The mystic’s and shaman’s gods for me any day. To me it feels like all the “prophets” or significant people like Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha etc were themselves Shamans and Mystics. Then came politics. I was raised Muslim. The idea that all that we know is a sliver of a much larger library that we can’t even fathom is what the non-confessor Muslim believes. It’s written in the Quran. The Muslim God is written of a quality that no one can hope to know, but yet they anthropomorphize him with human ability to intervene and change their lives for the better or worse when they are confessors. According to the text Allah is supposed to be agender and so are people who have gone to Heaven so I don’t get what the ruckus is about on Earth lol. He’s more of a phenomena than a being. I always say live such that you can live fully like there is no god, and respectfully as if all the gods were real. I relate very heavily to your writing and your experiences of meditative, hypnotic, and out of body experiences and growing spiritually despite the environments pressures. My brain is loopy because of DID and trauma so I have had these experiences all my life and eventually found out that there are places where people of immense pain can congregate and share that anguish and get better, but eventually I had the same kind of experiences from drugs, therapy, and even medication. Every time I’ve been through such ego dissolutions in my life I’ve come out of it with less existential angst because to me these were communications with the natural spirit that exists in all things. The one symbol to represent everything, including nothing.
Thank you so much for sharing your experience, and especially for connecting it to your Muslim background. I know virtually nothing about that tradition.
People pull the gaps wider than they actually are between the Abrahamic faiths. Islam is just another revision of the same original Abrahamic faiths, grown in a different ethnocultural environment. I enjoyed reading your article. I almost feel like we had the same visions and a similar journey as you describe it. My dreams tell me what is on my mind the most. The not knowing or understanding also has value.
As a (sort of) theologian, this is not sophomoric at all. It's an admirable effort to articulate the complexity of the term "God," and we need much more of this. I wish it were a more common practice to talk more openly about what we mean by "God" rather than just asking each other whether we believe in God or not. This is a great attempt at laying out a comprehensive landscape of different categories of versions of "God." If I dwelt on it more and wanted to nit-pick, I'm sure I could find things to contest or come up with things you may have missed, but that's not important at this stage. There's plenty here for people to chew on that I think will be productive food for thought.
Thanks so much, friend! I’m glad it’s met with approval by someone with your academic caliber. And yes, I’m already finding things that I would definitely re-write/nitpick! I’ve already gotten some fabulous feedback. That’s the process of thinking in public about something very hard.
Oh, this gets at something I wish I had included in retrospect: the mystic’s god is pretty interchangeable with other terms, because it an experience and not a doctrine. So “source” works just as well.
Oh man…. This post hit so many notes for me. My first thought as I was reading was “damn this reminds me of Science Mike” and then you quoted Finding God in the Waves! Science Mike and (before he got super problematic) Michael Gungor were an entire movement within the symphony of my deconstruction, if you will. (I grew up in a fundamentalist, very conservative , Evangelical church-cult and people like Mike McHargue, the Gungors, Rob Bell, and Nadia Bolz-Weber were a big starting point for me down the path I have found myself on the last 10 years instead of the one I was raised to follow.
Something that I struggled with a lot as a child and young adult was an obsession with certainty. I think the most important thing my deconstruction taught me was that I can hold my beliefs with an open hand. (The podcast episode where Science Mike and Michael Gungor talked about Apophatic Mysticism changed my life.)
I’ve evolved past anything Christian (or “Confessors God”) adjacent by this point and I practice a very solitary paganism and mysticism, and that open hand approach still serves me well. It seems like you take a similar approach, and I’m so glad I found your writings today!
Thank you so very much for reading and sharing your story. It sounds like we have similar backgrounds. Bell, Bolz-Weber, Science Mike, Rachel Held Evans were all huge influences on me. Like you, I eventually left completely, but they were my midwives who got me through that deconstruction.
(Also, apophatic theology is something I keep hearing about and need to look into.)
Wonderful post. Hit me just at the perfect time in my thinking.
