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After God: The Future Of Religion (MasterMind)

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I think Don Cupitt makes some visionary steps toward outlining workable religious practice for the future. As a more secular thinker myself, I have always felt that religion as it endures today remains largely unworkable. Yet I have always felt that there remains a need for the roles that religion has filled in the past, even though I haven't felt clear on exactly how it might do so in a workable fashion. Don Cupitt shows some very plausible ways it might. He boils down religion to recurrent essentials, and tailors them together in a way that does not offend the sensibilities of rational thinking people.

He takes a very good metaphorical approach instead of getting bogged down in issues of literal existence where inevitable clashes with science would otherwise turn off more empirically minded people. I came to read his book after reading George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's "Metaphors we Live By" and "Philosophy in the Flesh." This gave me a much deeper appreciation for the metaphorical undertaking that Cupitt delves into as well as providing a deep context of cognitive science within which Cupitt's thinking manifestly makes a lot of sense. Fundamentalists and hard core atheists may not like his approach. I think otherwise most people will appreciate his thoughtfulness.

Cupitt points in the right direction with his emphasis on the linguistic, however he seems to lack the cognitive science background to flesh out those theories with the more primordial cognitive underpinning structure. Lakoff and Johnson prove good for that purpose. Of course that would have made his task unwieldy for such a concise and to the point book. Though he may not understand the things that he does, he does them well. After leaving his introductory reverie on language he delves into a masterful use of metaphorical thinking that much of the secular world could desperately use.

In 1906, the American composer Charles Ives wrote a short orchestral piece called "The Unanswered Question". He described the music as a "cosmic drama." The piece is indeed a musical picture of the human search for meaning and religion and a world full of skepticism about both. (Ives himself was a believer of a rather traditional sort.)

I thought of Ives, and his "Unanswered Question" in reading Don Cupitt's short study "After God". Cupitt is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and his written widely on religious subjects. He is the founder of the "Sea of Faith" movement, which is an attempt to provide meaning for religion in a non-theistic, non-traditional sense.

The book is modernistic in tone. It is addressed to the many people who attempt to find a form of religion in their lives separate from theism. In setting out his topic Cupit states: "Religious life is an expressive, world-building activity through which we can get ourselves together and find a kind of posthumous, or retrospective, happiness". (page xiv)

The book is in three parts. In the first part, "The Coming of the Gods", Cupitt tries to give a historical, genetic account of the origins of theistic belief, based on the development of cities and ruling hierarchies from more primitive hunting or agrarian societies. He finds both religion and early philosophy deriviative of this change in human social organization.

In the second section, "The Departure of the Gods" Cupitt explores the difficulties in the concept of a transcendent God separate from the imminent world of the everyday. He talks insigtfully, if too briefly, of the development of philosophy from the objective realism of Plato (both the chief hero and the chief villian of the book) through Kant's internalization of the sources of human knowledge, through Nietsche and modern philosophy of language. His position straddles, I think, postmodern thought, which denies the possiblity of any absolute truth separate from the observer, and a more traditional philosophical naturalism (denial of supernaturalism) where I think it is ultimately more comfortable.

The third part of the book "Religion after the Gods" offers a new version of religion stripped of its theological trappings. Cupitt adopts a three-fold religious practice from the wisdom of the past, consisting of 1. attempting to see one's life through the eye of eternity 2. meditation on emptiness and 3. "solar living" -- a radiant, outgoing way of life based on emotion and human need, receptive to change and to the moment, and concerned with immanences here and now rather than fixed absolutes. Cupitt sees religion as ultimately global in character, breaking down the tendency of believers to separate themselves and their creed from other parts of humanity. Strangely enough, he closes the book with advice that people remain in their current religious traditions, but follow them in a manner consistent with the teachings of his book.

Cupitt writes eloquently and well. I am in sympathy with much of his programme, but he moves too quickly at times. There is a sense in his book of the mystery and enigma that Ives presents so well in "the unanswered question"; although, paradoxically, Cupitt seems too eager to disolve the mystery by creating a dogma of his own.

Those wanting to hear more of Cupitt might be interested in looking up his interview with Steven Batchelor in the Fall, 2003,issue of "Tricycle, the Buddhist Review."

It should be noted that this book is not an argument against organized religions, but is rather a description of their demise, along with what I will call an autopsy. It is a review of an already completed story. I am grateful to Don Cupitt for providing structure for my own vague and disjointed thoughts and convictions. This is a beautifully crafted book - an optimistic and forward looking view.

