There is no god but…

An article by The Ranting Dream    1 Comment

This thought-provoking and extremely well articulated piece is the intellectual property of (and reproduced here by permission of) the original author – a good friend and fellow blogger who pens under the pseudonym ‘The Fool‘…

The first part of the Shahada, the Islamic creed, reads ‘there is no god but God’. Contained within the Shahada is the creed of atheism, there is no God. Atheism is the first pillar of enlightenment, the second pillar is faith. This is grossly misunderstood by nearly everyone, especially believers and atheists.

Faith has no purpose where there isn’t truth, truth implies a possibility of the real as opposed to the illusory. The purpose of skepticism is to eradicate illusions with the same ascendance of a reality.

One of these illusions is god. However, the truth and what is real as opposed to what is illusory is also known as God. The difference in god and God is the level of humility and honesty of the person who mouths the word. Humility arises in knowing one’s imperfections and limits when it comes to understanding truth and reality, in understanding God. Honesty arises in the courage to stay with truth and reality and to speak of it.

When it comes to religious belief, there are many erroneous notions about what god is. It is that way now, and it was that way at the time the Shahada was revealed or discovered. What is different now, is that there are less erroneous notions about the physical world and indeed about our social and mental worlds. There is less need for gods, and just as much desire for God. The desire for God remains because we die. We don’t know and can’t know what happens to us after we die. If we think about that honestly, it means we can’t exactly pin down who and what it is we are as we live; are we mind, body, soul, spirit, consciousness, individuated, connected, alone in the universe and what for? Therefore, with all that science can tell us, we are still and always will be, on an existential cliff with no one to catch us.

So, this relationship between individual and God remains important. But it does not help us on the path to enlightenment if we are just concerned with ‘what happens to me’ and ‘who am I’ and ‘I need to find myself’. That only leads to comforting words we want to hear, a kind of spiritual pampering.

Truth requires negation. Truth requires discovery. It is one of those yin-yang things. The Tao Te Ching says ‘know the yang, but stick to the yin’. So above all, truth requires a belief that it is possible and responsible to exercise discernment, discretion and humility with regard to finding out what is not true (negation) and what is true (discovery). It is not expected either that one can judge an axiom or a fact if it is presented without rationale or evidence, that one can discover or negate as simply as that. This is why one is foolish to look at ‘God exists’ as an article of faith that is opposed to ‘God does not exist’. One simply can’t start with either statement.

Instead, tradition has always dealt with such questions with subtlety, or rather we would regard it as subtle because we are in such a fog. The Shahada is part of that tradition. Some people might actually believe that the Shahada gives Muslims the real God over other religions, making Islam the true religion above others. This is the kind of nonsense that belongs in the negation side of the Shahada, it is a god.

In the end it’s quite direct and obvious what is going on. The first part offers the possibility of negation in the search for truth, reality, god or gods, faith etc. It offers the possibility of being mistaken, and thus becoming humbled, emptying oneself of illusion. Then it offers the possibility of discovery, if all of these illusions are not god, then what? ….there is no god but…. Maybe the Shahada should have left it to a dot,dot,dot, a wide open space, but emptiness and the Dharmakaya was already a wind blowing from the Far East. Again, it’s yin and yang. Nothing and something. From zero to universe in a singularity. Monotheism gives us the fullness of the universe, that which is arising in emptiness as real. As God.

This may seem highly esoteric, arrogant and opinionated. But it is an important discussion.

The problem with theism is that is doesn’t practise enough negation. That gives power to religious authorities and ordinary people alike to abuse the power of our ignorance and the power of the possibility of discovery to harm, create suffering and even genocide. Theists need to practise atheism in order to navigate manipulations both coming from others and coming from within themselves. Manipulations that seduce one towards power, be it for control over what is feared, or to acquire what is desired. These seductions displace truth, the connection with reality, for illusions that are more useful than truth in the pursuit of power.

The problem with atheism is that it stops with negation. If we have discovered the means to discover everything, then there is nothing really and truly to discover, it is just a matter of waiting for other people to collect the truth. The problem with atheism is that in all its rationality it cannot bootstrap itself onto reality. It appears to have not been responsible for any of the bad things that have happened in humanity. That also turns out to be a cop-out, for in negation one copes with the question of existential responsibility in the same way the religious cope through duty to God.

Atheism is ultimately a reactionary system, retreating on the difficulties of navigating the tension between discovery and mystery when they go beyond what the atheist fairly arbitrarily decides is a line. The theist also has an unfortunate line, and that stops the theist from asking the questions needed to arrive at truth. The atheist’s line prevents them from going further in discovering who they are in relation to the universe, it is undiscovereable. The theists line prevents them from unearthing religious or other comforting delusions they have about themselves in relation to the universe. The tragedy is that in time, their chances pass, and only because people continuously seek comfort and power in gods.

Ultimately that is what the Shahada represents, the tension between discovery and mystery, the struggle to negate illusion, and open space to discover reality. It saddens me that in this day and age when we have discovered so much, many Muslims will negate discovery on the basis of something they were taught by religious authorities. That is not the idea, it is exactly what Prophet Muhammad (pbuh)was fighting against at the time. The tension between mystery and discovery helps us remove the illusions that result in oppression, it allows us to discover dignity in being human.

The best thing that can happen to a theist is for them to embrace atheism without losing faith in God. The best thing that can happen to an atheist is to surrender atheism without embracing illusions. Contradiction in words is a reflection of its opposite in reality.

When we have no last leg to stand on, we can walk together in the reality of a cool spring day. There is no god, but God.

Comments, thoughts, feedback welcome…

- The Ranting Dream