Having once been one and sometime accused of being one still, I do not believe in atheists. That thought or idea which for you denotes the absolute, the idea unsurpassable by any other, is the divine—be it absolute chaos, absolute determined order, or a system wherein individual input is part of the process. That is the rational and logical and philosophical vision of the absolute, sheer being or power to be. How one relates to that is the field of religion. No one can relate or literally get their head around the absolute foundationality of being, but we all want to find a sense of meaning about our existence. The job of religion is to place a mask over the inexpressibility of life that interprets it within a system of values. There are the primitive versions of the tribal overlord, and there are more global or cosmic versions. The masks of god are the cult and cultural foundations of a society’s value system. As long as they are understood to be masks for expressing the inexpressible, we remain in the field of healthful psycho-social or spiritual development. Whenever the masks become concretized items, idols, we are in the realm of delusion and institutional obscurement of the divine.
I think we can reach no higher than the poet Whittier’s vision “the silence of eternity interpreted by love”. Jesus’ great contribution to the effort of valuation and meaning in life was to understand himself not as a part of a deterministic system but as an intimate part of absolute creativity, not as creature but as child of creator, a part of a family business of fostering and nurturing life and wellbeing. The title Christ itself means divine delegate. To be a Christian means to “put on the heart and mind of Christ”, to understand oneself as an incarnation in one’s own time and space of absolute and caring creativity. The early followers expressed that in terms of their day—rituals of Jerusalem’s temple, ideas of Greco-Roman mythology and philosophy. But those ideas are all culturally and socially specific. It is unfortunate that they have become institutionalized and to many today little more than surds, relics of a past unrelatable and unretrievable.
But the silence of eternity, the sheer power of life persists. It cannot be ignored or denied, because I, you, we all, live it and in some way value it and respond to it and in it, and that system of value, that understanding of life and its meaning is the veil we place over the ultimate inexpressibility of being, our mask for the Font of Life Everflowing. It is not an idol, because I am a part of the everflowing of life that seeks to comprehend it even in its incomprehensibility, and to the extent that I believe it is incarnate in me, I can legitimately place over it the mask of personality and call it Father, Mother, or Lord God.
St. John’s letter gives us that great image “God is love”. What is love but the power to stand by and with another, to nurture and foster, to be wise enough and strong enough to know what to remember and cherish, what to forget and forgive. Religion exists to celebrate that. Religion becomes empty religiosity when it fails that. I cannot say there is no god as long as my life is in some sense a reality understood as more extensive than me, and that creative impulse is what is ultimately, in religion’s word, God.