Talking back to:

Taking Leave of God

by Don Cupitt

Quotations in bold type are from the book.

Preface

Mark Belletini lent me this book when I was going through a theological crisis during which I wrote to him, "I am still trying to decide whether theism makes any sense to me at all... I really don’t believe that the universe has any way of caring about our miseries. As my husband Harry says, that only means that ‘We are the road crew,’ but I don’t think we are up to the job.

I read a book last year (whose title I have unfortunately forgotten) which said that all spiritual and mystical experiences are solidly based in physical, biological processes; which is why spiritual and metaphysical disciplines bear strong similarities the whole world over. To me this means there is no supernatural intelligence…I think I believe in Ragnarok."

I suspect now that I was going through something that Steve Hassan describes in his book Combatting Cult Mind Control: I was looking over my shoulder at the threats ingrained in me by my previous religion: namely, the world will end and you with it.

Be that as it may, I found this book extremely useful in answering a vital question: how is it possible to have faith in some kind of God without either defending the indefensible or reducing It to a vacuous metaphor?

Cupitt plunges into the middle of things by saying that the increasing reluctance to bow down to authority is a good thing, because "a life lived in resigned acceptance and passive obedience to God and tradition does not deserve to be called a moral life. … If [my morality] derived its authority from another I could not fully adopt and internalize it without becoming dependent upon that other, and so forfeiting my freedom… I must at least be a critical follower of the party line," even if the party line turns out to be the Sure ‘Nuff Revealed Truth ™.

"Today everyone wishes to be his own master and the captain of his own soul" – well, I wonder if that is true. It is certainly true of most middle-class Westerners and those people elsewhere who have adopted Western middle-class ethics and standards. I wonder how true that is of Chinese peasants – well, if you read Jonathan Kwitny’s Rope of Sand, even they are "infected." What of the rural Ethiopian or Bangladeshi who is wondering how (or whether) he will get his next crop in? Cupitt leaves no room for cavilling: "once one has fully understood that it is possible to be captain of his own soul, then the ideal is established in one and has thereafter an unshakable authority." Somehow I think there is a gaping hole here, and I don’t mean the old wives’ tale that the collapse of external authority must necessarily lead to chaos; not if Autonomy for All accompanies this collapse. No, I have a deep-rooted suspicion that many people are afraid of autonomy; distrustful; paralyzed by fear of getting crucial things disastrously wrong. I think of the people who are sucked in by "dominion theology" and rush around trying to arrange everyone else’s life (with brutal force, as it seems necessary) so that their own world will not collapse.

Religion is in precisely the same state. "The old kind of religion, a thoroughly heteronomous external control system, is gone and swept away by history. It is not merely that people would sharply resent any serious attempt to impose it, but rather that it is impossible to reimpose it. … In the age of autonomous morality and consciousness you can only have heteronomous religion as a kind of affectation…Although [such believers] profess in general terms to believe in signs of providence and the discernment of God’s will, they laugh at the naivety of one who applies these beliefs in a concrete and specific way to just one particular case…. When that distancing [between the old way and the new] is internal to oneself one must use humor to express it and to relieve the strain." I know whereof he speaks. My son and I, a few years ago, were talking about God’s response to prayer. We were religious literalists then. He said, "God listens, but he’s very quiet, like a little mousie. No, more like a big Mousie, with claws and teeth." For weeks thereafter, whenever events seemed to break in our favor, we would laugh and exclaim: "Big Mousie!" as a jocular expression of our somewhat uncomfortable belief that God was looking out for us.

Well, the Buddhists have done without an external god for some thousands of years. How are such emphatically monotheistic traditions as Islam, Judaism and Christianity to do so? Need they do so? How to bridge the gap between the way of the external Judge and the way of the internal conscience that cocks a dubious eye at the throne of God?

It can be done and is worth doing, for "over the years I have met various people who are quietly agnostic or skeptical about Christian supernatural doctrines, while nevertheless continuing to practice the Christian religion [its spiritual practices and ethical principles] to strikingly good effect." Cupitt calls such people "skeptical believers." "The highly ideological character of much modern Western religion [its emphasis on doctrinal purity] is in global terms an oddity and an exception."

But I can’t, in every case, look down on a quest for doctrinal purity. Think of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, who were suppressed religiously for so long, and who are working seriously and strenuously to recover their old traditions and beliefs. Many of them go apoplectic at the syncretistic "New Age rip-offs" of their beliefs, because they are justifiably afraid of a backflow of mixed apostasies among the younger generations who have lost touch with the old ways. On the other hand, tell that to the Cao Dai church of Vietnam, which mixes Buddhist, Christian and other elements, and offers prayers to Victor Hugo among others. Maybe religious syncretism would be less objectionable to those interested in religious restoration if the syncretists would adopt some sort of warning label: "CAUTION: Traditions herein have been adapted to times and cultures vastly different from those of their origin. Believe at your own risk."

Introduction: The Spirituality of Radical Freedom

The continuing appeal of the old style of religion is partly rooted in a need for comforting, pretty stories. The fundamentalist churches have made the mistake of insisting we swallow them whole; the secularists of the last generation made the mistake of trying to break us of them altogether. The trouble was that the latter assumed being religious meant being dependent: swallowing implausible stories and handing your conscience over to an outside force.

For those of us who are not lucky enough to be artists, religion – spirituality – serves the same purpose as artistic expression: to "direct our freedom and make it fruitful, so that human lives can gain something of the nothing-wasted integrity and completeness of a work of art. When lives are rounded off in that way, death loses its sting." Any life dedicated to disciplined "fruitful" activity, then, is a spiritual life. I like this.

But the same intellectual forces that are freeing us from bondage to untruth and hypocrisy have also stripped the old religions of their power to direct us to what’s good. "Hence there is a great deal of eccentric experimentation, ransacking of Oriental religions and so on, for the pearl of great price is proving difficult to find."

Well, Dr. Cupitt – let be! Some of us need to re-invent the wheel rather than relying on unreliable authority. It may be that the longest way round is the shortest way home. Of course some people only end up exchanging one heteronomous authority for another. How to avoid this? How to "leave the chaff and take the wheat," as Emerson put it?

Cupitt notes that "internalization" is a persistent historical force – the shifting of "meanings and values" from out there to inside the individual. Inner demons take over from horned devils; the conscience takes over from the looming God. This process is the salvation, not the death, of religion. "In modern times we find less sacred meaning and mystery in the external world around us, but by way of compensation we have as it were more religiousness inside us." Although I fail to see why our internal religiousness can’t re-invest the world with sacred meaning.

Another blessing in disguise is the world-wide quest for "autonomy" – control over one’s own life, which the powerful and conservative dismiss as "libertinism." Rather than selfish rebellion, the quest for autonomy is actually a hunger for honesty and self-control. "It is better to live one’s own life, however unsuccessfully, than to live a life which is merely the acting of a part written for us by someone else, and the principle holds even if that ‘somebody else’ is a god. Anyone who has tasted freedom knows that it would be a sin against one’s own soul to revert to dependency." This requires considerable thought. Is that true for the homeless schizophrenic dying of exposure on the street because he can’t abide the "part written for him" by his medicines and his doctor?

You need not be antireligious to be autonomous. That the reverse has been true in the West is a historical accident, says Cupitt; to rebel against the external church has been to rebel against established public order, because church and state have been so closely linked. I wonder if the world really has seen many cultures in which the religious establishment stood apart from the government and felt free to censure it, or at least not very inclined to bless it.

