loved this, and appreciate the spirit in with it was written although I have a tiny bone to pick. We actually PAY taxes all year round, and in fact the IRS nearly always takes too much. On 15 April we file a RETURN to get back the excess. We are loyal because there is a reward for us, and we have tangible proof of it both in the filing of the return and the check (or direct deposit, these days) that comes with it. But really the IRS-God is enforcing our “belief” in him (her? it?) in the most brutal manner, by taking away our money and then requiring us to spend hours and many pieces of paper to get it back. If God on High would do that I’m sure more people would listen!

You wrote:
“From my perspective, stories don’t necessarily distort (whether love or the I-Thou relationship), but are simply incapable of being that relationship: they are related to what they recount, yet distinct from it. Having a different ontology, stories rather open worlds wherein I may find possibilities for existing better, worlds that I may, in a certain sense, “inhabit.””

This is pretty much what I was trying to relate. There is an old Zen koan in which the student asks the master, What is Zen? The master says nothing but points at the moon. This is the answer to this puzzle, IMHO: the word is not the thing itself; the finger is not the moon, though it points to the moon. So I agree with you that the main issue is basically that stories (words, symbols) are not the thing itself — but for me, that is a crucial difference. So I would suggest that it *does* distort, at least somewhat, simply and merely by not being the Ding an Sich. To go back to my example: a theory of love, no matter how complete, no matter how empirically based, and no matter how useful in other contexts, is necessarily insufficient for *human* understanding of love. That is only had through loving and being loved. Thus, talking *about* love, in propositional/declarative sentences, even if what is said is true, is necessarily a distance remove from love itself. And this, then, becomes the function of stories – that move, evoke, inspire, induce sym-pathy – by getting the audience to *feel*, not just *think*. That is, of course, half the reason why we like them. But in the end a word is a symbol and, hence, an abstraction, which is a move away form the thing itself. Yes, I agree that stories point us to new possibilities — but, like the finger pointed to the moon, they themselves are not those possibilities. It is up to us to live them, to actualize them, to create them.

“In other words, while they may not point to (in the specific sense of “point out”) God, their very “uncontainability”—their propensity to move us, to encompass us, to draw us into their orbit—is an informer that speaks of other, further possibilities that could be actualized.”

I entirely agree. Eugene Borowitz, a reform Jewish theologian, calls these experiences “transcendence.” He, of course, understands them to point to, or perhaps manifest, God. I respect this view and have no real objection to it except to say that it is not my experience. I find nothing added, for me, by positing a underlying ontology, and find doing so opens up many new problems, for me. Another Jewish thinker, Mordecai Kaplan, also addresses this idea, in ways more congenial to me and very reminisncent of what you seem to be saying. He is a religious naturalist, which means he does not believe in a literal supreme being but still finds religious language uniquely suited to expressed his own experience of holiness. He speaks of God as “the power that makes for salvation” - which requires a lot of unpacking, but basically means those aspects of the universe and of life that serve to promote human flourishing. This would include creativity, possibility, the awareness of tikkun olam - in Jewish thought, the duty to repair the world. I.,e., it is precisely those moments of sublimity that make us aware of how far short of our ideals and values much of the world routinely falls, and thus those moments inspire us to make the world better. Thus, God can, in this sense, be said to “command” ethical action, righteousness, and the pursuit of Goodness.

“Taken from this perspective, I’m not sure if the best question is “does a given symbol system [i.e., the Bible’s] move you?” Rather, it seems to me that the question is “given that certain of my lived experiences do move me, a) how do I construe these experience, and b) how does/ might what moves me or what I desire relate to and inform the rest of my existence?” ”

Again, I agree, and I did not flesh out my thoughts fully enough. I think the experiences we have, that we want to talk about, and that we must use imperfect symbols to do so, engages in a reciprocal relationship to the symbol systems we use. Thus, for many Christians, the symbols of Christ, the Resurrection, atonement, and the like serve both to express and relate them, creatively, back to their own experience. Thus, those symbols both give voice to, and shape, ones live-life and life-experience in a way that, hopefully, makes that life deeper and more abundant.

Thus, in the stories we tell about ourselves and about God, we may understand those stories (as I think you agree) to be pointing to something beyond themselves and beyond reality as we find it, to something better and more life-giving and life-affirming. This is the only “theodicy” that can make sense to me: God, as the bearer of human ideals, “responds” to evil by commanding ethical action, and by demanding, in us, ethical maturity.

