The transition from theism to post-theism is typically stressful and traumatic for someone who believes that god actually exists. Even though they have never observed or encountered a deity like the one represented in the sacred stories – and neither, by the way, has anyone else – the very idea that God is not what they believe can be profoundly disturbing.
Aseity refers to something that has no cause or origin outside itself; it is self-caused. A new use of this term applies it to the god found in the stories of mythology.
A believer doesn’t ask where god came from, and certainly not who made it up – the first mythmakers. Pressing such questions too hard is criticized as sacrilegious, until it is condemned as atheism and prosecuted as apostasy. One must simply believe, accepting that the deity in the stories and the stories themselves have always been and have no origin.
Young children do not scrutinize a Bible story as to whether or not it actually happened or if the characters are real. They simply take the story as told and it takes them inside an imaginarium of distant places and fantastic events. The character or literary persona of the mythological deity (i.e., the god of myth) becomes more clear and distinct as the narrative plot (Greek mythos) progresses. There is no thought or need to check objective reality for validation of an actual deity like the one inside the story.
The importance of theism to the work of establishing faith, nurturing connections, forming identity, and orienting the individual inside a world of shared meaning is widely underappreciated in the research.
If we simply define it as a social system of taller powers (parents and other adults) and/or higher powers (gods and other immortals) who supervise and provide for the needs of their children (believers commonly refer to themselves as children of god), theism can be acknowledged as a human universal – an inescapable paradigm of every individual’s experience, at least through adolescence.
In theistic mythology, iconography, and theology (conceptual god-talk), the analogy of god as father or mother serves to project the parent-child dynamic of dependency, obedience, providence, and authority beyond the sphere of the local human family and into the tribal-historical, local-geographical, or even cosmic-universal environment.
The higher power serves in roles directly aligned with those of parents in the family: protecting, providing, nurturing, training, instructing, and modeling the virtues of moral character for their children to emulate.
The difference in moral character between a child’s real parent and a devotee’s imagined god is a difference in degree rather than kind. A parent’s love is normally preferential, episodic, inconsistent, and conditional, whereas god’s love is praised for being perfect – unfailing, unconditional, and all-inclusive.
To the extent that the moral character and actual performance of a human parent are not perfect, the divine character and behavior of god as depicted in the sacred stories provides a bridge and inclined ramp for the devotee’s higher aspirations.
Just as every human child grows up to observe and to some extent suffer the imperfections of their parents, however, a time comes when the believer must account for the obvious fact that god does not always protect, provide, or come through on his promises for the victory and prosperity of those who worship and obey him.
Similar rationalizations may be employed in the interest of letting the taller/higher power off the hook. An inscrutable will, an unknowable plan, or a tricky reversal of normal logic where loss, misfortune, and calamity are administered or allowed by god for a deeper or deferred benefit to the one who remains steadfast: a stronger faith, fewer worldly cares or attachments, or the promise of everlasting glory in heaven after death.
That last hook particularly has been an effective “lock on the door” of theism for those insiders (devotees, believers, children of god) who are beginning to realize that the sacred stories of religion are not factual accounts, and that their central character actually does have a cause and origin.
Deep down and for some time already, they had to come to terms with the fact that nowhere in Reality have they observed or encountered the deity they were taught to worship and obey.
These closet doubters may be told that god is not found by those who lack faith, that god rewards those who persist in their belief despite a lack of evidence, or in the face of evidence that directly contradicts what they believe. What had been a lively and intriguing literary figure in their early childhood must now be newly confessed as a literal being who lives outside the stories and above the world, watching and keeping accounts for the Day of Reckoning.
*Click* goes the deadbolt.
You may be one of these who suspected at a formative stage in your intellectual and spiritual development (on average between the ages of 11 and 25) that the personal god in Bible stories and Sunday sermons was not without cause or origin – or at least that he didn’t exist in the real world of causes and origins. That god’s aseity was a naïve assumption which got planted in the fertile soil of your uncritical imagination in early childhood.
Hopefully it did its job in helping you feel safe, loved, capable and worthy, pulling you up by your aspirations not to be god but to be like god in the way you lived and managed your own little world.
But now, at the critical age when external reality, objective facts, and the responsibilities of ordinary life are redirecting your attention and preparing you for adulthood, it is becoming apparent that either god exists as he is depicted in the Bible and Church orthodoxy, or he doesn’t and must be left behind in the stories.
This has come to be the crisis of theism, which leads either to an atheistic rejection and escape from theism and its god, or to a fundamentalist regression that pulls the waking butterfly back into a cocoon of convictions and dogmatic mind control.
What is really needed at this critical threshold of intellectual and spiritual transformation, however, is neither a rejection of god’s literal existence nor the doubling-down of belief in it.
Instead, a post-theistic reflection on the meaning of god can simultaneously affirm its origin in the human mythopoetic imagination, and, by breaking the spell of aseity, open up something hitherto hidden in plain sight under the disguise of the personal deity.
The diagram above illustrates these other dimensions of insight and experience that become available once a believer has grown through the literary god and beyond the literal god, into the realization of what that god represents. On “the other side of” (post-) theism and its god is an expansive range of experiences that can quite abruptly break into consciousness.
A quick explanation is that god is now recognized as a symbol and metaphor of God, where the case change indicates a shift from the mythopoetic construct (god) to the Present Mystery of Reality (God) it was all along intended to represent.
What can we say now?
- That the Present Mystery of Reality is the Ground of Being accessed by an interior path of contemplation and release. This is the deep provident support that the god of theism personifies to us, the existential basis for faith-as-trust, deep security, and inner peace. Because this Presence is Mystery, our experience of it is mystical – ineffable, below the reach of words, thoughts, and thinker alike.
- That the Present Mystery of Reality confronts us as Other, an alterity (otherness) with a transcendent center utterly apart from our concepts, beliefs, expectations, and attachments. In this sense the Mystery is absolute – pure, free, and wholly Other – drawing us farther out of ourselves and into relational encounters with “the other.”
- That the Present Mystery of Reality pervades, encompasses, and includes us, as well as All of existence. This virtue is represented in the god of theism who welcomes, forgives, accepts, and embraces everyone, inspiring new bonds of love and understanding that co-generate a communal spirit of unity.
If any of this resonates for you, then you can relax because you’re probably a post-theist. If it’s all somewhat disturbing, then you might be on the very threshold of the transformation described here.
Have faith and take courage. Join the movement. There’s a lot of life out here.
Tracts of Revolution 