Well, naturally, internalization and autonomy lead to Cupitt’s third religion-saving principle – the idea of the New Covenant, which dates back much further than the Enlightenment, which is where he locates the roots of the other two principles. Isaiah specifically says that the law written on stone tablets will be replaced by one written on our hearts. "Objectifying religion," that is, literalistic, God-out-there religion, "is now false religion, for it no longer saves."

And now I know what evangelicals, or is it Pentecostals, mean by urging you to "invite Jesus into your heart." Replace the letter of the law with the spirit of the law; the words of Jesus with the conscience of Jesus.

And yet they tend to turn around and burden us (and themselves) with external laws again, whether by deep Bible study or frantic exhortation. A believer who takes up the burden of external direction again "is only a shell, a slave, a living tool – not all there, because the noblest part of himself has been surrendered to the God." Traditional Christian teaching says that "the human heart is treacherous," basically that it has no noblest part. (I remember, during the conversion process, weeping real tears over my intractable human selfishness – but I can’t remember, now, the incidents that brought on these crying jags.)

The commonest way out of this impasse, says Cupitt, is to forsake religion altogether, for humanism. The other – better, but more elusive – is to achieve an inner union with God, like the old mystics used to talk about, from St. Paul onward. "God indwells the believer, enlightening his understanding, kindling his affections, and enabling his will." As a God-out-there Christian, I never understood this.

And it is getting more and more difficult, given the state of scientific and historical knowledge and the persistence of evil, to believe in God-out-there. It is impossible to nail down specific instances of God’s intervention, Lourdes notwithstanding. And a good thing, too!

"For people talk of providence in connection with fortunate coincidences, lucky escapes and personal success, as if they really think that the universe revolves around themselves and that God’s chief preoccupation is with smoothing their path through life. The air-crash survivor thanks God for his deliverance, but what of those who died?"

If any decent people are not to be saved, that’s injustice; and it happens every day. And an unjust god is worse than no god at all.

Yet to live without some kind of Transcendent Thing is such a lonely business. What can we lean on when our nation, our people, our culture, are in the wrong? If both proving and disproving god are equally impossible, are we safe in simply assuming It?

Yes, in a manner of speaking, as "Buddha put spirituality above theology… The Way comes first. Get the Way right, and talk of the gods can be allowed to make its own kind of sense as best it can." The pretty stories are best used to support you on the path, not to function as cattle prods; as metaphors, not marching orders. The point is not "going to heaven" but purity of heart. The "strait and narrow path" does not lead to salvation but is salvation in itself. The pure in heart shall not see, but shall be, the Kingdom of God.

"What then is God? God is a unifying symbol that eloquently personifies and represents to us everything that spirituality requires of us." A mental image of God serves the same purpose as a stone or metal one, used correctly: to demonstrate to us and remind us of the requirements of the ethical, spiritual life, and of what reassurances the universe holds for us, in a way that reaches down into our heart of flesh and dwells there permanently.

Maybe someday God will be accessible to me in this way. I’m creeping up on it, very, very slowly.

A few years ago an Assemblies of God lady of my acquaintance told me that "the saved" were scattered throughout all churches, even the one I then belonged to, which she considered to be "the Antichrist." I did not agree then; I was sure my church had a lock on salvation. But I have come around to her point of view – not as she stated it, but as Cupitt states it: "Nowadays no religious message can be true unless through it one can attain a higher degree of consciousness than one’s non-religious contemporaries. Religion has to give one wit, levity and command; religion that makes the believer dull, benighted and obtuse is not spiritual and has to be rejected."

But we do need "spirituality" – a set of freely chosen principles, which are likely to be beyond proof – to shape our lives, or there is no point in living.

2. The Decline of Objective Theism

By "objective" or "realist" religion, Cupitt means literalistic religion.

If we are forced to define God as being a separate Person Out There, then we ought to be able to prove or disprove his existence; or at least we could if he weren’t also held to be "a world-transcending infinite Spirit" on which you cannot lay hands or train a telescope.

Cupitt asks: If God-Out-There exists at all, why is religion in decline? Why hasn’t he done anything to prevent it?

On the other hand: if no kind of God exists at all, why does every culture have a religion of some kind, from the dawn of human history up to the present?

Cupitt summarizes the change in consciousness thus: first, as a change in cosmology, from the god-filled cosmos "like a very rich literary text full of hidden symbolism" – in which the presence of omens and portents made perfect sense – to our present one which is equally complex but one in which no object means anything in itself.

Tied up with the change in cosmology is a revolution in the nature of knowledge. Rather than memorizing divine stories laid down by God, we pick the world apart and reassemble it, learning things no one knew before, discovering things the gods themselves left out of their scheme of creation.

The same thing happens to social order. We invent the study of history; everything from archaeology to etymology reveals the slow, piecemeal, evolutionary nature of customs supposedly handed down by god.

Under such conditions, of course the nature of self is going to change. Your destiny is not readymade, but largely left for you to figure out; die gedanken sind frei.

Cupitt says traditional literalist monotheism, such as is found in the Bible and in Islam, is the highest intellectual achievement of the old heteronomous culture, because it both "synthesizes and ratifies all its typical concerns." Yet I am not quite sure I understand what he sees in it. Apparently monotheism’s genius is to provide an irresistible rationale for conformity. And look what trouble that is causing in this country today. (Run awaaaaay!)

Cupitt now moves on to the traditional proofs for God’s existence and shows why they no longer satisfy.

"At its simplest, Anselm’s [ontological] argument begins by pointing out that for the believer God would not be God if he could be surpassed in any way. He must exist in reality, for to exist in reality is greater than to be a mere idea."

But is that really so? World peace, perfect justice, an end to poverty – these are all ideas that are greater than the reality that now exists, or is likely ever to exist. The argument hinges on "the old Platonic idea of degrees of being. Physical objects are things of which it makes sense to say that they might not have existed; so that numbers, it is claimed, are things more real and perfect and enduring than physical objects. Now I can see no sense in constructing such a scale of degrees of reality, for what can be the meaning of saying that purely abstract entities like numbers are ‘more real’ than physical ones like cats?" And if God is more real than numbers, why, He is even more abstract than they are; which does not suit the religious literalist at all, as any casual stroll through the Old Testament will demonstrate.

And then there is the idea that the cosmos had to have come from somewhere; that because we see nothing coming into existence by itself, it follows that nothing can continue existing by itself. But why should that follow? After all, "things do not just vanish, matter and energy are (with some qualifications) conserved, and the way the world behaves is to a large extent explicable and predictable," whether or not it is "luminously evident" to the untrained eye. Why should the world be as it is and not some other way? Nobody who has asked this question has been able to provide a more compelling other way the world might be; hence could not show why the world-as-it-is must necessarily be kept cranking by some external power.

Another argument: "In religious language from the Bible onwards, talk of God is commonly offered, not as an explanation, but as a way of reconciling oneself to the inexplicable. When we complain that something dire has happened and are told to ‘See it as God’s will,’ we are being advised to keep quiet, to stop complaining, to have faith and to endure." Endurance is all very well and noble when nothing else can be done. But all other alternatives ought to be exhausted first – which takes a different kind of endurance and faith, actually. Job had it – he spends most of the book hounding God for answers.

