son of the creator brand of religion that’s considered “mainstream.”
Here’s my question though. What is the point of defining God so vaguely? Aren’t you really just holding on to the concept of God for the sake of having a concept. God as mystery doesn’t do anything, it just exists as an idea. Certainly no need to worship mystery. You just observe it, maybe try to figure it out, but what’s the point?
yeah how would you pray to mystery? prayer is therapeutic to many and gives them comfort.
The only mystery I associate with God is why so many people believe in something that never was.
This reminds me of that horrible movie The Happening, where plants start killing people. Early in the movie Mark Whalberg’s character classifies the disappearance of honey bees as “an act of nature we’ll never understand.” Bullshit. There is no fourth law of thermodynamics covering incomprehensibility.
Your blog is excellent. Great work!
I found a book at Amazon God vs. Satan : The Untold Story which claims to be the Little Book
predicted to explain God’s Mystery to mankind in Rev. 10.
My family didn’t believe it, but we read it anyway. And it is true. I understand everything Jesus said. EVERYTHING! Even know where he left out information on purpose because his generation wasn’t ready for the truth.
I understand souls, God, how Satan’s Kingdom is divided, and how God and Satan fight
in the world today. Except the actual truth is different from what anyone expects.
It is a small book, as predicted, but every page is packed with new ideas. The words draw
pictures, making the understanding easy. Even how creation started. And what the Holy
Ghost is made out of.
It was written in the Bible that it would come in the hands of an angel to the world from God.
I read it, and I don’t believe any human mind could have that much new information by itself.
A thousand geniuses couldn’t have written that book.
The fact that it is here today amazes me. We must be in end times for it to exist.
I need an expert on Revaluations to commit on the book.
I even understand why God went into hiding. Once you understand his mystery, what he really
is, his early involvement in world affairs, and his absence later on becomes obvious. So does
his return and when and why.
No one religion captured the truth. But many got pieces of it. But the real truth makes complete
sense of reality.
Very nice , thanks a sharing.
just to wrestle with the unknown shows how passionate you are about finding the truth. i commend you for that, and not in a patronizing way at all. i believed in a G-d for quite some time until my brain began goofin’ up. now i need medication just to control my anger. i used to be funny, “easy goin.”, songwriter. but now i’m a grey smudge with so many questions and all i do is lash out. why do we even exist? what is the point. anyone who is ever alive right this second will never know. they may think they know, but it’s a brainwash. interesting how the ones who use logic end up having to take medication. that in itself is a mind explosion.
the only thing keeping me from just ending this is my wife. just her tolerance of living with me is almost proof of a God, but the minute she gets fat and ugly…. FORGET IT.