Faith for atheists. Part 4

Faith for atheists

Part 4: The wonderful gifts that faith brings are a simple reality, waiting to be experienced

So, we need to refocus the appeal of religious claims, and in my view, living a life of faith is the best possible way to live this life – regardless of whether there is life after death or not.

The religious claim is that there is an inexhaustible source of strength and guidance, freely available to us. No-one can take it away from us, block or restrict our access to it, or reduce its effectiveness, against our will. There is a never-failing spring of love, peace and joy that is always to hand. There is a sense of overwhelming acceptance and affirmation given to us, not because we deserve it, but as a gift. There is a means of seeking and finding forgiveness for even terrible faults, achieved, not through self-seeking delusion or selfish refusal to face up to the deep reality of the harm and pain we have caused, but by finding an even deeper source of healing and renewal than our failure. There is amazing clarity of thought, and the ability to embrace the full heights and depth of existence that comes to us, granting us meaning and purpose in life. There is the faculty of finding the precise vocation for us that will bring us that maximum fulfilment that human beings seek. There is the opportunity to immerse ourselves in a value system and principles that strike us as the ultimate that a person can aim for. There is a sense of relationship with someone who loves us utterly, is always on our side, and is always striving for our renewal even when we have given up on ourselves. There is a faculty of union with the absolute, ultimate and eternal such that, in those moments, we could die happy because we know that we have experienced the very fullness of what life is capable of offering us. There are grounds for community that enhances us as individuals, is a template for a just and compassionate society, and which empowers truly moral living in the wholeness of what it means to be human.

In simple summary, our initial issue of what can we do to fulfil our potential is answered. All these things are the natural outcomes of a life of faith.

There is no appeal here to a fairy-godmother sort of God, who waves her magic wand to “make everything alright”. There is no pleading for a miracle to rescue us. There is no fantasy, wishful thinking, or sticking our head in the sand. This faithful way of life is completely consistent with a clear, open-minded acceptance of all the facts of reality in a scientific, material universe. It achieves this because faith is a way of life. But it is a way of life that – as well as accepting the external realities of the material universe, also accepts the internal realities of what human beings are capable of. I am not sneaking religious wishful thinking in by the back door; I am simply pointing out what is available to us through our natural faculties as human beings. It is the testimony of all the great world religions that there is a wonderful experience of the transcendent that brings overwhelming peace, joy and love to the believer, and there is ample testimony that this faculty that human beings have can be nurtured through practice – condensed into particular practices that can be understood as “the life of faith”.

To return to the fundamental issue we posed ourselves: the vital importance of fulfilling our potential, then it seems a bizarre and tragic failure not to follow the way of life that has the best prospect of enabling us to do just that, and achieve the highest of which we are capable.

Faith for atheists. Part 3

Faith for atheists

Part 3: If we are after the best deal, it has to be one that pays out now

I will begin by using the idea of fulfilling our potential – and the tragedy of not doing so.

Imagine someone with a skill or aptitude for something. It doesn’t matter what it is: in music, art, sport, intellectual ability, capacity for caring, creative thinking, community building, scientific research, whatever. If someone had this potential, but couldn’t be bothered to use it, we would think that that was in some way wrong. To pluck out just one illustration: if Usain Bolt realised he had the ability to become the fastest runner on earth but couldn’t be bothered to train or even to turn up for the Olympic final, we would regard that as a terrible waste.

Now, let’s consider key religious claims. You don’t get much bigger than the claim that there is an eternal life of bliss on offer in heaven. In previous ages, this gave huge motivation for the religious life. Particularly given that, for most people, life was quite short and very hard, and easily ended by warfare, famine or illness that today would simply take a short course of antibiotics to clear up, the “religious deal” sounded very attractive: “I will worship God; keep his rules; and after this earthly life I will get my eternal reward”. Some believers overtly (though perhaps they kept this to themselves) resented “losing out” in some of the pleasures of life, in order to keep God onside, but the whole package was worth the sacrifice. However, our increasing scientific understanding of the universe and of humanity has made it hard for many people to believe in life after death. Many people think that it may just, somehow, be possible, but I’m not going to bet my life on it, in terms of giving up things that I want to do just to keep God happy – just in case there is a God, and just in case he really does get cross if we break his rules. I’d rather not lose out on the pleasures of this life.