Then literalists trot out the old bromide that God has a good and sufficient reason for allowing everything that happens, no matter how evil; we simply have no way of knowing what it might be. But if we could, full knowledge of God’s reasons would show this to be the best of all possible worlds. Cupitt is not impressed. Neither am I. Mark Twain’s book, No. 44: The Mysterious Stranger is the most amusing refutation that I know of.

Then we come to the argument from design – the structure of plants, animals and the rest of the material world display exquisite intelligence and craftsmanship: therefore, there is a Designer. But "Can we then specify what the purpose of cosmic history is and predict the next few turns in the plot? – Of course not. Can we at least say that nothing very nasty is going to happen to us? – No. Here is an attractive, edible-looking red berry on a plant that I have never seen before: can I safely predict from the theory of the Great Designer’s benevolence that this berry will turn out to be nutritious? – I certainly cannot."

What, then, about the appeal to religious experiences, the direct experience of God? Well, how does it work? Like ESP, maybe? Has the mystic "some special sense organ or faculty that [the rest of us] lack?" This might be so if mystics the world over produced a consistent description of the alleged spiritual realm. But they don’t. Either they delve inward and return with profound changes in their emotional and philosophical outlook, or they reach outward into the natural world and make (often deeply moving) parables of natural objects – like St. Francis of Assisi’s sermons to the animals. "In general, mystical experience is very common, very diverse, and occurs in every religion and in people of no religion. It is interpretatively highly ambiguous."

Religious literalists often ask, "How can you have morality without religion?" Well, if religion is defined as spirituality the proper answer is a cheery "You can’t." But if the question is formed as "How can you have morality without God?" – well, to quote Rev. Mark Belletini, who lent me this book: "If the great agnostic Bertrand Russell could offer no philosophical reason that killing a child was absolutely wrong except that his heart did not approve of it, what then?" What we call morality or ethics is latent in every newborn baby, and arises out of our lifelong experiences of pleasure, pain and community.

3. The Charge of Reductionism

Atheists, agnostics and materialists, especially those who have been hurt by heteronomous religion, have an odd habit of trying to prop up religious literalism – so they can debunk it. If they allowed for the philosophical evolution that has been in fact taking place in many religions, this would be either impossible or unnecessary or both. Debunking is made both possible and necessary by not allowing believers to reinterpret their tradition in the light of modern science and culture. So this particular brand of atheist is in bed with the fundamentalists.

Even if we postulate a God-Out-There, we can only talk about him as we experience him, just as we talk about everything else in existence. Hence we turn him into an Inner God whether we like it or not. We cannot talk about anything apart from our experience of it. (This includes our experience of other people’s experience.)

This reinterpretation goes far back. "In the Bible it often happens that some people say that a certain institution (the monarchy, the temple, circumcision and so on) was ordained at a specific moment in the past by divine act and promised authority and perpetuity and then others come along and on religious grounds repudiate or qualify those claims." The "New Covenant" and the "circumcision of the heart" are two biblical examples that spring readily to mind.

I like this. I have come to believe, over the past year, that everyone has a sacred duty to do their own midrash.

The task of the religious mind today is not so much to get at what the Bible writers meant when they wrote, and how literally they took those stories. That world view is one that we can no longer wrap our heads around. That is the task Fundamentalism has set itself, and it requires "so much self deception as to corrupt the soul."

No, what we each need to do is hermeneutics – to burrow though the text and make it our own again, to let it speak in its own way to our autonomous, more or less rationalist minds – in other words, to "let talk of the Gods make what sense it can."

Cupitt explains why there are miracle stories in scripture: because what we would call historical, or scientific, description, is a post-biblical concept. Religious writing tends to be rhapsodic, to bend the material world into parables of spiritual experience. It is only in the past few hundred years that we have learned not to do that about science and (to a lesser extent) history. For ancient believers, the miracle stories were part history, part poetry, part hosanna, part amen.

From such a viewpoint the story of Jesus’ resurrection becomes another juicy piece of ecstatic poetry: "The resurrection is a religious reality – a state of the self and a form of salvation – which according to the New Testament was introduced by Jesus or which arrived with him. It means the state of salvation toward which the Jewish religion is oriented, now attained by Jesus and available (by anticipation, as it were) to his followers. It consists in the maximal degree of liberation from the power of evil and of spiritual individuation, creativity and responsiveness. The enjoyment of this through Jesus is, by definition, faith in his resurrection."

You see? But what a bizarre thing to do to a poor, desperate artisan from Nazareth.

4. Creation and Theological Realism

What kind of hermeneutical changes can we ring on the Bible's creation story? To say that God created the world is to say that nothing can continue to exist without God, which is what the Bible means when it says things like "the nations are less than the dust in his scales." But I thought we had demolished that argument already.

He quotes Luther: to believe in God as Creator, one must "be dead to everything, to good and bad, to death and life, to hell and heaven, and must confess in his own heart that he is able to do nothing by his own power." What a singularly nasty state of affairs! I've had enough learned helplessness to last me the rest of my natural life.

The old pagan view of creation constructs a hierarchy of deities each responsible for its own bit of the cosmos. Of course conquest, migrations, trade and other routes of culture-mixing stirred the various schemes into a wonderfully rich, shifting, tangled array. (Miscegenation NOW!) It seems to fit in naturally with the view that the chief of the gods is not only the most powerful but the "realest" of all beings. But "if you regard God as the explanation of the world, suppose there to be causal relations between God and the world, and regard the perfections of creatures as so many varying degrees of participation in the divine perfection, you run very close to viewing God as part of the world, or at least to viewing God and the world as together components of a great totality." But I don't see anything wrong with this. Cupitt, though, says it leads to idolatry, not to the true God. And yet the only alternative – the only way to be monotheistic in this age – is to strip the material world of its images of God – for an idol is a mute parable, a sermon without words – and admit that God is unknowable. On the other hand, he says, "the less we know of [God] the more he makes us grow spiritually." I am afraid he's right – but what are we to make of John 17: 3, then?

Well, science itself has stripped the world of its god-symbols and subordinate deities. I suppose you can't be any kind of polytheist or pagan any more except "as an affectation" – unless you use myth as metaphor. So I can't see any reason to favor subjective monotheism over subjective polytheism, as Cupitt does.

But subjective, rather than literalistic, it must be, for there are "strong pressures toward agnosticism…within religious language itself."

Christian doctrine works against prayer, for instance. If God is unchangeable, how can my prayers affect anything? Isn't it impious or at least ill-mannered to ask God for the things I want for myself? And who am I to decide what is best for me and my friends, since God knows all?

You end up praying, if at all, because you can't help it.

And then there is "providence," the doctrine of God's watchful care over your life. The presence of evil in this world riddles "providence" like buckshot.

And yet you end up believing that good will triumph, because you have to. That is what faith is for; to keep you alive and working and maybe singing when Occam's Razor lies against your jugular vein. Look at Daniel on the lip of the furnace: "Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace; and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship your golden image." (Daniel 3:17) "Here faith resolves to cling to God regardless of how facts turn out," says Cupitt. Yes, faith is an act of will, as has been said before. So is tolerance. So are the other fruits of the spirit – love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, mildness, self-control. May they and faith always coincide.

"The point is that to believe in God is simply to declare an intention to be true to religious principles whatever happens…what faith does entitle us to say is that we will survive, we will come through and evil will not have the final word…

"In summary, in confessing God as creator I testify to my experience of rebirth and renewal insofar as the religious concern and religious values have come to take first place in my life."