There is the proverbial God shaped hole in people's heart, but for the deniers of the confessor God there is also a second important God shape hole. For the standard new atheist kind of person, the word God is now hollow. But this means we can fill it with something important. I used to be a standard new atheist type, but now I am realizing that leaving the word God unused is a massive wasted opportunity. I have some vague confused thoughts on this I am trying to make coherent, but its really a process of searching right now.
Jewish mysticism gets down to the letters of the Torah. Also explores angels a lot. And it works and is the underlying influence on Western esotericism. IMHO.
There's a cool old book I have called "The Mystic Spiral" that talks about Jewish mysticism using the concept of the spiral and how it relates to the Kabbalah tree of life. I haven't finished it, but it's super interesting so far. It's illustrated and also just a generally neat book to look at.
I think everyone has some of these in them, even the most devout atheists, and some people have a bit of all of them in different amounts, even if those are contradictory. Part of the human experience is living in a contradictory soup of thought. I think it's wise to point out that religions, God, whatever you want to call it, functions a bit like myths in the ancient world (or memes in the modern world), where the point isn't to convey accuracy of meaning, but a beneath-the-surface context that's subtle and carries emotional weight. These different iterations of the religious experience are different variations of that subtext. "God" is a placeholder, a poor substitute that conveys a breadth of meaning to different people. In the words of the immortal Nietzsche, "We establish a word at the point where our ignorance begins," and "God" is the ultimate example of what he was talking about. We can't communicate direct facts and emotional experiences, so we use the cheap substitute of words. Being charitable, people are describing those experiences the best way they know how. In the words of my close friend, speaking of the Abrahamic gods, "I may not know what's out there in the Universe, but I certainly know that's not the answer." But I think some of these are rather benign and probably helpful for some people. But...
I think we shouldn't be so hasty to give up on the idea that a multiracial, multicultural, democratic order can be established. Ali admits defeat when she says that she's converted to Christianity for that reason alone. She also over-estimates the power, especially political power, of a loud, but small minority of overzealous activists. Quite to the contrary, there are many forces among us that are much graver than "woke ideology" (her words, not mine), and those forces can not only be addressed without appeals to divinity, of any sort, but divinity might directly hinder that process. I think the New Atheists underestimated the way Political Religions would rise and fill the sudden void left by religions proper, but that doesn't mean we should consider the battle over. While it's fun to say, "Yes, we are like children in a library," we're kind of not—Einstein understood nuclear physics, after all, hardly an ignorant child. The lack of self-awareness is awe-inspiring, to be honest. This idea that the meaning-making institutions are collapsing is one I'm very skeptical of, as well, and, not to mention, institutions don't *make* meaning for us, they should reflect the meanings we have as humans. I think if you ask most people around the world who aren't warped by some wild ideology, they'll tell you they want the same things—peace, stability, to have their family, etc.; institutions should nurture, not dictate these things. All in all, the fight for increasingly secular and functional societies is certainly not lost, and I think our perception that it might be growing out of the algorithmic age and the distortions it presents our minds.
Mm, another thought: I think my perception of the loss of meaning-making institutions informed by my own process of losing faith, which was a true catastrophe for me. Institutions aren’t dead things — they are full of human beings working together in concert towards a shared value, myth, faith, etc. losing that on a personal level can be a catastrophic loss, and I do think it’s worth wondering what the consequences will be when that gets lost on a broader scale. In this way, I am a conservative. But this worry certainly doesn’t supplant my belief in pluralistic liberal democracy.
I couldn’t agree more. I hope we can preserve the best parts of them beyond my lifetime, as the relics of Athens and even Mycenae are with us today via Rome, France, England, and more.
Oh, also, that’s an interesting take regarding Einstein. I come to the exact opposite conclusion — not that he was totally unself-aware, but that he was brilliant enough to understand how little we truly understand about the universe. Maybe it takes a mind as great as his to truly grasp that.
