The Possibility of Meaningful Atheism

As a Christian who is trying to serve God, I spend a lot of time studying the "Book of Law" and find that its not that living without God isn't easy, Living with God is very Hard but living without Him is Impossible.

That is why most Chirstains could not be as fervent as Orthodox Jew, they don't have the stamina to worship as did David. I read your blog to increase my understanding of God's Law in my life, I hope you don't mind if a Gentile joins you.

p.s. I was called "unteachable" because I supported teaching the Law of Moses in church. I remember a Catholic Preist who told me that Evangelicals coundn't hack it as Jews because they where to weak in their knowledge of God.

What bothers me is a person of some particular belief who insists that another's statement of what s/he believes or doesn't cannot possibly be what that person really believes because of the particular parameters of the critic's belief.

On some message boards I have seen people claim that the person who has stated s/he does not believe in God is disingenuous or just plain ignorant of his/her own beliefs and have then posed the question: Which god (or definition of God) don't you believe in?

The question arrogantly assumes that atheists are always and only people who are disgruntled because their parents forced them to go to Sunday School rather than people who have discovered ways of seeing the world and their place in it that do not rely on myths (whether taken literally, symbolically, or metaphorically, whether seen as True or merely useful).

Granted, disgruntled former theists are among the ranks of atheists. However, far more among the disgruntled never leave their religion of origin, and plenty of atheists never were disgruntled but, instead, were simply unconvinced. For many atheists, questions about God are simply irrelevant.

We may have a different belief. We may believe their belief to be either totally wrong or, alternatively, missing part of the puzzle. But we have no right to claim they don't really believe or disbelieve what they say they do.

I like Rabbi Hirschfield's comparison of (some) atheists to Avraham the idol smasher. If idolatry is the worship of some part or aspect of the divine as if it were the whole of the Divine, I'm afraid most of the monotheistic world (in all its variations) is guilty of idolatry. I'm not by the wildest stretch saying that people should abandon their faith and become atheists to avoid idolatry. But I am saying that people of faith should take atheism seriously and, as necessary, use tools it makes available in the reevaluation of their own lives.

L'Shalom,
Chaim

I, too, like the idea of the idol smasher. Each era finds a completely undiscovered part of the divine. Interestingly, Reform Judaism has become very concerned with the feminine part of the divine. This year, the prayers for the High Holidays have been adjusted to be less male-oriented. The hard part is that Hebrew linguistic references are gender-specific, and to find something that expresses both male and female is daunting.

However believers (and doubters) define or imagine G-d, the definitions can never even begin to be complete. Yet,each believer (or doubter) can reach a small corner of what G-d is. The essence of G-d is so vast it cannot be defined.

Let me know if I am on the right track because this is how I have formed my own personal belief.

Lucy

Lucy,

Seems to me you are on the right track. The thing I might add is that it is incumbent on us all to bear constantly in mind that the "small corner" of what God is that we have apprehended is just that - a small corner.

Rabbi Hirschfield gave a little talk on beliefnet some time back titled "How Do I Combine Faith and Tolerance?" In it, he said the following:

"... Now, I know for me it begins with a certain belief that Torah, that the Jewish tradition, the Hebrew Bible, is the infinite gift of an infinite God. What that means is that there must be an infinite number of ways to appreciate it, because if God is infinite, then there have to be infinite readings of God’s will. And that doesn’t mean just within my own tradition, but it means that each of these traditions throughout the world is actually one path toward that infinite God. ..."

I was impressed with that the first time I watched the video of the talk, and I'm still impressed. No matter how right our understanding is, it will never measure out as more than a micro-drop in the sea of infinity.

L'Shalom,
Chaim

If you are a atheist it is meaningful to you.

It need not be meaningful to anyone else.

A possible reason for books and articles similar to Prof Steven Weinberg's. The atheist is the one person almost everyone seems to be able to openly be against and get away with it unless they resort to violence. This is ofcourse an extremly horrible thing. They have good reason to be paranoid. So many doors are closed to them unless they are in the closet like politics. YOU KNOW THIS IS TRUE.

The reason he even needs to state that atheists are normal and can live good moral lives is that many so called religous people do not believe this in actuallity altho they may say they do.

Many attrocities have been committed in the name of religon on a huge scale. As for science attrocities you might think of research that can be cruel and inhuman on annimals. Or you might think that what they did in scientific experiements on humans like they did on Jews during the Holocaust. There is a problem with this tho. The Germans and company who did the experiment did not do it because they were atheist nor were and are the ones on animals. I am sure you would find that the scientist involved may or may not have been atheists.

So far as I know our atheist brothers and sisters were the victims and never the prtagonists when there were problems that got violent between athiests and people who believed in G-d.
Hugs
Laura