Your response is great, and in light of it I’d like to raise a few more (correspondingly lengthy) points & questions.

You write in #29 that “no theory *about* love, no matter how accurate or true, substitutes for actually loving and, in a sense, trying to make such relationship the object of thought necessarily distorts it.” And later, “how do you communicate an experience when any discussion of it, in words (and hence symbols) necessarily distorts that primary, unmediated, I-Thou experience you want to refer to?”

From my perspective, stories don’t necessarily distort (whether love or the I-Thou relationship), but are simply incapable of being that relationship: they are related to what they recount, yet distinct from it. Having a different ontology, stories rather open worlds wherein I may find possibilities for existing better, worlds that I may, in a certain sense, “inhabit.”

Viewed from the perspective of relationship-and-distinction, I think that puts your experiences of being “moved” (e.g., by the “beauty of [your] children” and the “majesty . . . in the stars”) in a different light. For if “they point to nothing beyond their own holiness,” they remain events that evoke the essential (as you say, the “holy”). So, while we created our children, their wonder far surpasses our procreative acts: I do not feel I earned them but feelgifted with them (giver aside). And central to this “essence” is that they bring in a different economy: in their presence we are no longer in the quid-pro-quo of reciprocity, but in the “more” of superabundance.

In other words, while they may not point to (in the specific sense of “point out”) God, their very “uncontainability”—their propensity to move us, to encompass us, to draw us into their orbit—is an informer that speaks of other, further possibilities that could be actualized.

Taken from this perspective, I’m not sure if the best question is “does a given symbol system [i.e., the Bible’s] move you?” Rather, it seems to me that the question is “given that certain of my lived experiences do move me, a) how do I construe these experience, and b) how does/ might what moves me or what I desire relate to and inform the rest of my existence?” Clearly, dangers lurk nearby—our experiences (and the stories we tell about them) can give way to illusion. So I am not suggesting that we make God (or the Bible, or our children, etc.) into anything that want them to be.

Yet I believe that we can mediate the desire vs. illusion dilemma by understanding “reality” as meaning both the true (versus false) and the actual (as the current state-of-affairs, versus the possible [as what may be]).

By doing so, I think that we can legitimately require that God show up (you write “God, to me, has always been silent”) and respond to evil in reality (not by “theodicy”) and authentically desire a God who could be “more” than what we have known, and who could be manifest in ways beyond our past experience. In other words, in this sense we may legitimately value the possible over the actual, the unreal over reality (as “what is”). There’s more argumentation needed to substantiate this, but this gestures at what I’m thinking.

What do you think?

Yes, this is good. Your points again helpfully push me to say better what I’m thinking.

On the one hand I agree with you—we know this God only as this God “shows up.” This is why I’ve been hammering on the hermeneutical value of experience (i.e., the essential role of our lived existence in any act of understanding).

But, on the other hand, we need to have some information about God in order to know how this God is to be expected to show up. What kind of God is this? Several things inform this. One is my expectations (and closely related to this, what type of God [or interaction with God] I’m willing to live with). The other would be sources of information about God. This includes the Bible (this is a big topic that I won’t go into here) but also my own experience of things related to God. Let me give you a few examples.

I am married and have 2 kids. The Bible talks about forgiveness, yet the Bible alone cannot make me believe in the value of forgiveness. That is because forgiveness is not a concept, but an action. And as an action it is fully known and understood in its practice. So I personally understand the value of forgiveness through my interactions with my spouse—forgiving and being forgiven. Same with love, and with other attributes of God’s character.

In other words, God is related to and distinct from my existence. And understanding how God is related and how distinct is essential to my ability to perceive God in human existence, should God “show up.”

So my earlier point: understanding God and understanding self/ world are intimately linked. For if I am not self-aware enough to know that my abusive childhood distorted the value of the word “love” (i.e., my parents said they “loved” me but this love often came in the form of abuse and deceit), then I will be unaware that my expectations of love are necessarily mis-aligned. How can I thus understand (or better, even recognize) God’s love (especially, if as it is claimed, it is true love [and not the false stuff I received])? Clearly, there is more involved in the question, but I think that there is at least this.

Your thoughts make me think of Buber’s distinction between I-Thou and I-It relationships: that there is something irreducibly experiential about that which is dearest to us. That no theory *about* love, no matter how accurate or true, substitutes for actually loving and, in a sense, trying to make such relationship the object of thought necessarily distorts it. (I would critique this view only by saying it doesn’t (and can’t) stop there; that any I-Thou experience I have is necessarily nestled with an I-It. We are not disembodied spirits, we have bodies and senses , so even our deepest relationships are not either I-Thou or I-It, they are both/and – but this is a minor criticism.)

