Adam S. Miller - The Relationship between Religion & Atheism

Belief is a lure, a shiny, spinning distraction.  Faith, in contrast, is the work to which religion calls us.

If the aim of religious practices is to enact, again, the nearness of what is too close to be visible, then we must always begin again from the ordinary ground upon which we stand.  If this ground is secular, that is neither your fault nor mine, but we must not claim it as an excuse for our own laziness.  "Christians take as proof of the tediousness and decadence of this age what is in fact the result of their own laziness in pursuing the translation task of their fathers" (TS 228).  There are nothing but translations all the way down.  If contemporary religion remind s us a bit too strongly of a dry well or a gaily painted sepulcher, this is not the fault of the age in which we live.  It is the result of our unwillingness to do the only kind of work that has ever been done: the work of repeating, copying, translating, concatenating, aligning, porting, processing, and negotiating the whole settlement, from the top, again.  Religion works crosswise to theism or atheism.  When, Latour asks, "will we be able to entertain a coherent form of atheism, that is to accept the the ordinary way of talking about religion today is through common sense atheism, which performs the same role as the common sense powerful Gods of a bygone past?" (TS 232).  Atheism is not an objection against but an invitation to religious work.

"Theologians should not shun but on the contrary embrace the formidable chance provided by a thoroughly secularized spirit to say that there is no powerful, omniscient, omnipresent Creator God, no providence, that God does not exist (or maybe does not exist yet, as Whitehead could argue), and to see in those common sense features of ordinary talk the expression, the power of religion which may start exactly as freshly as it once did, when it had to use the obvious common parlance of ancient people for whom God was as unproblematic as market forces are for us today. (TS 229)"

The force of religious speech depends on its ability to speak plainly about obvious things.  Religion addresses the most ordinary features of our most common objects and renders the difficult grace of the nearness visible again.  God himself has always insisted, not on orthodoxy, but on the religious centrality of the least, the common, the ordinary, the vulgar, the downtrodden, the poor.  The path beat by their feet marks the way.

Adam S. Miller, Speculative Grace, pg. 133-135

If God is not, then the existence of all that is beautiful and in any sense good, is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly swirling atoms, or of the equally unpurposeful, though more conceptually complicated, mechanisms of present-day physics.  A man may well believe that this dreadful thing is true.  For to wish there should be not God is to wish that the things we love and strive to realize and make permanent, should be only temporary and doomed to frustration and destruction.  If life and its fulfillments are good, why should one rejoice in the news that God is dead and that there is nothing in the whole world but our frail and perishable selves that is concerned with anything that matters?  Not that such a prospect would diminish the duty to make the best of what we have while we have it.  Goodness is not made less good by a lack of cosmic support for it.  Morality is sanctionless and can never derive its validity from what is external to itself and to the life whose fulfillment it is.  Atheism leads not to badness but only to an incurabe sadness and loneliness.

-W.P. Montague

Quoted in Lowell Bennion, Religion and the Pursuit of Truth pg. 112