Re: Einstein: either that or perfectionism. It’s easy to forget how much we know and how far we’ve come. It’s like writers who constantly question themselves and if they’re any good. I’d imagine brilliant physicists can have imposter syndrome too.
Thanks so much for reading and sharing your thoughts! I agree with you that a pluralistic, multiracial, multicultural, democratic order is worth fighting for, and I’m certainly not giving up on that vision. I believe that the likes of Ali are perceiving a problem (though I don’t think she’s correct that “wokeness” is a civilizational threat) while opting for a terrible solution.
All in all, whether you left the TST or not, a sharp mind like yours is definitely worth a follow. I remember subscribing on Patreon back in the day! You've really come a long way.
I accidentally read "This enrages people who prefer a more expansive definition of God." as "expensive God" and it made me laugh. It also has me thinking how true it is. Maybe some people simply want a more expensive definition of God to match their expensive car and impress their friends
Thank you for touching on the Storyteller God. Iove this one because stories are so universal and no matter what religion I am in I still carry stories with me. Sometimes whether I like it or not. Mr Palahniuk talks a lot about how powerful stories are the ones that share an event or feeling that is the most universal.
I really enjoyed the article - I guess it's possible for a believer to not truely understand fully in what they believe, but take great comfort in the belief. None of us can truly know the truth while alive in any event. It takes the next step for that to be revealed. Also, fun to look up the Flannery O'Connor story of her dinner party. Quite a group of attendees.
Ayan: “But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
This sounds a bit like Voltaire’s argument, so I shall raise her one Christopher Hitchens:
“Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. Our evolution has been examined “backward,” with life temporarily outpacing extinction, and knowledge now at last capable of reviewing and explaining ignorance. Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come “first.” But as Sam Harris states rather pointedly in The End of Faith, if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.”
Ever read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East? It’s dense and difficult, but a mindfuck pertaining to religion.
It’s definitely not a *fun* read, as it’s linguistics and the etymology of long-dead languages, but it’s certainly mind-expanding. Thankfully, I speak quite a bit of some of those long-dead languages (Ελληνικά), so my Greek is good enough to understand the nuances of the New Testament.
TL;DR version: not only did Jesus not exist as a person, but he was more than just a myth—they were describing psychedelic experiences and talking about amanita muscaria mushrooms, these guys 🍄—the hefty Super Mario mushrooms that make you trip face—and sex. I’ve covered some of this beat on my own Substack, dissecting the sexual passages of the Bible, so we have some overlap, but yeah, wild book (but boring book).
The mystic’s and shaman’s gods for me any day. To me it feels like all the “prophets” or significant people like Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha etc were themselves Shamans and Mystics. Then came politics. I was raised Muslim. The idea that all that we know is a sliver of a much larger library that we can’t even fathom is what the non-confessor Muslim believes. It’s written in the Quran. The Muslim God is written of a quality that no one can hope to know, but yet they anthropomorphize him with human ability to intervene and change their lives for the better or worse when they are confessors. According to the text Allah is supposed to be agender and so are people who have gone to Heaven so I don’t get what the ruckus is about on Earth lol. He’s more of a phenomena than a being. I always say live such that you can live fully like there is no god, and respectfully as if all the gods were real. I relate very heavily to your writing and your experiences of meditative, hypnotic, and out of body experiences and growing spiritually despite the environments pressures. My brain is loopy because of DID and trauma so I have had these experiences all my life and eventually found out that there are places where people of immense pain can congregate and share that anguish and get better, but eventually I had the same kind of experiences from drugs, therapy, and even medication. Every time I’ve been through such ego dissolutions in my life I’ve come out of it with less existential angst because to me these were communications with the natural spirit that exists in all things. The one symbol to represent everything, including nothing.
+1 on the belief that prophets were mystics, and religion is basically politics overlaid on top
I suspect the storyteller god is the one needed to explain the mystical god to non-mystics, which gets corrupted into the confessor God by politics
Thank you so much for sharing your experience, and especially for connecting it to your Muslim background. I know virtually nothing about that tradition.