A challenging book indeed. Cupitt's challenge makes Spong's challenge seem easy, Spong's challenge, while not easy, seeming intellectually a far simple one for those of us who have already long ago dismissed supernaturalism as anything other than a convenient deception. Cupitt's wide sweep though Western history can be mind-blowing but it's especially the views he has arrived at that pulled the rug out. Cupitt claims to be "at home with nihilism" albeit an ethical nihilism and able to "do without roots, identity, stability, or provenance". [ I admit I had to look up "provenance", it means, in case you also didn't know "place or source of origin" ]. He speaks of the value of "deferring objectivity" to arrive at a subjective and "nonrealist" vision. Not easy to follow and certainly something I would need not only a second read but much thought to make useful sense of. Cupitt (who has launched a Sea of Faith movement after a British TV series he conceived of the same name) seems to find a value in traditional religions simply in the "tricks and techniques" they have gathered to help us be a self and relate to the world. Otherwise, he seems eager to explore the creation of a new world religion, one not at all easy for him or others, he admits, to define, but all the more critical if we are to respond to the crises of our time. That he does not advocate the abandonment altogether of religions, old or to be created, is one of the challenges of this book and Cupitt. He addresses that challenge especially at the end of the book, turning to such themes as "The Eye of God", "The Blissful Void", "Solar Living" and "Poetic Theology" to try to communicate his insights.

If postmodernity has led to Tillich, Spong, and Altizer, it now comes full weight upon us in Cupitt. It's hard to know what to make of it but there is a sound logic and sense of historical development in Cupitt's thought that seems to me to deserve further and serious consideration. As to where it might lead me,if anywhere, of value, I don't know. But I don't think I can ignore Cupitt's challenge.

Don Cupitt is a Christian who does not believe in a God "out there", but a God who is part of the human reality. He has been publishing approximately a book a year since the late 1970s on what the implications of a "non-realist" God are for religion and Christianity. As the former Priest and Dean of Emmanuel College Cambridge (he is now retired), Don Cupitt's Christianity is not simply an intellectual position, but a practical part of his life.

The book is divided up into three parts: The Coming of the Gods, the Departure of the Gods and Religion After the Gods. This review will first summarise the book then discuss the issues it raises.

The Coming of the Gods deals with how God and the supernatural world were originally experienced. Soul was the principle of life, usually associated with blood and therefore usually embodied. Spirit on the other hand was usually not embodied, it was an active free-ranging power, sometimes helping sometimes tormenting. Spirits are sometimes called powers or energies. They are semi-personified, they are many of them (they are sometimes members of a "host" or "legion"), and they rarely have names. Angels and Demons are a little more personified - a few of the angels are given names, scarcely any devils. Spirits have five types of relationship with humans: humans can be filled with a spirit, a spirit may be a guardian, may inspire, indwell or possess you.

A "god" a symbol of a group. Cupitt argues that the earliest Old Testament traditions identify God as the "bull of Jacob" (Gen 49:24) (the NIV translates it as "Mighty One of Jacob" but Cupitt argues that this is because the translators find it too embarrassing find the God of the Old Testament as a tribal deity). Gods are different to Spirits because they are lords, who sit enthroned and who lay down the law. Cupitt explains that originally Ancient Egypt had 700 gods, but as the political system united the different tribes, the one group, the nation of Egypt, needed a single God. So as cities replaced nomads, so gods replaced spirits.

Cupitt cites another reason for the change from spirits to gods. Spirits swarm, cluster, rustle and whisper in our heads. As an anonymous legion they are fearsome. But when we start to name them we demythologise them and they lose their power. So this supernatural world of religion turns out to be a myth of the origin of language, and the process of naming is part of the development of consciousness.

As cities and nations begin to develop, so the need to law and authority arises, and so the concept of a "god" develops. Spirits wander freely in the wilderness and know nothing of the law, by contrast the god is the origin and authority of the law, of regulation: of space and time, private property and an ordered, regular calendar. Cupitt explains the reality of these gods as being similar to the reality of Donald Duck today. There is no superior original Donald Duck - all the Donald Ducks produced by Disney are "real", so the god wasn't something over and beyond the statue or image, the god was the image.

According to Cupitt god arose when someone asked the system to justify itself. God arose as part of critical thinking, questioning god was part of the very first experience of god. Think of the stories in the Old Testament where God is argued with. Abraham is the father of the Jews, but also someone who does not hesitate to argue with God.

Greek philosophy, argues Cupitt, far from being a new way of thinking, was just a secularised version of this religious outlook. Metaphysical laws replace the authority of the god, but the outlook is still looking outside and beyond, Objective knowledge of the Real.

So to conclude the first part, The Coming of the Gods, the gods turn out to be named, ordered, structured reality - language. They were needed to help humanity develop consciousness (worshipping the god of deer was just another way of keeping the concept of "deer" in the mind when the hunter went to hunt them). They were needed to justify the new order of kings and priests in towns, cities and nations. Hence the religious concern for language: holy books, creeds, blasphemy ("bad" language), the names of god, even the Logos.

The Departure of the Gods begins with a chapter called "Mysticism" in which Cupitt notes how god has always been seen as a mysterious part of reality. Look at other words which seem to overlap with the word "God": fate, luck, chance, history, things, it, it all, the throw of the dice, destiny, time, how it does, and so on. God becomes part of reality. Even the classic definition of God, as infinite and so on, seems to dissolve God into everything and nothing, so the idea of God seems to contain within it the mystical idea of God dissolving into the world, or the self blending into God (the "spiritual marriage"), but those mystics who went too far with this idea were punished by the religious authorities who rightly understood that this meant the death of a realist God.

