01.21.12

Religion beyond theism/atheism: completing the Reformation: occupy Xtianity,…

Posted in General at 3:33 pm by nemo

The posts today re: ‘religion for atheists’ suggest to me something quite different on this score: how about a Christianity for atheists, not only theists? Or better a Christianity for a community of diverse beliefs. This religion was a community of robust social action, with a spiritual milieu that does not need the doctrinal conformity of ‘god faith’. Who cares any more? Such a church can be far more disciplined than the current madhouse of infantile god superstition dominating the religion. The world of Christianity (and Islam) needs to acknowledge the timeliness of the new atheism, whatever their stance towards its content. We have been critical of new atheism here, but the ‘god’ beliefs of Christianity are so confused, so close to the idolatrous (poly)theism that (mono)theism set to replace (a pantheon with one god), that the revulsion aspect of (new) atheism becomes comprehensible. There is nothing, ironically, that a real Xtianity needs from this legacy of ‘god muddle’. It is all a later decline from the integrity of real monotheism. They can throw out the whole legacy of ‘god reference’ and return to what they started with: an injunction to not take ‘god’s’ name in vain, that is, not using it at all. Instead pointing to the unsayable, IHVH. Christians (and Jews) need to face the fact that they have trashed monotheism, made alternatives hard to adopt, and coopted anything like real religion with a superstitious brand of near polytheism ‘all over again’. It is a religion, if it can be called that, that has been infantilized, mythologized, turned into pop cultism, and a prayer-infested black magic of wishfulfilment. The whole thing could be set aside, or upgraded to a more intelligent version 2.0. Initiatives on this line are clear in Islam, where the practice of prayer was discplined to a formal rite beyond the personal “consersation with god” nonsense, and the ‘god reference’ became more stylized, subsuming and sublating ‘atheism into theism’: there is no god but god.

A new Xtianity could assume the burden so bungled by the new atheism. The duty of faith in a god never definable was always a fixture of the Xtianity of the Roman Empire, an arbitrary collation of cultic beliefs in an institutional context: a clever permutation of the polytheism it wished to supplant. There is nothing required in any of that (as Luther understood, up to a point). The cutting edge of the otherwise muddled new atheism is this renewed challenge to theistic idolatry. A renewed Xtianity could lead the old churches to a new secular spirituality that is open to upgraded theistic beliefs, and atheistic sidelines, and that might well serve to cast out idolatrous theisms, with a tolerant agnostic milieu that can be in search of the ‘one god’ in a spectrum, or dialectic of definitions. Atheism tends to fail, because one it has thrown out infantile theism, a more intelligent and real posssibility emerges to take its place.
This new religion could say goodbye to the Axial Age, and yet maintain a link to that genesis with what is actually a more faithful rendering. Xtians might actually figure out that the truly stunning confusion called the ‘Trinity’ is a garbled version of the (atheist, materialist) Samkhya’s ‘primordial triad’.
Xtianity in its current form is not sustainable and the motion of the modern system will not forever maintain the form of Xtian religious systems. But, in a strange circumstance, the new atheists show that a stage beyond religion is going to be itself problematical if it is so bound over to scientism, social darwinism, and capitalist ideology. The potential for religion in a secular culture is vividly real, but must not blow its chances with stupidies of the tradition.
A radical Xtianity that is more intelligent about theism could be a big hit, and forestall the inevitable decline and ruin to which Xtianity is now condemned.
Xtianity is pervaded by a belief system enforced by a ‘duty’ of faith in a pack of nonsense beliefs that made sense to the inhabitants of the old Roman Empire, and its medieval continuation. Faith is not needed n a real religion. A Kantian usage for the term ‘faith’ should be taken up without delay, to get past the current stalemate of false beliefs.
We have gone beyond that, and need to complete the Reformation started by Luther, and (almost) completed, and much enriched in the phase of German classical philosophy. I think that the atheist humanism that tried to pass beyond that movement of the concluding Reformation was a flop that lost its bearings (just like the new atheism), and too fragile creation of positivism to be viable, but it does offer an framework for a future Xtianity, that can speak to Feuerbach with a bit of Hegel without being the insipid positivism that that figure bequeathed to the old left.
In fact, a new Xtianity ought to be a continuity and discontinuity at the same time, armed with Hegelian dialectics of theism/atheism, and in search of the reconciling principle in that dualism (Hegelian spirit is the phantom solution to that, but…you can roll your own). This new Xtianity would be a public philosophy for secularism, liberalism, postdarwinism (as social darwinism) with a foot in the socialist door even as it tries, pace Weber, to be the ‘protestant spirit of capitalism’ (I shudder as I say that, but the point made by Weber was significant, and in any case a future Xtianity should be leftist, yet able to handle a capitalist social milieu, etc….)

I must reiterate that in its present form Xtianity is a Titanic that has hit its iceberg. It can’t survive in its current state of absurdity. But the basic framework of a new secular Xtianity (which could skulk around buddhist legacies like beggar looking for handouts, the first handout being a study of mediation to replace the endgame of prayer superstitions) could be versatile, post-theistic in the same challenge to idolatry that graced the early ‘monotheism’, and be in search of ‘real god’ in a church of practical action, redemptive sociality and religious therapy, with a stance that is at once open to reductionist science, and yet able to embrace the evolutionary psychology of spiritual homo sapiens, with his ‘soul’, self-consciousness (overamped potential consciousness), and his (Kantian) take on a ‘one god’ beyond metaphysics. It is important to consider that Xtianity and Mahayana buddhism are correlate parallels in the conclusion to the Axial Age, and that hint should advise Xtians to the larger context of their brand of ‘Mahayana buddhism’ (redemptive religions). A religion of redemption is eminently compatible with a post-theistic religion of ‘redemption’.
Better get cracking because the new atheist termites are close to eating away the foundations, with nothing but sawdust in its place.

A first step would be to skulk away with the Protestant hymnal and rewrite all the lyrics for the new church. And a mission to the new atheists would be a first task on the laundry list. ….

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