Instead, people in the UK expect that – given a reasonable roll of the dice – they can look forward to 80+ years of interest, achievement and enjoyment. I am not at all decrying interest, achievement and enjoyment, and we will return to this point. Likewise, I am not overblowing the criticism that life has been taken over by a consumerist mindset. However, there are elements of consumerism that, almost inevitably, invade our understanding of life itself. If, through absurdly lucky chances, I find myself alive in the modern age, in a peaceful and prosperous country like the UK, and if this life is going to end in about 80 years and that will be the complete end of me, then I have an opportunity – no, a responsibility – to maximise my fulfilment before this wonderful gift of life is taken away from me. This does not, of course, exclude altruism, principled commitment to good causes and sacrificial service, for all these things may be part of individual’s understanding of what fulfilment entails. However, we can see that, in an atheist mindset, if other individuals choose to maximise fulfilment through indulgent self-interest, there are no sure grounds for criticising them, for they are simply doing what life is for: fulfilling their potential according to their own standards of what they think is worth bothering about.

Therefore, to appeal to atheists to adopt the life of faith, I think we need to appeal entirely to this life on planet earth. Life after death may be a reality, but we cannot be sure, and no-one in this life is ever going to prove it.

Faith for atheists. Part 2

Faith for atheists

Part 2: Atheism only appears to be on high ground by attacking a false view of religion

It’s an impressive attack, and we must show why it is false, and how religion can be again the saving grace needed by atheistic society. I aim to do this entirely by using ideas that are easy for atheists to accept. For, it seems to me, religious and atheist arguments often appear to exist in different realms. Religious ideas gain no traction with atheists because they have rejected the entire package of ideas used by believers. So, they end up making appeals to atheists that atheists have already rejected as simply false. Clearly, many religious people still believe them to be true, but that cuts no ice with atheists. So, leaving traditional religious people happy in their faith, I am going to go seeking atheists using only ideas that make sense within atheism. I believe I will be able to show that having faith is an entirely reasonable and beneficial thing to do.

I should stress that I am not necessarily rejecting traditional Christian belief; it’s just that I don’t see any point in me happily continuing in forms of belief that atheists will not even consider. You will see that I am putting forward considerable modifications in my understanding of Christianity, which I think may be a better way of understanding true reality, but, ultimately, I am not in a position to judge with any certainty whether traditional faith is true or not. No-one is in a position to know that for sure. However, what I can do, is show that it is not necessary for me to persuade anyone that traditional Christianity is true. It may, or it may not be. What I can do is show that a modified understanding of Christianity can definitely be accepted by all.

Let’s go back to the deal that is the implicit basis of faith for many people: “You help me, God, and I will believe in you” – a deal that many people feel that God has broken and so such an idea of God needs to be rejected.

I agree! I reject that view of God too. I think it needs to be rejected, not simply because it’s too difficult to get the facts of people’s lives to fit into this view, but also because a better relationship with God is available if it is not dependent on this simplistic deal which is – perhaps – not very morally elevated.

Let’s consider the facts of people’s lives first. Great ingenuity is employed by religious people to show that the deal is, in fact, honoured by God. There are profound arguments to justify how evil and suffering can exist alongside an omnipotent and all-loving God, and in people’s ordinary lives it is often perfectly possible to show that a good God has guided and sustained you through the trials of life. Things did go wrong; life was very tough at times; but we held to our faith and God has drawn us safely through. However, these are the arguments of the survivors; the people who did not make it safely through are no longer here to accuse the faithful that they too had faith but it was to no avail. So, a different understanding of God and what faith in him means is required.

