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Our current explanation for our spirituality, the modern story, is what we call God. This is not the first, nor will it be the last, idea we come up with. Science proves, and history has recorded, that God, that mono-theism, was not our first answer. In the “west”, which includes all three religions of Abraham, we all supposedly worship the same God; the God of Moses, invented by the children of Israel a few thousand years ago. But for more thousands of years, there were other ideas.
In the great cradles of civilization; in Mesopotamia, Persia, Egypt, Greece and in Rome
they were religious too: Yet they worshipped different spirits. When we view the idea of our God ontologically, that is, which came first- humanity or God, it is clear that humanity preceded God. God, as an idea, is a human invention. God is the idea which explains our spiritual relationship to life.
For atheism to assert that God does not exist, that God is not real; it relies, in the name of reason, on the proposition that ideas are not real.
Is evolution real? How about freedom? Beauty?
Oh, they say, truthful ideas can be proven by a scientific method, whereas theology is unsubstantiated. Science can only prove any idea through abstraction. Two plus two is a scientific certainty, but only an abstract representation. “Two”, like God, is a human invention.
There is much need for criticism of those who seek to control, brand, market and centralize our ideas about our nature. In fact, there is no end to the details they’ve got wrong. Foremost, is the idea that we already know it all; for it is those that make the religiously narrow argument that our idea of God is complete who are in fact arguing that the idea of God is dead, while it is those that doubt the perfection of any human idea who are actually arguing that the inquiry into the idea of God must be kept alive: To perfect is to preserve.
Much confusion arises from the silly notion that God created the idea of God.
We mistake the result of our inquiry with its need. Even while we must accept God as we accept any other idea, when we reject some particular aspect of this idea, or even the entire story, we do not disprove that human beings are essentially spiritual. Even if some idea of God is dead, as are most such ideas, we have said nothing about the underlying condition which prompted such ideas to begin with- human life.
To argue that God does not exist is to argue that humanity does not exist. Our spiritual selves are as real as all our other qualities. The ideas produced through spiritual inquiry are as real as any other idea. Ideas are real.
Finally, for those that say that religion is irrational- I say “so what”? What on earth ever possessed people to expect rational behavior from human beings? There are no rational human beings. Rationality is an abstract idea- JUST LIKE GOD.
The best of the religious, the humble, say God is love. Does love exist? Is love rational?
So, don’t tell me love is dead. What’s dead, is the useless idea of atheism.
R.I.P.
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