After God, a richer life awaits

So what's to be done after giving up a belief in God? (Or any other metaphysics founded on blind faith rather than demonstrable evidence.)

First, pat yourself on the back -- or any other place that feels good -- and offer up some congratulations from you to you.

"Great job, me. I've made the right choice: to embrace honesty rather than deception."

But just as smokers often need a nicotine patch to help them break an unhealthy habit, going cold turkey off of God can be tough. After all, believing in the Big Guy Upstairs has been fulfilling, perhaps for a long time.

How to replace that source of pleasure, meaning, and support? What's going to warm a true believer when the cold winds of reality start blowing around in his or her psyche?

In his wonderful book, "After God," Don Cupitt offers up some suggestions.

The theme of my previous post about this book was how much fun it can be to shake up our worldview. However, after the shaking, many escapees from the confines of a religion want to settle into another means of diving into the depths of what life is all about.

That includes me, for sure. This blog is called Church of the Churchless for a reason.

If I simply wanted to be churchless, I'd go do something completely unrelated from spirituality, philosophizing, and pondering ultimate cosmic questions. Instead, my goal is the same as before: to live life wisely and well. I'm just going about this in a different fashion. Hence, this "Church."

Cupitt says that we don't have to give up every trace of religiosity after we've realized that dogmatism isn't for us. Religion can be used as a toolkit from which we pick up practices that continue to seem appealing.

Now, though, we use them in the context of a non-realistic view of God. Cupitt uses Donald Duck as an example of what this means:

"Yes: but what then was the god? It is a mistake to suppose that the god was something over and above the image of wood or stone that was venerated in worship...Each and every Donald Duck image published by the Disney Studios really is Donald Duck himself; there is no superior original. Donald Duck is a vivid character to millions, maybe billions, but he simply doesn't need to have any existence outside his own iconography."

So each of us is free to create our own conception of what "God" means for us, using that word in the sense of what we feel life is all about -- our ultimate aspirations.

Cupitt suggests that three themes can be productively salvaged from the old outmoded way of religious believing.

We should learn to pursue our own personal growth by exploring and flipping among several different forms of selfhood and views of life. There is no One Great Truth anymore, and there never will be again. It is now better to maintain a small personal repertoire of different truths, paths, and goals, to be utilized ad lib.

The Eye of God

A Christian nonrealist like me may often find himself dropping back into the old type of God consciousness, praying or worshiping because he wants to or because it helps. And why not? I actually think I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists.

...The old way of living coram Deo (as if before the face of God) was valuably consciousness-raising and morally stabilizing, and one may usefully continue to pray to God just as one may find oneself often talking to and thinking of a dead person.

The Blissful Void

Not only in Buddhism but also in other religious traditions, the final goal of meditation and contemplative prayer is a state in which all imagery, difference, and form have disappeared, and the subject too is emptied out into void bliss.

...I am suggesting that we should use the Discipline of the Void, meditation upon the underlying universal emptiness and nothingness, as a background against which to set and to see the flux of our life. The Blissful Void, sunyata, thus replaces the old metaphysical God, and gives -- to us Westerners in particular -- a new and much-needed way of getting our life in perspective.

Solar Living

It follows that we ourselves are the only makers of meaning and value. Such meaning and value as we can descry in our life must be value that we have ourselves ascribed to it and projected into it. All the colors and "feels" of things are our own feelings, projected out. Ethics therefore must be solar.

We no longer have any metaphysical reason or excuse for withholding ourselves. We should pour ourselves out as the sun does, identifying ourselves completely with the outpouring flux of all existence.

...Life can't be possessed or clutched at: we should pour ourselves out and pass on, without hesitation or regret. We can get ourselves together only by leaving ourselves behind. This is solarity -- to live by dying all the time, heedless, like the sun and in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. 

...We are no longer fearful about dying, or afraid to give ourselves away. we pour ourselves out recklessly into symbolic expression and then pass on, pass on, and pass away, without regret.

Comments

[Roger]

The following passage helped me to understand Culpitt's meaning of non-realism.

"In brief, we don't know and we cannot know THE world, absolutely. We know only OUR world, a world shaped by our ideas, seen from our perspective, and built by us with our needs in view. Such is Cupitt's non-realist philosophy. It implies, by the way, that we have no privileged knowledge of ourselves either, hence Cupitt's phrase "Empty radical humanism". It means "We alone improvise our knowledge about everything — including even ourselves". There is no absolute or perspectiveless vision of the world: the best we can have is a slowly-evolving human consensus about a purely human world. It doesn't sound much; but it works remarkably well in practice, which is why in America this philosophical outlook is called ‘pragmatism’. In religion, the move to non-realism implies the recognition that all religious and ethical ideas are human, with a human history. We give up the old metaphysical and cosmological way of understanding religious belief, and translate dogma into spirituality (a spirituality is a religious lifestyle). We understand all religious doctrines in practical terms, as guiding myths to live by, in the way that Kant, Kierkegaard and Bultmannn began to map out. We abandon ideas of objective and eternal truth, and instead see all truth as a human improvisation. We should give up all ideas of a heavenly or supernatural world-beyond. Yet, despite our seeming scepticism, we insist that non-realist religion can work very well as religion, and can deliver eternal happiness. Cupitt sees his religion of ordinary human life as the "Kingdom theology" that historic Christianity always knew it must eventually move to, after the end of the age of the Church and the arrival of a religion of immediate commitment to this world and this life only."

---A religion of immediate commitment to this world and this life only, sounds interesting. One could replace religion with the word philosophy. Maybe, maybe not.

[David]

This is more like the kind of thread that catches my attention these days. "how to use "god" to live and think in an ungodly way".

I suppose it seems hard to give up all the past God beliefs as they are so ingrained into the brain. I do wonder now how to get on with things without a type of nervousness looming over my shoulder about the apparent hollowness of life without a God. I suppose one of the answers is to make as many friends as possible!

On a side note, Brian, when you meditate does your mind subside into a kind of void or stillness? I haven't practiced meditation regularly or much to acheive such a state, but i am willing to believe it may be possible, granting that subconscious thoughts also subside. It would represent a type of awareness without thoughts akin to the deep sleep state without losing consciousness. Is such a thing worth trying to achieve? Or should there be perhaps a warning to people in general about the unpleasant side effects of meditation.

If your mind does attain a thought free state, how long does it take to settle down? And what kind of feelings does it produce at the time and afterwards?

It's handy to have a tome like "The Portable Atheist" when you need it.

[Blogger Brian]

David, when I meditate my mind is still doing what it does, "minding." Some days I enter into a state of quasi-quietude; some days I don't.

There are many different approaches to meditation. There's no right way or wrong way. As you said, "unpleasant side effects" may exist, but if someone follows their own way, rather than a rigid set of practices, it's difficult to see how meditation could be harmful. If an unpleasant feeling comes up, just stop meditating and go do something else.

For me, the most interesting meditative question is what my consciousness is like when I'm not busily doing, but rather being. Or at least more "being" than during the rest of my active day, which is filled with "doing."

So I find that doing as little as possible each morning is an enjoyable adjunct to my life. It seems to help settle me into a more stable, open, and responsive awareness of the rest of the day.

Over-reacting to events (whether inner or outer) is a problem for most of us. Finding our psychological center of balance can keep us from over-tipping emotionally, just as finding our physical center of balance is essential in dance, walking, tai chi, and other activities.

[The Rambling Taoist]

Hey, don't spoil it for me! I'm only 3/4 of the way through the book.