God creeps up on us smiling, open-handed.

5. Worship and Theological Realism

"God's reality is not a matter of facts and evidence, but of the unconditional authority of religious categories in a person's life….the inner demand…is the essence of religion." I don't know how I can top this. Here I stand, my eye distracted by a few ancient instructive idols, my new atheism moist and wrinkled as an unfledged butterfly's wing – and I am, if anything, more religious than I have ever been.

Well. Religious ritual – worship – like the other aspects of religion, works best metaphorically. But it is often out of pace with the state of people's actual beliefs. Hence come revolts and reforms and sects, but the more usual process is reinterpretation – metaphorizing – internalization. "The most familiar example is the development from human sacrifice to animal sacrifice, to linguistic acts expressing self-surrender to God in faith – ' the calves of our lips' – and finally the complete moralization of sacrifice as it acquires its modern meaning of altruistic conduct." But the idea of human sacrifice still lurks underneath, giving all this ethical talk a rich and bloody tang. As a long-time fantasy reader, I would not be too quick to disassociate myself from it. But "the more we explore the extravagant richness of religious symbolism the more we also encounter warnings against being misled by it." Because of the counterpressures of internalization versus religious literalism, "there are no genuine idolaters."

"Liturgical action is a drama [in which] God takes an active part. God is incorporated into a complex human social interchange. Does not this again suggest that the practice of worship implies a vividly realistic and anthropomorphic view of God?

"No, it does not." The very formality of worship – not necessarily somberness, but its very inviolable tamper-if-you-dare structure – implies the "distance and the inscrutability of the gods…Many ancient mythologies suggest that in the beginning gods and men…mingled in easy fellowship…[but] a time came when, for whatever reason, heaven and earth drew apart and the old intimacy was lost. They were now more enigmatic and their favor was harder to win. Worship perforce became more ceremonious and tinged with a certain anxiety…Men must [now] signal to them in bold, urgent and unmistakable gestures if they hope to be heeded."

But this alienation is a good thing, Cupitt says. The primeval innocence is a dream state, an unconscious state, a useless naïveté. "When man begins to become conscious a gap opens between what he is and what he should become. Belief in the gods expresses this sense of shortcoming, for the gods represent the freedom, spiritual autonomy and sovereignty over nature [especially human nature, I think] of which man obscurely knows he is capable."

Kierkegaard, as Cupitt quotes him, rings in a slight change: "For in order for man to pray there must be a God, there must be a self plus possibility…for God is that all things are possible, and that all things are possible is God; and only the man who has been so shaken that he became spirit by understanding that all things are possible, only he has dealings with God."

This makes me want to laugh out loud. I have been fighting off this kind of existential optimism for months, but the world-spirit shakes me up (quietly) whether I will or no; a subtle, healing tremor overtakes the brain. But Kierkegaard's point (he says) is not that god equals possibility. It is that our whole duty as a sentient species is to "be as gods" eventually; and this is such a difficult, painful process that only Christian principles can see us through it. I doubt this but can't prove it yet; I would have to read a good deal more about the ethical principles of other religions before I can say yea or nay.

The Holy Ghost will not sneak up on you until you are free of carrot-and-stick morality. I suppose Luther is right after all: be equally dead to heaven and hell. Do good because it is sweet, not in hope of heaven. Avoid evil because it hurts and sickens, not in fear of hell. In this way virtue is its won reward – not frenzied or smug self-congratulation, but an easeful expansiveness, a brief, delicious respite for the conscience, and soo9n enough, a hedonistic pleasure in good works.

And this approaches what is meant by "disinterested love," a hunger for other people's happiness that has nothing to do with gratefulness or reciprocation or even recognition. You grow beyond the need for others' thanks and sup on the occasional sigh of relief.

6. Doctrine and Disinterestedness

"It is an obvious historical fact that concepts, and also entire belief-systems, do undergo profound transformations and revisions in the course of time. Hegel saw this, and he helped to introduce a new kind of philosophical argument – much used in this book – in which one take sup a particular set of meanings and beliefs and by pressing their own inner logic transforms them into something significantly new and different. In all religious traditions theologians have always done this, because it is their duty to preserve a tradition by changing it." But it cannot survive the change unless "the inner spiritual continuity between the old pattern and the new" is made so clear as to permit the conscience to shift. (And yet it was the twitchings of pained conscience that prompted the shift in the first place.)

Cupitt defines religion as "the highest degree of dispassionate compassion, selfless self-awareness, attentive and free availability to others…I this state we are in the love of God…That is what it is to be religious, and it is different from morality, [which] has been plausibly represented by the great moralists as largely or wholly determined by considerations of reasonable and cool self-love or of utility," and if that is anything like the truth I have no use for morality at all. "Cool self-love," my eye! Worse than useless! Give me a hot faith that leaps into the lives of others for their good.

But I can't help thinking of C. S. Lewis's remark: "She lives for others; you can tell the others by their hunted expression." All right, then, let me leap softly and imperceptibly, butt nonetheless usefully and tangibly. I have had enough prudence and looking-after-myself to last me a good long while. Right now I can best meet my own needs by reaching out.

Even if God could be shown to be as real as a block of granite, you could not deduce the truth of any particular religion from that fact. If God is literally real, what is to be done about it? Any more than about the reality of the material universe? "Truly religious people can crop up, and can have a good deal in common with each other so far as religiousness or piety is concerned, in doctrinally quite diverse settings. Surely doctrine cannot matter so very much? In our new global culture local religious ideologies are unlikely ever again quite to recover their former standing, for it is so obvious that they are merely local and not universal."

Then what is the point of all the picturesque stories, the eye-catching doctrine? "To characterize religious experience, to summon people to it, and to commend it." We can trust them just as far as they serve these functions, and no farther. We have every right to seek out the church that will tell us the best (the most helpful) story. Cupitt quotes William James: "We have a right to believe where belief is life-enhancing." But he sounds a cautionary note: "Gratuitous overbeliefs…are often very harmful…Furthermore, in real life it would often be preferable to have rather more human moral effort and rather less daydreaming about supernatural agencies."

Many still cling to God-Out-There religion "for the sake of the precious values associated with" it; but these precious values need no support at all; "against such things there is no law," nor can there be.

To internalize religious values while shedding literalist doctrine does not corrupt one's life, as fundamentalists allege, nor need it suck one into the cloister. Rather, it is more likely to galvanize one into reaching out compassionately. Take the shifting biblical concept of holiness: "The holy was originally specifically religious and not at all ethical. Like high-voltage electrification;" yet by Isaiah's time, "'the Lord of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.' (Isaiah 5:16) …the prophets reinterpreted it, shifting both the criteria for applying the term and the domain in which it was applied, so that it became a moral quality of persons."

And yet attempts at justifying religious literalism are still made on ethical grounds. Many people find it easier to maintain the wholesome habit of prayer if they suppose there is someone to pray to; to live life as a pilgrimage if there is a real goal after death; to be humble if they think there is someone to abase oneself to. religious doctrine might serve the function of "religious postulate" (Cupitt borrows this useful term from Kant). Cupitt is not impressed; he says that you lose honesty and gain nothing by taking this route.

