Am I a nontheist...?

Part 6: Agency and separation

Here is why I have trouble with the practice of personifying what we usually call “God.”

Daily, sometimes hourly, I am either dealing with or at least aware of people who are suffering somewhere in the world. If one is truly awake, one cannot avoid the awareness of such people. They are on the streets outside of the coffeehouse. They are among our friends and acquaintances. They are anywhere in the world where there is anger, fear, grief, hunger, illness, violence, or catastrophe.

The unbearable scale of this suffering is too much for us, whether it is at a personal level in our own surroundings or on a global level. Our animal reflex, especially if those suffering are not kin, is to shy away from feeling that suffering. We don’t want to suffer ourselves, and we also don’t want to suffer other people’s suffering. It’s too unpleasant. It’s too threatening, because we know secretly yet deny that we are vulnerable to the same or worse.

So we pray. Either with trivial and insulting “thoughts and prayers” or, perhaps, with anguished pleading. But we don’t really know what prayer is.

The whole history of praying to supernatural beings has to do with our ascribing agency to them. We expect them to have the power to affect things in the natural and human world, for better or worse. In cultures with pantheons of amoral supernatural beings, these beings are considered separate from us and yet able to intervene in our lives if they choose.

Understandably, these notions of separateness and agency carry over into monotheism. There is said to be a division between creator and creation, and creator can choose to intervene—or not. There is a power hierarchy, and interactions between humans and God are transactional. We must do things, offer things, obey, submit, and so on, in exchange for what we need. Furthermore, in the traditional Christian cosmology we are told that there is in fact nothing we have that is valuable enough for this exchange. God must provide the sacrifice.

In other words, we project onto this God the demands of marketplace logic, yet with the catch that God is actually above all of this logic and acts outside of it.

Here is where I part ways with traditional orthodoxy. Where is the loving familial interrelationship in such a cosmology? As we saw in Part 5, we are stuck instead with theodicy, the problem of rationalizing why a good and all-powerful God would allow evil, pain, and suffering. And we are stuck with pleading for divine intervention, even though we have nothing valuable enough to pay for it.

“Self-portrait,” by Mike Shell, late teen years in the mid-1960s (click to enlarge)

I have known or known of so many people, devout people, whose suffering is multiplied a hundredfold by dismay that their prayers seem to go answered. Or, worse, that they somehow fail to have enough faith, making the unanswered prayers their fault. None of this has to do with engaging God. It all has to do with personifying God and then expecting that God has some motive for rewarding or rejecting our prayers.

Agency implies motive. We are always trying to second guess God’s motives. We are always trying to guess what would earn us answered prayers or, worse, how we have failed to deserve answers. It’s an endless cycle of failure, tainted with mistrust of God, anger with God, and potentially rejection or denial of God.

None of this works. None of it leaves space for us to recognize the grace which is always available to us, which is in fact an intrinsic part of the Real. Grace is not about problem-solving. Grace is about becoming able to live through whatever happens without despairing.

I have not yet spoken to the questions that ended Part 5. What is the truer path for communitas in a world of suffering? How do we cross the boundaries of belief and open the horizons? I will write about this next.

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Image Source

“Self-portrait,” by Mike Shell, late teen years in the mid-1960s, charcoal and watercolors. This was a teenager who did not yet know who he was because of the layers of social expectation and belief systems that kept him in the queer closet.