But his point is well taken, and is echoed in other disciplines, as well, such as Buddhism, existentialism, many forms of mysticism, and even psychoanalysis, in the concept of the “experiencing ego.” These ideas direct us back to our primary, pre-cognitive, unmediated experience, and indeed, if the existentialists are right, this is the only place in human psychic life in which meaning can be found or made at all– in living life, not thinking *about* it or understanding it. There is no sub speciae eternitatis; in telling our stories, we must never forget we act in them.

Liberal theologians have taken up this idea and applied it to God, suggesting that our experience of God (if there is one) is all we might really know about him, and in any event forms our necessary starting point. (And, of course, 2000 years of Christian apologetics primarily using *reason* has left most of the world unconvinced, anyway).

I follow this line of thinking, and Bubers and the existentialists – any view of human life which leaves out human experience as we find it can never truly be human. I further agree with you that too many atheists and fundamentalists focus much too much on the alleged facts, rather than on questions of experience and meaning and the lived life.

.So in beginning to address your connection between story and religion, I start with this dilemma: how do you communicate an experience when any discussion of it, in words (and hence symbols) necessarily distorts that primary, unmediated, I-Thou experience you want to refer to? Only this: by the use of images, symbols, and metaphors – in a word, by story. Stories uniquely are out there”, in the world, for us all to hear as a community, yet we all know we each “take them in”, make them our own, and they are inexhaustible in the individual meanings they can acquire. Stories do not communicate propositional truth – Moby Dick is not a textbook about whales – they evoke, they move, they communicate experience by replicating it in another. And religions are our most elaborated symbol systems. So the question, for me, becomes, does a given symbol system move you?

For me, I found that Christianity does not. In all probability, it is just too tainted by my long experience in fundamentalism, such that concepts such as atonement (however understood) or the value of suffering have become nothing but aversive to me.

I share with you your sense that there is something good in the world, something holy, that must be experienced and that we want our stories to tell about, and to bring us closer to. Our difference is our response. You pursue the God you feel in your soul underlies all such experience. I content myself with its particular instantiations - in my family, for example – and simply celebrate the local experience itself. So, if your experience of goodness and holiness in the world and in your life feels like a relationship to you, then nurture it. I have no objection in the world to that. But to me, it just doesn’t. Why not? Probably, for two reasons:

One, it just doesnt feel like a relationship to me because God, to me, has always been silent. The beauty I see in my children, or the majesty I see in the stars at night are both breathtaking – but they point to nothing beyond their own holiness, in my experience. In being an atheist I have come to simply be true to my own experience as I found it.

Two, I cannot easily set aside issues of theodicy. I would rather God not talk to me at all, and instead correct the evils in the world, but he doesn’t do either. Now, my IRS argument works much better against a punitive God who damns (and hence, who cannot be good is he doesn’t make the rules clear), than it does against a liberal God, who can take more refuge in “mystery.” I well admit a liberal God might perhaps have his reasons for hiding his face, but to maintain that would take more faith than I am willing to work for. In fact, I would be angry at such a God who allowed so much evil in the world., and I could not love him, no matter how much *I* was loved *by* him.

So, my story is not too different from yours. I, too, want to celebrate and nourish the goodness I find in the world, and to write my story around it. I think, in the end, we just have different actors.

I had wondered if that’s where you were going. For a while, I thought it made sense. After all, if I want to look out my window and identify what is and what is not a car, I have to have some idea of what a car is, and what distinguishes it from all things that are not cars.

Then I thought some more. I get my concept of what a car is, from my experience with actual cars. I could also learn from books about cars and photos of cars, but even these secondary sources start with an actual car.

I do not sit in my house and start with rumours and legends that tell me a car is something that lets me get from one place to another, decide for myself what form of transportation would satisfy me or give me peace, then look out the window only to note that what I see sitting in my driveway would require fuel and cause air pollution and determine that there is no car, or that the car there is not a car-for-me, simply because it does not fulfil my expectations.

I am not saying you should start with nothing, not even expectations. I am saying you should start with God, as God reveals God’s self. In other words, we can only know God’s character (and existence) if God “shows up”, within or without our conditions, in ways we can not do other than “find” God.