Two arguments for hanging on to literalistic doctrine remain: first, "because it would be rude not to." This is why my atheist friend in Los Angeles attends Christmas Mass with his parents. Well, OK – but what has that to do with salvation, Cupitt wants to know? The other is that it is impossible to transcend the limits of the religious tradition you were raised in. But then how are we to explain religious conversions at all? This argument seems not to have occurred to Christian missionaries in Africa, South America, or the Orient. I suspect it's more likely to be applied by Christians to their fellow-believers' attempts to examine other religions. It sounds rather jingoistic to me. I do concede, though, that when you convert to another religion you do tend to bring the flavor of your childhood religion with you; look how native-born Americans are remaking Islam.

Cupitt now specifies six "religious values" that cannot be allowed to die away:

"It is good that one should appraise oneself and one's life with an unconditional religious seriousness and contemplation that tolerates no concealment or self-deception." This is as good a definition of the Inner God as we are likely to find. Under these terms I have been religious all my life.

"It is good that one should cultivate meditation and contemplative prayer, and especially the inner fortitude and resilience needed to combat evils of all kinds.

I do not see how we can be human without these values. It would be instructive to see how they compare with the Principles of the UUA.

7. The Meaning of God

So far Cupitt has arrived at a nearly creedless condition he calls "Christian Buddhism", which he admits is damn near perfect; yet he wants to improve it, by getting more specific about God. "Maybe," he says hopefully, "behind the philosophical ways of thinking about God there are more archaic religious ways which can help us in the task of grasping the post-metaphysical meaning of God." Yes, maybe there is some old Hindu or Buddhist or Celtic story that we laymen can reinterpret, rather than rubbing our brains raw on the philosophers' ten-dollar words.

"To be religious means that one's whole life is as it were subject to a constant scrutiny and under assessment from an absolute point of view that silently records everything and misses nothing…It does not allow one to keep any secret compartments or locked doors. It searches the heart" – this phenomenon, the keenly honed, relentless human conscience, is where the old idea of the omniscient God comes from.

In fact it is precisely the stuff we are trying to hide and forget that the Inner God knows best. Our sin consists largely in our willful, defensive ignorance of what we ought to do, which is why "the religious requirement must be experienced as condemnation before it can be experienced as salvation; it has to take us apart before it can remake us."

And this is why all the pop-psychology talk of self-love and "affirmations" sounds like such a thumping lie; because it is. "The word of God is alive and sharper than a two-edged sword and capable of dividing between the soul and spirit" – and if we pick it up freely and willingly, and wield it with our own hands, we can do the most exquisite psychosurgery with it. In the hands of a stranger, especially a literalist and religious separatist, it may well amount to spiritual butchery.

As Cupitt sees it, the whole point of religion is to arrive at this creedless state which is too often mistaken for atheism. Only by internalizing the meaning of religion can you bridge the gulf between man and god.

I assure you this is literally true. When I became one of Jehovah's Witnesses, I had a brief time when the God-Out-There was vividly real and accessible; but all of that evaporated for good within a couple of years. It was a cause of shame and grief to me. Prayer became steadily less possible, finally impossible. I had the misfortune to join a church which fought strenuously against "the Inner God" while preaching about "developing a personal relationship with God" – with God-Out-There. Of course, the most successful Witnesses were those who were able to say "And Jehovah said to me -- " regardless of how flakily mystical it sounded. I never caught on to this. I was too caught up in being loyal to "Bible principles" – which meant the Bible as interpreted by "God's organization." It left no room for Jehovah to talk to me himself, since we were explicitly warned away from any kind of visionary or mystical experience.

When God-Out-There was in his prime, "you could almost say God improvised, made up his own mind on the spur of the moment and was subject to fits of moodiness, savagery and tender mercy. Such a God was not dull to live with. He was exuberantly and outrageously 'personal.'"

I had a keypal, a bright, exuberant Baptist lady, who dropped me when I became a Unitarian Universalist. "Your tame god," she said, "will let you believe anything you want to." She made the usual literalist's assumption that the Inner God emits nothing but a tone of bland self-approval. But "it is the immutability of God, his eternal silent waiting without batting an eyelid, that forces us to confess everything. What an interrogator! He does not lift a finger and yet he gets everything he wants…. It is in fact highly dramatic so to live, but the drama has become internalized." I suppose this is what Socrates meant when he said "The unexamined life is not worth living." It is godawful boring, too.

In my experience, it is the God of the literalist churches who is tame. He is tied down by the expectations of his worshipers, by their silent assumption that their lives are his central concern. He is tied down by the cramped, ancient cosmology of the Bible and not allowed to be as vast as he is – to misquote H. G. Wells about his Martians, "cool and vast and sympathetic." It is getting difficult for me to avoid the pathetic fallacy that the universe is grounded in Something that knows goodwill – or, in English, that "God loves me." It used to horrify and shame me; now it makes me laugh. It is getting so difficult to avoid this fallacy that I may soon give up trying. Such talk is permissible, for "what it shows is not what God is like, but what the human response to God is like."

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil." Boo!

8. How Real Should God Be?

Cupitt is really grouchy about the prospect of an objectively real God. He seems to think that a God as real as rock would reduce religiosity to the level of algebra lessons or something. I am going to have to think about this. It comes down to handing your conscience over to an outside force again, apparently.

"Strangely enough, the more literally I imagine a supracosmic being to exist, the less he seems to have to do with religion." I think he's right. When I believed in God-Out-There, I found him unapproachable most of the time. Religion under such circumstances was eventually reduced to rule-keeping and staying out of the way.

So if the Way comes before the Gods - if spirituality is even more important than a particular set of ethics, let alone a doctrine or a particular god - then maybe theism itself is bad for us? Well, says Cupitt, God is useful to fight with (like Jacob fought him). But it requires a strong spirit to do so; or else you will end up infantilized again under the wing of a heavenly father.

Cupitt has been saying a lot about the need to "transcend nature," and at last he explains what he means: the Inner God "is experienced precisely as a call to break out of the finite - the rut, the groove, the little cycles of habits…We hate boundlessness and would much prefer to stay within the comfortable limits of our present natures, regardless of the fact that we understand perfectly well that to do so is to find those limits steadily contracting…[AMEN!] Habit kills, for it slowly puts one to sleep spiritually." And now I know why I have been saying "When you are afraid, run forward."

Puritanism, when it is done right, condemns such things as "alcohol, sexual excitement, music and strong emotion, because of their drugging effects." Well, I concede the alcohol, but nothing else! And yet I suppose Jesus did not talk about gaining the whole world and losing your soul for nothing. But I protest that too strict a renunciation of emotion and physical pleasure can lead directly into a deadly contraction of the world's borders, whereas an aesthetic or sensual experience can sharpen the soul and concentrate the heart. Cupitt equates religious reflection with "quiet watchfulness," which I agree is essential, but I have long suffered a deficiency of red paint, gold ink and fireworks.

You can also overdose on good works, he says, quoting an old joke.: "We were put on this earth to help others." "What were the others put here for?" But I'm starving. "Religion is clarity and simplicity. Nothing is further from religion than the flustered involvement and busyness that in some quarters passes for Christian ethics." I believe the operative word here is flustered.

And yet "faith without works is dead." If anything in the Bible is true, surely that is. Here Cupitt is definitely not preaching to the converted! I have had a good long stretch of painful healing contemplation, which led directly to these words you are reading, and it is time others got the benefit of it. Cupitt says bluntly that "you cannot give unless first you have it." But I say also that unless you give, you will lose it.