People pull the gaps wider than they actually are between the Abrahamic faiths. Islam is just another revision of the same original Abrahamic faiths, grown in a different ethnocultural environment. I enjoyed reading your article. I almost feel like we had the same visions and a similar journey as you describe it. My dreams tell me what is on my mind the most. The not knowing or understanding also has value.
Yes, dreams have always been incredibly important to me. I’ve had some important experiences and insight by way of dreams.
As a (sort of) theologian, this is not sophomoric at all. It's an admirable effort to articulate the complexity of the term "God," and we need much more of this. I wish it were a more common practice to talk more openly about what we mean by "God" rather than just asking each other whether we believe in God or not. This is a great attempt at laying out a comprehensive landscape of different categories of versions of "God." If I dwelt on it more and wanted to nit-pick, I'm sure I could find things to contest or come up with things you may have missed, but that's not important at this stage. There's plenty here for people to chew on that I think will be productive food for thought.
Thanks so much, friend! I’m glad it’s met with approval by someone with your academic caliber. And yes, I’m already finding things that I would definitely re-write/nitpick! I’ve already gotten some fabulous feedback. That’s the process of thinking in public about something very hard.
God feels like too front loaded a term. I prefer the term source and I guess that makes me fall under the mystic catagory?
Oh, this gets at something I wish I had included in retrospect: the mystic’s god is pretty interchangeable with other terms, because it an experience and not a doctrine. So “source” works just as well.
Similarly, I hear "Spirit" a lot.
The mystic's god has always appealed to me most after growing up kind of default-Christian.
This was a really neat breakdown!
Thanks so much for reading and I’m glad you enjoyed it! Fortunately, I believe the Mystic’s God is available to all of us.
Oh man…. This post hit so many notes for me. My first thought as I was reading was “damn this reminds me of Science Mike” and then you quoted Finding God in the Waves! Science Mike and (before he got super problematic) Michael Gungor were an entire movement within the symphony of my deconstruction, if you will. (I grew up in a fundamentalist, very conservative , Evangelical church-cult and people like Mike McHargue, the Gungors, Rob Bell, and Nadia Bolz-Weber were a big starting point for me down the path I have found myself on the last 10 years instead of the one I was raised to follow.
Something that I struggled with a lot as a child and young adult was an obsession with certainty. I think the most important thing my deconstruction taught me was that I can hold my beliefs with an open hand. (The podcast episode where Science Mike and Michael Gungor talked about Apophatic Mysticism changed my life.)
I’ve evolved past anything Christian (or “Confessors God”) adjacent by this point and I practice a very solitary paganism and mysticism, and that open hand approach still serves me well. It seems like you take a similar approach, and I’m so glad I found your writings today!
Thank you so very much for reading and sharing your story. It sounds like we have similar backgrounds. Bell, Bolz-Weber, Science Mike, Rachel Held Evans were all huge influences on me. Like you, I eventually left completely, but they were my midwives who got me through that deconstruction.
(Also, apophatic theology is something I keep hearing about and need to look into.)
I still miss Rachel Held Evans. I have a lot of friends in the Exvangelical community that met and knew her. She was a massive loss.
Same ❤️
Wonderful post. Hit me just at the perfect time in my thinking.
There is the proverbial God shaped hole in people's heart, but for the deniers of the confessor God there is also a second important God shape hole. For the standard new atheist kind of person, the word God is now hollow. But this means we can fill it with something important. I used to be a standard new atheist type, but now I am realizing that leaving the word God unused is a massive wasted opportunity. I have some vague confused thoughts on this I am trying to make coherent, but its really a process of searching right now.
“I am realizing that leaving the word God unused is a massive wasted opportunity.”
Could not agree more. If ever you put those thoughts to words, I would love to read them. I’m in the process of figuring this out as well.
Thanks so much for reading and sharing.
God Is.
Specifically try the Jewish form of the mystical God. That's the best form of it from what I've found in my experimentations so far.