Cupitt noted earlier how philosophy began as a secular form of religion. In this section he notes how this tradition, philosophy as footnotes to Plato, the philosophy of metaphysical entities, is now passing. Critical philosophy is destroying the idea that our world is mere appearance, beneath which lies the world of God, Truth and Happiness. This distinction itself has now become unintelligible.

If you imagine yourself walking down a corridor, you imagine a view outside of yourself. It is natural to think objectivity, not subjectivity, and for much of history, the subjective viewpoint has been unimaginable. Only relatively recently, and with great difficulty, has culture been able to discover the subjective.

Cupitt concludes the section on The Departure of the Gods by noting that the "nomad", whom the gods originally replaced with the city dweller, is now returning. With the departure of the gods, law, order and tradition are crumbling, to be replaced by the nomad:

"Instead of marriage, a series of relationships; instead of home, a series of addresses; instead of a career, freelancing; instead of a church, the irregularly mushrooming politics of protest; instead of a faith, whatever one is currently "into"; instead of stable identities, pluralism and flux; instead of society, the

market and one's own circle" (p. 74).

In the final section, Religion After the Gods, Cupitt asks what religion might be like in this new age. It follows from the analysis of part two that for Cupitt all the major religious traditions are now coming to an end. All they are now good for is taking whatever may be of use to us in the future. Cupitt believes there are three concepts worth stealing: the Eye of God, the Blissful Void and Solar Living.

These doctrines are not, of course, true in themselves. "In the future we will see our religion not as supernatural doctrine but as an experiment in selfhood" (p. 82). They are simply useful techniques, useful stories.

The Eye of God means living as if God is watching us. Living from the standpoint of eternity. This obviously makes our life more serious, more ethical. Meister Eckhart says that the eye with which we look at God is the same eye as the eye with which God looks at us. The fact that we take the place of God simply means we heighten our consciousness ("a serious postmodern definition of true religion: religion which makes you smarter than your god" (p. 85)). Indeed the fact that God is absent means for Cupitt that he loves him all the more: "I actually think I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists. Perhaps God had to die in order to purify our love for him... Kierkegaard says the love we feel for our dead is the most faithful and the most purely unselfish of all our loves" (pp. 85-86).

The Blissful Void Cupitt takes from Buddhism, in which the subject is emptied out into void bliss. Cupitt says the Blissful Void can also be called the cool sublime, and contrasts it with Kant's sublime. For Kant the sublime (the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime) is out experience of the vastness of nature, and our response in feeling exaltation at our mastery of such forces through mathematics and reason. Instead Cupitt argues we respond to such forces by seeing ourselves as infinitely unimportant, we disappear into nothingness. The sublime is now, we are swallowed up into the void.

Solar Living means thinking of our lives as burning up like the sun. As we live we burn, our life is just a pouring out of energy until we are burnt up. We pour ourselves out, and this is our existence. Our truth isn't something deep within our unconscious, it is our actions, our creation. Cupitt calls this "postsainthood", we live by dying all the time.

Cupitt then goes back to address the obvious objection made his claim that all the main religious traditions are coming to an end. How

In reaction to the rise of science, the rise of the "global village," and the rise of religious fundamentalism, so many books are struggling over the disintegration of traditional religions and the search for substitutes. This is yet another attempt. In this case, Cupitt wants to reduce all human experience to words and the deification of words, and in doing so is yet another postmodern author who completely misunderstands that the fundamental origin of religion is pre-verbal, in the primordial and perennial experience of mystical union with Absolute Reality, or what we in the West like to call "God." Unless an author writing about the demise of traditional religion at least understands that, then any remedies they are likely to devise are going to be, in a quite literal sense, groundless. The closest Cupitt comes to understanding this is his (almost cavalier) proposal that we look into the cosmic "Void" to achieve a feeling of personal bliss. But his understanding of this state is insipid, not at all compelling, and obviously not based on personal experience. His obsession with reducing everything in human consciousness to verbal language automatically disqualifies him from any true understanding of the source of human religions, and hence from providing us with any insight into the real future of ecumenical religious development. The main value of this book is Cupitt's analysis of the poverty of traditional religious beliefs in coming to grips with the problems introduced by scientific knowledge and global communication in the modern world. But he provides no compelling solutions

Don't get me wrong, this is a god book for what Bishop John Shelby Spong would call "beleivers in exile", but at times the author comes off with a Eurocentric justification of past wrongs done by the church as in page 106 where he states,"It may indeed be that an overwhelming and annihilating system of religious TERRORISM was needed in order to discipline the hunter-gatherers into becoming GOOD CITIZENS". This kind of talk does little for the advancment of religious though!

Cupitt is one of these Christians who don't believe in God... hmm... while he writes very well and explains his position at length and with great literary talent, in terms of actual logical philosophy, next to Kant, Nietzsche, Sartre, Aristotle or even fellow postmodernist types like Derrida or Foucalt, Cupitt's mistakes are all too obvious - and there's one on almost every page.