"The religious requirement is quite indifferent to time," unlike our careers and our love lives. Eternity does not mean endless life, but timelessness. This is what makes it possible to "pray without ceasing" - the fact that the Inner God will not go away. "I testify that I am aware of it as I sleep," Cupitt says. "Its demand for spiritual integrity will not allow us to keep any drawers locked."

Cupitt goes on to contrast the God who "is the same yesterday, today and forever" with the local, partisan God who makes the sun stand still to settle a tribal skirmish and answers the little prayers of believers. During the Enlightenment, philosophers found the little intervening god, the divine "fixer," to be logically impossible, and the vast Creator to be logically unnecessary (for if God and his power are always and everywhere the same, how can you pick him out at all?) We need the "fixer" to keep the vast Creator from fading into his own handiwork; and we need the impersonal, rule-of-law Creator to keep the "fixer" from becoming "a mere fantasy guardian-spirit." European civilizations began with fixer gods and tried to remake them into a vast Creator as they discovered more of the world. These two divine personalities clash and tear at each other.

We cannot reconcile them except by ceasing to take them literally. Let the vast Creator stand for the immutable requirements and demands of the Inner God; and the little fixer stand for its painfully healing effects on our lives. Then we ought to be all right.

9. Is the Religious Ideal Attainable?

"Gods personify religious values," which is why I am partial to Thor - stubborn, scrupulous, a champion of slaves.

Polytheism has its virtues. In a pantheon, "each god specializes" in some part of the religious ideal, "concentrating on controlling some region of the cosmos or aspect of nature, and on exemplifying one or two of the subsidiary moral and religious virtues and values, such as justice or wisdom or skill in the arts and crafts." I gather the impression (from Geoffrey Parrinder's World Religions, I think) that nobody in a polytheistic religion is obliged to worship all the deities available. "Polytheism makes it plain that the central ideal…can be realized in many different ways," so you can chop and channel your religious experience to meet your ethical needs.

But monotheism has the advantage of representing all conceivable virtues in a single figure. Polytheism belongs to times and places where there is no consensus, where there is disagreement about the range of virtue. Polytheism suits and belongs to diversity. For a recovering Fundamentalist Christian, agnostic polytheism is a spangled romp.

But when we come to view the world as a single law-ordered whole, and the self as a single entity, the old gods shrink down to "mere elements in our psyches, allegorical figures." (I'd like to see anyone shrink Shiva Nataraja down to a mere element in anyone's psyche!) If no god represents everything, then no god's voice is imperative.

A polytheist, like any other devil-invoker, can be bluntly realistic about evil, though polytheisms historically have been unable to resolve "the problem of evil." They may shake hell about our ears and teach us to loathe the wrong people, but at least they recognize that there are, somewhere ill-favored forces with the power to do us harm.

And yet the devil never believes it is in the wrong. What we monotheists see as the battle of good against evil is likely to show up as a clash of "irreconcilable virtues" under the old polytheistic schemes. I am not at all sure that the "problem of evil" can be solved. Monotheist religions promise an eventual, permanent happy ending, emotionally satisfying and very likely false. Polytheism strikes me as more honest as well as better-decorated.

Not only is the perfection touted by monotheism unavailable in the world, but all the saints that ever existed are deeply flawed. Cupitt citing six modern figures as examples of sainthood, but the ones he chooses are "neither priests nor theologians nor even conventionally-practicing devout believers," but "heterodox figures" who had an "attractive and fascinating intensity of moral and religious seriousness," but who were accomplished sufferers nonetheless: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, Simone Weil, Wittgenstein (of the last two I have only heard. The two Russians are the only ones I have read much of, or tried to.) "Outstanding religious figures," past and present, are marked by their intense and vivid longings rather than serene accomplishment. "In reality, the very religious mostly have a hard time." Hell's bells! No wonder the Witnesses are at war with "the Inner God" and visionary experience. Without realizing it, I was hunting for an escape from the religious requirement, and found it in a religion. The advantage is that I did not have to do so overtly. Or even consciously. Really, I was only seeking a happy ending and for about ten years I thought I had found it.

If "God" is the internal pressure to do good which forces us to transcend our petty lives, what then is "the love of God"? "The highest kind of religious happiness is outwardly entirely invisible. Only the affliction that it causes the natural ego is visible." Aha! "Happy are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted" - possibly even simultaneously. "The joy that is over the other side of loss is not visible," because it is not about any tangible object.

This kind of "nirvana-joy" is both "paradoxical and rare"; most of us would be better off contenting ourselves with a spiritualized agnosticism. Or an agnostic spirituality. Frankly, I cannot see any difference. Skepticism is not quite the same thing. Though it avoids "error, distortion and the unhappiness of bigotry and fanaticism," it also avoids "demands upon yourself and others," the "itch to change and improve." I was handed a newspaper article recently which said that women are more prone to psychosomatic illnesses because "they tend, perhaps unrealistically, to demand fairness." Well, somebody has to do it! Realism is beside the point!

Still, "skeptics have a true spirituality and a kind of selflessness…you have to work hard to acquire [the skeptic's] complete absence of censoriousness and his lack of hankering after the illusions of ideology," in contrast to "the Western patriarchal monotheist [whose] ego [is] like a clenched fist with white knuckles," whose affliction is not the painful healing process of being made over by the Inner God, but "merely a boring and trivial self-hatred which makes him spread misery all around him." Having rejected dogma, the skeptic is free to achieve a peaceful, stable, contemplative life.

But Christianity, or at any rate, the Christian attitude, takes the high ground when it rejects both sectarian dogma and the quest for peace of mind. The pagan skeptics of old forsook "both historical striving and ecstatic love because they are both of them too risky and uncomfortable." I hope this description is incorrect, because it strikes me as a distinctly pusillanimous reason to be "no part of the world" (yes, I know; mea maxima culpa). For Christians, the hunger and thirst for righteousness reaches out from inner self-development into society.

"One must renounce mean, exclusive and partisan forms of consciousness and move out to the larger and more universal consciousness of disinterestedness. One becomes more free as one becomes less egoistic and tribalistic. Yet it is very hard to do, and involves a kind of death." So the authentic Christian's ego becomes as accommodating and limpid as water, like the skeptic's, but for different reasons (supposedly) and in a different cause.

10. Faith as an Act of the Will

Truth - what we call scientific truth, and mistake for the full range of truth available to us - is about what is. Faith is about what ought to be, and what we ought to do. Before the invention (discovery?) of the scientific method of inquiry, nobody made any distinction between "what is" and "what we ought to do about it." Both were assumed to be equally true, and true in the same sort of way.

Now that we have learned to make that distinction, however, there is no going back. The testing of every utterance is a contagious habit. Once you begin asking "But is it really so?" you cannot stop. Besides, the technology that this habit has given rise to impresses people everywhere, "whereas the power and authority of gods is evidently restricted to certain regions. The Virgin Mary may cure many people in Portugal but she is much less active in Libya, whereas vaccination and inoculation are observably beneficial - and equally beneficial - in both cultures, the local religion in the end making no difference at all." Well, I am inclined to take a jaundiced view of this statement, until I remember the existence of books like Where There Is No Doctor and the modern use of disinfectant in the Dakota Sun Dance Ceremony, in attaching eagle claws to the dancers' chests. So, sprinkling a little salt over this illustration, we come to the idea that the parts of scripture that turn out to be literally untrue are still to be taken seriously for the sake of the underlying doctrines.