Then we can challenge whether the implicit deal with God was justified in the first place. I do not mean to assert that religion IS based on a deal between us and God, but I think that, in practice, the faith of the great mass of people in previous generations was fuelled to a considerable degree by this idea of a deal. Hence the mass of people in the UK have abandoned faith. I think there is a widespread view among such atheists that those who haven’t given up faith must therefore be somehow dim, or blind, or fooled into believing something that they can see is palpably false. However, I think we will find that many of those who are still faithful are able to do this because they have adopted a wonderfully profound understanding of who God is, and of what it means to live a life of faith, and it is this that I would now like us to explore.

Faith for atheists. Part 1

(A theological reflection in 5 parts)

Faith for atheists

Part 1: Atheism not only dismisses God, but claims the moral high ground

Christian faith in the UK has declined catastrophically in the last couple of generations. I am going to argue that it would be good for people, and for society in general, if we could rediscover faith.

The reasons for the decline in faith are many, but I consider the most important one is that many people have simply come to believe that there is no God – he just isn’t there! I think we need to accept that for many believers in previous generations there was an implicit contract, or deal, going on. In effect, people said, “OK God, I will pay attention to you and try to please you, and in return you’ve got to get me out of trouble when times are hard”. However, the evidence increasingly came in that there is no guarantee whatsoever that God is going to rescue you. If your country is at war, bombs are still going to drop on you, despite your prayers. Your sick loved one may get better – but then again, they might die. If the harvest is bad, you may well starve. It’s perfectly legitimate for people to complain that God did not help them enough, and rather than conclude, “There is a God, but for some reason he failed to help me”, it seems fairer to conclude, “There is no God”. Certainly, people have voted with their feet – and with their minds and hearts: “God did not keep his part of the bargain, so I will not keep mine; I am finished with God!”.

I think, initially, this was done with considerable sadness and regret, but as atheism has grown in confidence this is no longer the case. Instead, it is seen as a “no-brainer”: of course God is not real. Atheism then takes on lots of positive connotations. Firstly, it is seen as the truth. You are leaving behind superstition, “medieval” beliefs, fantasies, wishful thinking, infantile, dependent thinking. Instead, you are standing on your own two feet, taking responsibility for your own life, courageously facing up to life’s challenges without needing the false crutch of leaning on God. Perhaps faith will be looked on indulgently as a nice fairy tale for children, but we adults must leave all that sort of thing behind. IF it was true, it would be lovely, but religion isn’t, and so we must do without it. The more aggressive branch of atheism will have none of this nonsense, and they see religion in its entirety as not simply false but also bad. It is nothing more than an authoritarian con to keep people under control and manipulate them for the benefit of those in power. It promotes a host of evil things such as intolerance, persecution, blind-faith closed-minded thinking, and is a hindrance to progress. As such, society cannot leave religion behind fast enough, and it must be thoroughly extinguished to end its destructive effects. Hence atheism takes on overtones of liberty and fulfilment for individuals and society – and claims that it is the exact opposite of religion.

Keeping in step with the Spirit

Keeping in step with the Spirit

To place the next step securely, with confidence, assurance,

To move forward, making progress, delightedly creative,

To be focussed, not distracted, not turning aside,

To make my way towards my goal, not deterred, not blocked, not confounded by obstacles,

To know deep peace in my heart as I travel, not confused, beset by doubts, troubled or impressed by the clamour around me,

To step with such joy I could shout or sing, or weep, with gladness,

To set out, and continue, full of hope, both clear-sighted of my goal and trusting when I cannot see around the corner,

To have a companion on my way in the silent communion of a love shared that knows no measure,

To feel strong and capable of facing anything and everything because I am not alone,

To find the end of all my searching and the beginning of my journey, and to realise this is the path I have always been on,

To know now that all I have to do is follow and I will arrive safe home,

To accept that till I get there I have much to do, but with the confidence that it will be done:

This is what it means to keep in step with the Spirit.

