Atheism for Lent

I’d never done anything for Lent before this year. Obviously I knew about lent and as a child I looked forward to ‘pancake day’, but being a Christadelphian, and therefore not following the church calendar, it wasn’t really something on my radar to actively take part in. This year was different, this year I decided to join an online course where a group of people spent a short time each day reflecting on a critique of theism, with the aim of throwing out the superfluous.

The course is called ‘Atheism for Lent’ and is largely aimed at deconstructing Christians, although there were a number of people who wouldn’t associate with that label, and whose view could be on any side of it. The intent is that each member of the group makes their personal worldview venerable to critique by a short work (writing/art/audio) from a theologian or philosopher selected for that day, and to make an effort to see things from the perspective of the theologian/philosopher and really try to understand where they were coming from. Each day a new work is provided and each new piece is viewed in light of what has gone before, providing an overall progression. Each week had a theme, and each week progressed from the last and was best understood in light of what has gone before; jumping in halfway through and out of context would risk being unable to 'get it'.

The themes, and some examples of the writers of the material, are these:

• Week 1: Introduction to the Relationship between Atheism and Theism
• Week 2: The Critique of God as Being (Epicurus, Robert Ingersoll, Anthony Flew)
• Week 3: Mystical Atheism – God as Hyper-Being (Anselm, Meister Eckhart, Simone Weil)
• Week 4: Masters of Suspicion (Ludwig Feuerbach, Frederic Nietzsche, Karl Marx)
• Week 5: Theological Existentialists – God as Ground (Mother Teresa, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Paul Tillich)
• Week 6: The Theological Atheists – An Evental God (Slavoj Žižek, John Caputo)
• Week 7: Faithful Betrayals

The first few weeks were an easy introduction for me having already deconstructed the type of god being critiqued, and therefore finding I generally agreed with what was being said. I know from the group discussion that there were others who found these weeks very tough going. The later weeks were much more interesting for me. They introduced ideas I’d never heard of and took me in a direction I previously only had an inkling of.

We live in an era of ‘sound bites’ and short attention spans where we go with our gut feeling using only simplistic arguments. The latter weeks moved beyond this to more complex ideas that were harder to follow and weren’t immediately open to evaluation as ‘true’ or ‘false’. Rather than the easily understood early weeks the latter weeks were much more impenetrable and not always obviously about theology or religion. I found one of the hardest to understand (and longest) was a podcast titled, “Why only an atheist can believe” which among other things discusses the Star Wars plot.

What I got out of the course is a realisation that the current debate between religious fundamentalists and the ‘New Atheists’ is both simplistic and a relatively recent departure from more longstanding God-concepts. Reality is more complicated than the fundamentalists on both sides give it credit for and on that specific debate I find myself with the atheists. However, away from the false dichotomy there are theologians and philosophers that have gone in a different direction altogether. They look beyond religious divides and live in the gap between atheism and theism. They do not seem interested in weighing the merits of any particular religion, instead they focus on human experience and explore our limits and unknowns. They don’t rely on any holy books or special revelation, just human thought and experience. This tradition goes back a long way and could be said to include the mystic's apophatic approach where it is impossible to assert any truth about God because God can’t be described, and so any attempt to do so will create an idol instead. Their God-concept is beyond what can be put into language and is a far cry from the sort of quasi-scientific definitions of god that came into being following the enlightenment and are now being rejected more and more widely: the god-concepts that the New Atheists rail against.

Perhaps I’m just playing with semantics, but I now find myself wondering if religion is not actually about loving God, it is about loving people. That religion is not about being saved by God from God, but saving people from people.

After being part of a fairly diverse group, even for only a short period, I’ve also discovered that I have an emotional desire to be part of a fairly uniform community that provides me with comfort and security. But I find that I’m unable to label myself and find that community. Further, I actively work against my emotions and endeavour to make a conscious decision to reject a uniform community and instead be part of a diverse community to limit my personal biases and seek new and varied ideas.

So my journey continues.,,