Well, maybe. I dare say this is true of the alleged events of Jesus' life, but what spiritual truth are we to make of the seven days of creation in Genesis? "The doctrines were built on the presumptions that those myths were revealed truths, so why go on affirming the doctrines when the myths will not sustain them any longer?" If there is any spiritual truth in the myth, it will stand by itself - whereas the pretty story would be far uglier without it.

Cupitt reminds us that Jesus did not demand that we submit to a doctrinal checklist; that to demand such a thing is "very close to the deadly heresy of Gnosticism, salvation by special esoteric knowledge" - of which I do believe Jehovah's Witnesses are guilty! "Faith is a virtue, not a means by which we gain esoteric information about occult [that is, hidden or invisible] entities." This sounds like a flat contradiction of Hebrews 11:1; so be it! To define faith this way means only that "I choose my religion, all of it." Yee haw!

To insist on religious literalism, to force all the sciences to serve as a sort of proof-texting machine, is to become a slave just when you think you have achieved freedom. "This…conception of faith fails as spirituality and it is my belief that it is partly responsible for the decline of religion….It gradually reduces religion to infantile dependence upon paternal authority telling us what to do." And it most certainly does not serve the internal pressure to do what is right.

Yet freedom, the necessary freedom, terrifies. At one time it terrified me. The fact that the truth will make you free is no damn use to most of us. Few of us appreciate spiritual freedom until the spiritual bonds chafe right through the skin.

Having kicked aside the chains of orthodoxy, we find it won't do to drift. We must "get the Way right." We must set and strive to meet ethical and spiritual standards. We must hunt out truth and settle for nothing less - and our appetite sharpens as our skill increases. It requires us to taste everything and spit out much. The task is "declaring what ought to be, and not simply interpreting what is already, the case." A Unitarian Universalist author has called this "the prophethood of all believers."

It means that not only religious doctrine but also religious practice must be examined with a searching eye. For instance, if God is strictly Inner, what happens to the practice of intercessory prayer? Modern religious thought leans toward the idea that we have to answer our own payers, which makes praying for ourselves easy; our own souls and lives are well within our reach. And we would remake our friends' world for their benefit if we could - in fact, we do so when we can; the value of praying for them is that they know we are doing it. To be prayed for and know it is more than "good for morale;" it eases and strengthens the heart like virtually nothing else can. Even to tell an atheist "I am praying for you," is to tell him "I am beseeching and compelling the universe to make more room for you." If he is sufficiently far gone in skepticism, he will realize this and take strength from it.

"I conclude that almost all actual payers [the ones people actually expect to have answered] are directly about people's relation to moral and spiritual values…Talking to God most beautifully expresses our wish to be rid of our own wickedness, our desire for spiritual rebirth, our aspiration after various infinitely-precious moral and religious values, and - above all else - our sense that life is short and we are dust, that the religious standard is ideal and its demand upon us measurelessly great and awesome…In a world that is so often dispiritingly meretricious it is one thing that is of eternal and inexhaustible worth and beauty."

It is not, of course, accurate to talk to the "religious requirement" as if it were an intelligent personality, but it is a powerful human habit, as natural as speech itself. It shows up in our imaginary childhood friends and the beloved dead who hover about us. "We are particularly apt to personify the ideal we live by." We can get a better view of the Inner God by holding it at arm's length.

And by personifying the eternal and asking it to care for your friends, you are calling the Cosmos to witness that your friends ought to be well and happy, dammit.

What, then, of the old forms of public worship? Shall we continue to reinterpret them, even if only to ourselves, or shall we discard them? Cupitt asks: why not go on with them? However literalist the church we belong to, we do not really take all the language of worship literally. Jesus is not literally the Lamb of God. No Christian or Jew would bring back the old sacrificial system even if he could.

"Why do Unitarian Universalists sing so badly at church? Because they are reading ahead in the hymnbook to see if they agree with the words." I meant this as an example of the process of reinterpretation, but I see that it is actually only a literalistic first step. Here is a better example from the same tradition - from my own life:

Take the second verse of Luther's indestructible hymn, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God":

God's Word above all earthly powers,
No thanks to them, abideth;
The spirit and the gifts are ours,
Through God who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go,
This mortal life also;
The body they may kill,
God's truth abideth still;
Whose kingdom is forever.

As long as I assumed "God's word" meant "the Bible," I could not sing it. But when I realized that the word of God is written in blood on the walls of your veins, the truth of this verse became hilariously obvious.

"Most of the religious beliefs [of Christianity] are not ours any more, but the specifically-religious values and many of the moral values are still ours, so that in worship we rightly affirm the historical continuity of the church and renew our allegiance to our spiritual values at their source." Well, maybe. As needed. But a little while ago, Cupitt was talking about throwing out beliefs rooted in myths that no longer stand up. We can taste anything religiously, I suppose, as long as we retain the liberty to spit out anything that has gone bad.

"We may still be justified in using the old words if we can plausibly argue that our present faith and spiritual values are the legitimate heirs of the old." Yes; to the degree that you care about it at all.

Continuing to beat the dead horse of religious literalism, Cupitt turns to the subject of "divine restitution after voluntary surrender," as in the story of Abraham's attempted sacrifice of Isaac. Religion is full of imagery about getting back what you have sacrificed many times over. But if that is literally true, what is the point of renunciation? The only reason to renounce anything is to express and practice disinterested love, what the Buddhists call detachment and I prefer to call "detachability." "It is absurd to promise to one who has learnt disinterestedness the reward of a large gift of all the goods from which he has lately struggled free. It would be like presenting a newly-reformed alcoholic with several cases of malt whiskey."

11. The Justification of Faith

Is there any difference after all between faith and superstition? "A religious belief cannot merely be a superstition that happens to be true," because many such things have been believed to be true without sharpening our consciences or making us any better. Cupitt classes all religious doctrines that do not directly sharpen and strengthen us as superstitions. Of what relevance is trinitarianism, or unitarianism, to a Good Samaritan?

A faint spasm of queasiness arises on looking at such a statement. Are we opening the way for, say, human sacrifice - ritual murder? How far does, say, Christian Identity satisfy the religious requirement? Revolting! - and untrue, besides. There is a core of principle that must be conformed to, in order to deserve the name of religion -- or morality, which is a similar quest - but otherwise, the thoughts are free.

There is a kind of nominal morality required of everyone, even when you can get away without conforming to the minimal expectations of the nominal religion; most people can manage, and are content with, being merely well-behaved. Why bother with any more? Well, how else are you going to get at the eternal questions? Once they grip you they won't let go. But you are in for a long, arduous labor once they do grip. Cupitt notes that "it was perhaps the quest for the Grail that destroyed the Round Table. Only Galahad, Percival and Bors, the three best, achieved it, and the rest were severely damaged by their failure. After the Grail quest somehow things began to fall apart." Maybe the Grail is not worth the quest.

Cupitt wants to know if moral seriousness and religiousness are the same or not. It looks like a chicken-and-egg question, but: without an inward, inborn sense of holiness, can you be moral at all? Unless you believe, beyond reason, in the Golden Rule, how can you see any point in any law? Kant is supposed to have said: to act well we must act as if we are already holy. But the only way to get used to being holy is to act well, consistently.

What does that mean, anyway, "to act well," to be moral? It requires consistency, "sincerity, authenticity, or integrity - whatever is the opposite of pretence and hypocrisy. You must identify yourself with your act and put hour heart into it,, for any doubts…are morally fatal."

