One Little Hurrah for God

I just recently reacquainted myself with a blog every bit as obscure as my own called "A Father Talks to His Daughter about God." Subtitled: "The Holy and Morality in a World of Idolatry slipping over the edge into End-Time." That's pretty cool, too. First off, this is the product of a guy who suggests Aristotle's Poetics on his reading list. And Emerson's "Essay on History." [Links available on site.] This is not something you encounter every day. Actually the blog's title is a bit of a misnomer because it's certainly not overtly about God all the time. It's pretty eclectic: poetry, political comment, snippets of the dude's brain. (You can see why I might find this site interesting.) But this time the post was about God, and it's so in tune with my own thoughts about the subject that I share them. Montag--that's what he calls himself--writes:

The Experience Of the Divine is a basic and essential human function, such as language and music. It is not reducible to some other human experience. God is not joy nor suffering, not words, not singing, not dreaming. We may talk about basketball, but that does not make the experience of basketball somehow reducible to talking and language. Similarly, the Divine is not reducible to words and logic, or songs, or smiles, or frowns, or anything else.

God is one and alone. Our experience of God is a primitive function of humanity which is not reducible to any other human function: it stands alone.

I have seen and heard that our concept or acquaintance of God came from our experience of awe or fear or wonder at (pick one): the world, the universe, the starry night...etc. Pure hogwash. The emotion of awe is what it is. It is not God.

God is not that which you conceive. God is not that which you cannot conceive. Rather God stands outside of any conceptual system: beyond any thesis and antithesis; God stands outside any non-conceptual system. If you think God to be a wonderful, bearded, old softy who loves children, He sends a hurricane. If you think God is a nasty old bugger, He sends you a mitzvah. Go figure.

Precisely so. God is beyond all our categories of thought or expression or emotion. Beyond our denial of his existence or our descriptions.

Many people, probably most, surely most I know, and certainly the celebrated lately published atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins don't believe in God, scorn God, and revile God because they blame God for religion. God ain't religion. He's beyond that, too. But he, hapless guy, takes the rap for it nonetheless.