Thank you for reading and for the suggestion! Is there any reading you would suggest?
This book God is a Verb is a good place to start. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1573226947?tag=figoonthtr-20
Also check out this YouTube video on the mystical meanings of Hebrew letters - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL630D8F45C2CD0213&si=Tb3r5kw5Ts6IxUUo
Jewish mysticism gets down to the letters of the Torah. Also explores angels a lot. And it works and is the underlying influence on Western esotericism. IMHO.
Thanks so much for sharing! I’ll check it out.
There's a cool old book I have called "The Mystic Spiral" that talks about Jewish mysticism using the concept of the spiral and how it relates to the Kabbalah tree of life. I haven't finished it, but it's super interesting so far. It's illustrated and also just a generally neat book to look at.
Oh sweet, thanks for the recommendation!
I think everyone has some of these in them, even the most devout atheists, and some people have a bit of all of them in different amounts, even if those are contradictory. Part of the human experience is living in a contradictory soup of thought. I think it's wise to point out that religions, God, whatever you want to call it, functions a bit like myths in the ancient world (or memes in the modern world), where the point isn't to convey accuracy of meaning, but a beneath-the-surface context that's subtle and carries emotional weight. These different iterations of the religious experience are different variations of that subtext. "God" is a placeholder, a poor substitute that conveys a breadth of meaning to different people. In the words of the immortal Nietzsche, "We establish a word at the point where our ignorance begins," and "God" is the ultimate example of what he was talking about. We can't communicate direct facts and emotional experiences, so we use the cheap substitute of words. Being charitable, people are describing those experiences the best way they know how. In the words of my close friend, speaking of the Abrahamic gods, "I may not know what's out there in the Universe, but I certainly know that's not the answer." But I think some of these are rather benign and probably helpful for some people. But...
I think we shouldn't be so hasty to give up on the idea that a multiracial, multicultural, democratic order can be established. Ali admits defeat when she says that she's converted to Christianity for that reason alone. She also over-estimates the power, especially political power, of a loud, but small minority of overzealous activists. Quite to the contrary, there are many forces among us that are much graver than "woke ideology" (her words, not mine), and those forces can not only be addressed without appeals to divinity, of any sort, but divinity might directly hinder that process. I think the New Atheists underestimated the way Political Religions would rise and fill the sudden void left by religions proper, but that doesn't mean we should consider the battle over. While it's fun to say, "Yes, we are like children in a library," we're kind of not—Einstein understood nuclear physics, after all, hardly an ignorant child. The lack of self-awareness is awe-inspiring, to be honest. This idea that the meaning-making institutions are collapsing is one I'm very skeptical of, as well, and, not to mention, institutions don't *make* meaning for us, they should reflect the meanings we have as humans. I think if you ask most people around the world who aren't warped by some wild ideology, they'll tell you they want the same things—peace, stability, to have their family, etc.; institutions should nurture, not dictate these things. All in all, the fight for increasingly secular and functional societies is certainly not lost, and I think our perception that it might be growing out of the algorithmic age and the distortions it presents our minds.
Mm, another thought: I think my perception of the loss of meaning-making institutions informed by my own process of losing faith, which was a true catastrophe for me. Institutions aren’t dead things — they are full of human beings working together in concert towards a shared value, myth, faith, etc. losing that on a personal level can be a catastrophic loss, and I do think it’s worth wondering what the consequences will be when that gets lost on a broader scale. In this way, I am a conservative. But this worry certainly doesn’t supplant my belief in pluralistic liberal democracy.
I couldn’t agree more. I hope we can preserve the best parts of them beyond my lifetime, as the relics of Athens and even Mycenae are with us today via Rome, France, England, and more.
Oh, also, that’s an interesting take regarding Einstein. I come to the exact opposite conclusion — not that he was totally unself-aware, but that he was brilliant enough to understand how little we truly understand about the universe. Maybe it takes a mind as great as his to truly grasp that.