When it comes to science or law it is much easier to be ruthlessly honest and rational, but morality overarches your entire life. The keen gaze of the Inner God might uproot a friendship, demolish a sinecure, throw us together with pariahs, without any notice or concessions at all.

So one hopes. We still have to deal with the "sheep" consciousness, or maybe it's the "soldier" consciousness - the order-following, blindly loyal heteronomous consciousness. You see it, says Cupitt, in the lower socioeconomic classes, who 'have to take orders a good deal…morality [is, in these classes] more a matter of command and obedience, childrearing more authoritarian and social attitudes stricter and more extra-punitive.' Modern education and media work against this tendency: witness, Tiananmen Square. But "we will not have complete moral integrity until there is a [fully egalitarian] society…[but surely our efforts to achieve such a society, if they are to be effective, require and presuppose the moral integrity that we will not have until there is such a society?" I really do not see why this is worth agonizing over. How did John Holt learn to lay the cello? By playing the cello. He played it very badly at first, but gradually improved. Learning music theory helped him some, and learning to read music helped a little more; but the crucial thing was to lay hands on that cello. In the same way (Cupitt paraphrases Kant), we will not reach holiness, or rather, the height of rationality, except by acting as if we were more rational than we presently are.

But this way lies hypocrisy and intellectual slavery, such as Ayn Rand's followers fell into, unless we act as if we are already ruthlessly honest with ourselves, too. In other words, Kierkegaard notwithstanding, we must always be ready to "falsify" our own motives with a doubtful, searching eye.

If Kant equates holiness with the highest degree of rationality, he may be running against the grain of Western tradition. We contrast innocence and experience; we are not surpr4ised if someone turns out to be a "fool for Christ" since "not many wise … are called" [FIND AND CORRECT QUOTE]. We expect the good to be timid and helpless as well as gullible.

In other words, we mistake ignorance for innocence. I am convinced that they are not the same. Shrewdness may indeed be associated with trickery, but I know from experience that honesty requires a high degree of self-knowledge and shrewdness, not to mention vigilance. Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom - of conscience.

Traditional religion attempts to solve the "holiness problem" by projecting the ideal society far backwards and forwards in time: Eden behind us and the Kingdom of God ahead of us. All religious traditions have 3quivalents to these myths. None are historically true, but at least they provide us societal role-models to grip as we struggle to reshape the present. It is not a bad way to deal with the problem. It is certainly something anyone can do - far easier than reading Küng or Kierkegaard.

Myth holds up shining examples of what ought to be; and the world's myths hold some surprises. Masai women say that all the animals now thought of as wild were once herded by women, but through their own neglect the animals escaped, while the more vigilant men held onto the domesticated livestock. I know this sounds like a "blaming-the-victim" story, and it probably is, but look at the nature of the "golden age" in this story: one in which women and men were equally wealthy (for among herding peoples, livestock is wealth). "All over the world we find stories of the fall of woman, because the subjection of woman is very widely thought to be strange and anomalous." I wonder how widespread these stories are in patriarchal cultures, and if men ever tell them. But the whole point of myth, especially where it paints a glowing Land Without Evil for the future, is expressed at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan: "Go thou and do likewise." But you must be brave, for as Saki said, "whenever a man takes his religion too seriously, he is in immediate danger of founding a new sect."

12. The Triumph of the Religious Consciousness

"Religion is about holiness, exaltation, power, lordship, spirituality, autonomy, freedom, knowledge, blessedness, universality…The work of religion is to celebrate the triumph of universal, free and sovereign consciousness, emancipated from and lord over nature," that is, human nature, especially its tawdriness and egocentricity.

When it is assumed that all these virtues are God's and not man's, it becomes a - "snatching at equality with God" - blasphemy - to think of acquiring them; at best, we are to imitate God in everything but power and authority; freedom is defined as slavery to God. The worshipper of such a god is reduced to a mere fan. A God-Out-There Christian eventually stands in relation to his God as millions stand in relation to John Lennon. "The fan, a true believer, takes his own insignificance so completely for granted that he is scarcely even aware of how deeply he despises himself…When a believer's relationship to God is like that, pessimism is close at hand." His disinterestedness is not liberating, but only "an expression of his conviction of his own utter worthlessness. He is fit only to live vicariously as someone else's handmaid."

The Bible has all too many verses useful for browbeating us into this state. "The human heart is treacherous and is desperate; who can know it?" -- and far too many others. To quote Kafka: "You believe in the necessity of religion? Then you really believe in the necessity of the police." So religion becomes a means to a comparatively tawdry end: freedom and honesty are sacrificed to order. Order is valuable, necessary even, but in this case the price is too high. The only blessings such a religion can offer are "resignation, tranquillity and acceptance of one's allotted place in the scheme of things" - Marx's immortal phrase, "the opiate of the people."

The second chapter of Philippians says in many translations that Jesus "did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men." And yet many other Bible translations say here that "he thought it not robbery to be equal with God." This rendition is commonly used to defend the trinity, but now I come to think of it, perhaps it is really about Jesus as an exemplar of religious freedom. If you look at it this way, Jesus gained equality with God by giving up everything he had. He let his exalted place in God's hierarchy slip through his fingers in utter disinterestedness - detachability - in order to gain a richer, freer equality with God. (Not that I am taking this literally; it works better if you don't.)

13. Conclusion

Cupitt reiterates that what we know as "God" is actually our hazy perception of the ultimate goal of our evoluti8om toward - well, call it holiness.

Yet the next steps, of course, are "seen through a glass, darkly." This is fearsome - terra incognita always is. But I have decided, Roosevelt notwithstanding, that Fear is nothing to be afraid of. Fear does not sound an alarm, but points the way. It must happen this way, because "a lower stage of consciousness, though it may aspire after a higher, never fully understands it"; and so it sometimes appears that the way to freedom lies through a cage. "The process is one of continual mortification, self-surrender and purging while at the same time, and paradoxically, it is also a movement toward greater autonomy and self-possession."

These things are awfully easy to get wrong. Mortification, taken too literally, becomes cultic self-abuse. Self-surrender becomes and abdication of the conscience.

In Jane Eyre, St. John Eyre Rivers dismisses "human uprightness" as a "wild stringy root" - but it is our birthright, and if we violate or starve it in our spiritual quest we lose everything.

We can sidestep many such pitfalls buy the way we define God. "We do not nowadays have sufficient reason to suppose that there are any such beings or influences" as external gods; in any case, that does not matter, because "no external object can bring about my inner spiritual liberation. I must will it for myself and attain it within myself. So the religious imperative that commands me to become spirit" - and that, friends, is all the god that matters - "must be regarded as an autonomously authoritative principle that I impose upon myself."

Our inability to read the future makes the true god unknowable and the true religion a slippery thing. You can't really learn godliness like you learn accounting. Religious language is meant, not to describe real and invisible realms, but to stab you awake (Hebrews 4:12). True scripture ought to raise an answering shout in the heart - so no two people's inner bibles will read quite the same.

Having come to see that there is no sound reason to believe in God-Out-There, we find It sneaking into our hearts nonetheless - mind, heart, name, face and everything else - because Man is a meaning animal, living by story because he lives in linear time. Knowing, now, how much of our religious expression consists of story rather than objective, material truth, "we have to go forward to a new kind of faith which is fully conscious. It uses myth, but also transcends it into autonomy."