Atheist Coming Out Day
Atheist Coming Out Day
Sweet Jesus, what the hell was that all about?
“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among us, a greater sincerity.”
Re: Atheist Coming Out Day
Wise Blood Flannery OConnor...
"You then," he said impatiently, pointing at the next one. "What church you belong to?"
"Church of Christ," the boy said in a falsetto to hide the truth.
"Church of Christ!" Haze repeated. "Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I'm member and preacher to that church where the blind don't see and the lame don't walk and what's dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I'll tell you it's the church that the blood of Jesus don't foul with redemption."
"He's a preacher," one of the women said. "Let's go." ... "
yrs,
rubato
- Sue U
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Re: Atheist Coming Out Day
Seems apropos:
For more of this essay, click here.***
And yet, I’d like to suggest that the time has come to stop thinking about language and God. I’d like to suggest that the last forty years of work have been a valuable and necessary detoxification process, and that it’s time to stop worrying about our metaphors for God, lest we become so tangled up in them that they become our experience of God entirely.
Do Names Matter?
In religion, symbology is inescapable. The Divine, and the human relationship with the Divine, is vast, complex, and beyond language. There’s no way to explain God in direct words. Rather, as a way of pointing at and expanding our notion of ultimate existence, linguistic symbols create a kind of shorthand. Jewish theologian Neil Gillman puts it thusly: “We borrow aspects of familiar human experience to express a complex set of truths about a reality that transcends everyday experience.” How could it be any other way? We use what we have.
This, of course, explains why there’s so much anthropomorphism in our sacred texts and liturgy to begin with. Jewish rabbinic texts tell us that “the Torah speaks in the language of humans.” In other words, language is a tool to help us access the One that defies human description. That’s all language is — a tool. Our job, is to not get too hung up on the words themselves.
When, during the High Holiday prayers, we beseech “Avinu Malkeinu,” “Our Father, our King,” to whom are we calling? Do we really believe God is our parent (stern, loving, or both)? Do we truly relate to God as a king (benevolent, exacting, or both)? Certainly, the phrase can evoke the sort of patriarchal domination that sends many feminists reeling. But it can also evoke the feeling of a small child looking to a parent for comfort and safety; a feeling of submission to a greater force and liberation from self-importance; or a yearning for justice in the world. How these symbols and myths manage to be so powerful and lasting is that they both name something just outside the grasp of articulation, and that they are porous enough to name several things at once. Maimonides is adamant that anyone who takes literally either the emotional or physical description of God in the liturgy is committing idolatry. The words of the liturgy are not literal but meant to name something just outside the grasp of articulation—the perfect unity, the transcendent power, the infinite expansiveness—that reflects our own feelings of smallness in comparison. Kabbalists might say that God’s true nature contains both aspects of lovingkindness and justice—so these metaphors of father and king express something fundamental to the Divine nature. More rationalist theologians might say that God’s nature transcends even those categories, but that this familiar metaphor helps to articulate our relationship to this mighty expansiveness, that it helps us situate ourselves in prayer and thus find God.
Of course, some may ask, why do we have to accept that God is father and king and not also (or, instead,) mother and queen? Why, if language does not matter, should we use the old tropes rather than finding new ones that feel more relevant to us, today? First of all, I think that by focusing too much on the metaphors and the gender of said metaphors is missing the point. The words are merely a starting point, the place we’re meant to transcend in a hurry. The traditional metaphors are usable, and newer metaphors are also usable — we can open ourselves up to find depth and meaning in all of them, to be sure. But by working too hard in our attempts to measure the precise nature of the false clothes in which we dress the Divine, we lose the goal beyond the horizon.
***
GAH!
Re: Atheist Coming Out Day
Great essay; thanks Sue.
Atheist Coming Out Day
I, too, agree.Big RR wrote:Great essay; thanks Sue.
Of course, as with all well established, organized religions, the believer always has more questions than answers. And the usually bromide from the pulpit? You must have 'faith.'
The Almighty will never be gender neutralized.
“In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among us, a greater sincerity.”
- MajGenl.Meade
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Re: Atheist Coming Out Day
Nice one, Sue.
For Christianity, by identifying truth with faith, must teach-and, properly understood, does teach-that any interference with the truth is immoral. A Christian with faith has nothing to fear from the facts
Re: Atheist Coming Out Day
X4Big RR wrote:Great essay; thanks Sue.