Re: Einstein: either that or perfectionism. It’s easy to forget how much we know and how far we’ve come. It’s like writers who constantly question themselves and if they’re any good. I’d imagine brilliant physicists can have imposter syndrome too.
Thanks so much for reading and sharing your thoughts! I agree with you that a pluralistic, multiracial, multicultural, democratic order is worth fighting for, and I’m certainly not giving up on that vision. I believe that the likes of Ali are perceiving a problem (though I don’t think she’s correct that “wokeness” is a civilizational threat) while opting for a terrible solution.
All in all, whether you left the TST or not, a sharp mind like yours is definitely worth a follow. I remember subscribing on Patreon back in the day! You've really come a long way.
Thanks!
I accidentally read "This enrages people who prefer a more expansive definition of God." as "expensive God" and it made me laugh. It also has me thinking how true it is. Maybe some people simply want a more expensive definition of God to match their expensive car and impress their friends
Ha true!
Thank you for touching on the Storyteller God. Iove this one because stories are so universal and no matter what religion I am in I still carry stories with me. Sometimes whether I like it or not. Mr Palahniuk talks a lot about how powerful stories are the ones that share an event or feeling that is the most universal.
Yes ❤️❤️
wow!! so dope!! and maybe a bit much for my morning brain - will return later and properly digest…
Hey! So glad you enjoyed it!
I think this might be a useful companion piece here, going into more detail on how various understandings of God are present in the same tradition:
https://open.substack.com/pub/perennialdigression/p/monolatry-monotheism-monism
Thanks for linking!
Your descriptions seem to somewhat parallel Wilber's schema of Gross, Subtle, Causal and NonDual
https://integralchurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/a-brilliant-matrix-the-world-of-religious-states-and-stages/
Oh!! I was unfamiliar with this, thank you so much!
I really enjoyed the article - I guess it's possible for a believer to not truely understand fully in what they believe, but take great comfort in the belief. None of us can truly know the truth while alive in any event. It takes the next step for that to be revealed. Also, fun to look up the Flannery O'Connor story of her dinner party. Quite a group of attendees.
Zeb! So glad you enjoyed it, and I agree on all points
Ayan: “But we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”
This sounds a bit like Voltaire’s argument, so I shall raise her one Christopher Hitchens:
“Thus, though I dislike to differ with such a great man, Voltaire was simply ludicrous when he said that if god did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. The human invention of god is the problem to begin with. Our evolution has been examined “backward,” with life temporarily outpacing extinction, and knowledge now at last capable of reviewing and explaining ignorance. Religion, it is true, still possesses the huge if cumbersome and unwieldy advantage of having come “first.” But as Sam Harris states rather pointedly in The End of Faith, if we lost all our hard-won knowledge and all our archives, and all our ethics and morals, in some Márquez-like fit of collective amnesia, and had to reconstruct everything essential from scratch, it is difficult to imagine at what point we would need to remind or reassure ourselves that Jesus was born of a virgin.”
I hadn’t made the connection between Ayan and Voltaire, but I think you are right! And I love that quote by Hitchens.
Ever read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East? It’s dense and difficult, but a mindfuck pertaining to religion.
It’s been on my list for years!
It’s definitely not a *fun* read, as it’s linguistics and the etymology of long-dead languages, but it’s certainly mind-expanding. Thankfully, I speak quite a bit of some of those long-dead languages (Ελληνικά), so my Greek is good enough to understand the nuances of the New Testament.
TL;DR version: not only did Jesus not exist as a person, but he was more than just a myth—they were describing psychedelic experiences and talking about amanita muscaria mushrooms, these guys 🍄—the hefty Super Mario mushrooms that make you trip face—and sex. I’ve covered some of this beat on my own Substack, dissecting the sexual passages of the Bible, so we have some overlap, but yeah, wild book (but boring book).
That’s awesome! Reminds me of the Immortality Key, which I really enjoyed.
Off to go check that out.
I don’t know how historically sound it is, but I really enjoyed it