When all is uncertain and fleeting, when you are so lost you have no idea where you are, when you have made so many mistakes and feel that you cannot possibly pick yourself up and try again, there is the Spirit who makes himself present, saying, “Here I am”. This is all that really matters, for it is what I most desire, that the Spirit should still be there, should still be willing to come to me, should speak to me with fresh words, but always the same intent, “Come with me”.

He never tires of picking me up, of carrying me when I cannot go on, of encouraging me, “You try now”. In his company all things are possible. Blinkers fall away leaving clear vision to the furthest horizon. You touch the rock and the spring of living water flows. Your joy and hope know no bounds. All of life is for you and it is for you to share with all.

Yet he is so great a mystery. I hardly know him, yet when he is near I know him instantly.  He is my constant companion, yet he also comes and goes, visiting me at key moments – at the pitfalls, at the fork in the road, at the dead-end at the end of my wrong turning when I rushed on heedless, at the vantage point when suddenly the world opens up in all its glory.

Most mysterious is the truth he imparts. In a world of such competing choices, such attractive opportunities, such compelling delusions, such shameless lies, such vitally important decisions, he always says the right thing. He never fails or falters, even though I fail and falter all the time. Yet if I follow his way, I never make a mistake. I cannot understand this. I cannot prove this.  It does not make sense. He simply is the truth. We, who are so easily fooled – by others and by ourselves, who so gladly twist things to our own advantage, who are so willingly blind to the truth when it does not suit us, we can recognise the truth when he speaks it to us – and he always does.

Seeking a rock for my foundation stone, I found it in the Spirit’s breath; like the wind which passes over us, going where we do not know, we are inspired, and we know to follow.

God and me: a like-minded pair? Part 7

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 7: We cannot be certain of what God is, but we can be sure that we are one with him

All this talk of mind-merging is, I think, helpful to explore, but another issue that seems very important to me is that my relation to God appears to me to be a relationship with a God who is separate to myself. It is extremely likely that we can never achieve any certainty into whether or not God is “just” an aspect of my own psychology – that is, that he only exists within my own mind, or whether he is a personal, independent agent. With this uncertainty, it also implies that there will always be uncertainty over my speculation about what is going on when my mind acquires any degree of affinity with the mind of God.

What I am aware of is that my experience of God is of relating to someone who is not myself. After much deliberation, I even think it does not matter whether or not God exists separately to me or only in my own mind, because, whatever the truth of that is, I experience God in a relationship with someone who is other than me. So, although it’s possible that God is “just” an aspect of my own mind and, when I think I’m conversing with him, I am in reality just having an inner conversation with myself, I can never prove which it is that is happening. There seems to me to be a radical difference between me having an inner conversation with myself – perhaps mulling something over, and having a conversation with God, but perhaps I am mistaken. (And mistaken in a way that I will never be able to uncover) Perhaps the term “God”, that I use to refer to a separate individual that I sometimes talk with, is really the term for a special and distinctive part of my mind that has taken on the persona of God, or – if we wish to move from nouns to verbs – God is the term for a particular form of consciousness that I adopt when considering the nature and activity of what a person called God would do – IF such a person actually existed, rather than as just a concept within my mind. As I dwell on what a person like God would be like if he existed, he takes on a “real existence” – but only within my mind. In my mind, it then becomes impossible for me to tell the difference between the persona of God who has “come alive” in my mind, and an actually existing God. Very simply then, God is the way I look at life.

These thoughts seem to leave me with a sense of settlement, of the end of long searching for a solution to difficult thoughts that result in lack of fulfilment and a possible failing to achieve the highest goals of life – as though something is always out of reach – possibly out of failure to reach what could have been grasped if I was somehow “better” – in thought or life, or possibly because what I reach for is never graspable.

However, if the ultimate is not to reach out and be at one with an elusive God “out there”, who is always a will o’ the wisp ultimately unreachable and unknowable, but the ultimate is, in fact, a oneness within our own minds – the one sanctuary that is completely “me” – that entails a coming together of my mind and the mind of God, then this strikes me as something that I can know, and even (perhaps) take charge of the process by which this goal could be accomplished.

Yes, my mind will one day cease. Even at its very best, the conformity of my mind to the mind of God is so partial and temporary, yet to the degree that I experience that, I have accomplished what ultimately matters.

God and me: a like-minded pair? Part 6

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 6: If two become one, are there two or one now? I still don’t know

It’s been a nice train of thought! However, I am, in one crucial respect, aghast at it! If there is one thing I am certain of, it is that I am NOT God! This is more than the traditional guarding against idolatry and blasphemy; we are exploring the nature of God and of ourselves, and trying to gauge our own experience of reality. The thing that impresses me most of all about God is that he is so completely different to me. He is “other”, and I use the word “holy” to convey this awesome awareness that everything that I fail to be, God accomplishes. So, as I’ve been exploring the possibility of what the connection between God’s mind and our mind might mean, I am not in any way claiming that some simplistic – and false – label of “divinity” can be applied to me. Yet my thought about giving my mind to God has opened up what seems a legitimate question about the status of God, and of me, IF there was to be some correlation between our minds. Is it a “merging” of minds, whereby our two minds still have their own identity but the boundaries of our minds have dissolved into a corporate union? Has God “taken over” my mind? And if so, does this mean I have lost “my” mind, or does it mean I have gained the mind of God? Again, taking into account the comment above, this is not claiming any status for myself, but I am trying to understand what such a development of mind would mean.

Perhaps I am making false obstacles for myself by failing to get away from my thoughts of God. as “a something” out there rather than as an aspect of me – a way of being me. However, this has been my concern throughout my life to believe that God is not me – and as I say, this is one of the things that I find most precious about him. Clearly my relationship with God has to take place in my mind – everything I experience takes place in my mind. However, my relationships with other people are definitely with other people who are apart from me, even though my experience of them happens in my mind . I still don’t want to say that God is just a manner of thinking that I can adopt – something that is entirely about me. Partly because I’m unwilling to give up the idea of God “out there”, but also because the concept of God as really being about the way I think doesn’t seem to do justice to the experience of God – even if “God” is simply “the way I think that is reminiscent of my understanding of the manner of God”. You seem to discover a reality that has always been there waiting for you – perhaps an analogy would be discovering a new continent, and, despite the myriad of unique features that each individual discovers, there seems to be a corporate unity about the experience that all discoverers of God enter into. This could be explained by the idea that “God” – who is really (perhaps) a manner of my thinking – is a faculty that all of us have in our minds, so that as each individual discovers it, it appears like a new thing but really it was lying dormant all the time. Ideas about there being some sort of “cosmic mind”, which is another way of understanding God, and each person has the ability to develop the ability to connect with this mind and become one with it, or even part of it, would also be possible.

Perhaps the simple thought is the right one: when my will is aligned with God’s, we share the same mind even though we remain separate beings.

God and me: a like-minded pair? Part 5

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 5: Oneness with God as a simple reality, experienced now

If all this is sounding simply like fatuous metaphysics, I would object. I am not pursuing some phantasma, as opposed to engaging in the real business of living; I am seeking empowerment for living. If I can understand the truth about human existence, and what the true relationship with God actually is then – quite apart from wasting energy in false pursuits – I can give myself entirely to the task of seeking full union with God. I can end the anguish that so many people feel when inherited beliefs about God do not tally with the evidence of what reality is actually like. I believe it is possible to show that faith in God is, indeed, the ultimate human experience – as has always been claimed – but that this faith can be fully integrated into our understanding of the reality of the universe and the reality of what we know being human to entail. It is a faith that offers complete fulfilment here and now in this lifetime (regardless of whether life after death may be possible) and is a faith that can be embraced by all people, for it entails nothing that is reliant on unfulfilled belief or a promise that it will only be fulfilled in the life to come, after death. Complete union with God must be the ultimate goal, and it is that which is open to us through the idea of our mind becoming one with the mind of God.

Of course, we did confess that this will never be fully achievable in this life, yet we seem to be opening ourselves to the possibility that it is achievable on at least some points. And being the same as God – fully one with him, even if only on some points, seems quite something. And as a little bit of God is traditionally understood as being the same as the whole of God, perhaps there is a never-ending dimension to even our partial or momentary union with God. God is understood to be the ultimate. And oneness with God must count as the ultimate “achievement” for human beings – the ultimate fulfilment.

God and me: a like-minded pair? Part 4

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 4: Who is it that exists if we attain union with God?

Clearly, in this case, there are still two minds: the believer’s and God’s and they are in complete agreement. When this “new thought” first occurred to me, I sensed that there may be more to it than this. That God has either taken control of the person, so that their separate individuality had ceased, or that it could suddenly be seen that God has ceased to exist, in that God is nothing more than a state of mind existing within us, so it is God who is shown to have no separate existence. It may be that this conundrum is solved by some sense of union with God – perhaps familiar with the mystics – whereby talk of one or the other party ceasing to exist is mistaken, for what is really happening is that the two persons are merging into a full union. In this case, both continue to exist – and, I think, both still exist as individuals, but they also, perhaps, take on a corporate existence, where the two truly have become one – even though both persons of the union maintain their separate individuality – though, in practice, neither party ever chooses to act contrary to what the other party also desires.

I note that I have started talking about the will as the central aspect of explaining how two might become one, and I did not initially expect this. I was thinking in ontological terms – about the nature of being – as to “what” it is that is existing if the believer’s mind “became one with God”. Have we shown that the ultimately important part of the human person is a mind that must “be lost in God” if it is to attain complete wholeness – and thereby attain eternity, such that, in the end, the individual ceases to exist and all there is is God? Or have we shown that all our thoughts about God as a separate, independent personal agent are mistaken, and, all along, God is the word we use when we attain a state of mind whereby all that we conceive God to be (as that personal agent) has been fully integrated into the person we actually are (as opposed to simply desiring to attain in principle)?

God and me: a like-minded pair? Part 3

God and me: a like-minded pair?

Part 3: Behold, I have become God – and I mean that very humbly

What have we said? The mind of God is – sorry, can be – the same as our mind. Rather than thinking I have destroyed God, or, at least, terribly demeaned him with this idea, claiming that God is nothing more than something our minds can do, let us instead take in the awesome elevation of what this means for us: we can take on – and become – the mind of God.

This is not some megalomaniac delusion: “Look at me, I’m God really!” Remember, there is absolutely NO endorsement of ordinary humanity as though it has divine status. The idea only has any validity at all IF we can be transformed by giving our minds to God and allowing him to shape us so that we “take on the mind of God”. In practice, of course, this will never be fully achieved, but even aiming for it raises our question about the relationship between our minds and God’s.

If some sort of correlation, no matter how imperfect, between our mind and God’s is possible, what might this mean in practice?

We might begin by thinking in terms of us, as individuals, being in complete agreement with God. Not simply in the usual terms of believers acknowledging – wholeheartedly – that they understand that what God thinks is completely and absolutely right and good (believers have always accepted this), but we would be saying that, in practice, the person has come to completely desire what God desires. There would be no more divided will, whereby the believer wants, in their inmost being, the same as God, but other parts of their will want what is contrary to God’s will. If a believer could attain some sort of integrity, or full inner harmony, so that they experienced no inner conflict – on at least some points – then, to this degree, their mind would be the same as the mind of God. God would not have to tell the person: “Do this, for this is my will”, because the person would say, “I have already decided to do this, for it is my will too”.