The Experience of Clarity

Why is “Do I believe in God?”  not synonymous with “Do I know how to live?” A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

God is not in the sacrifice but in my increase.  And where there is no sensation of increase there is no God. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

How desperately we humans want to be complex ... delight in our inability to see around the last fact when the shadow of that last fact is nothing other than our own vanity.  Anthropomorphism accounts for all of our confidence in the beyond, whether in religion, in metaphysics, or in a realist’s “philosophy.”  I propose that we begin to worship this anthropomorphism for what it is.  Why not?  We will never get around it, and it accounts for the universal prayer of the species: “Something of me in this too.  Dear God!”  An unrelenting effort to expose the anthropomorphic in every leap away from our condition would create a suffering ... a passion unequaled by all religious attempts thus far: this effort not to leap would be equally impossible but would have authenticity on its side.  A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

23 More significant than the fact that there never was an external God is my inability to get beyond the “loss.”  I lament the shipwreck, when I should feel relief that it was not I who was on the ship. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism

24 It was not merely Christianity that had collapsed, but every denial of our own existence — leaving our neglected nature and the task to harness that nature toward another, higher task: our authentic relation to our own reality.  We may console our loss of religion with this new task: it serves as a last obligation to ourselves. A Human Strategy ** The Mechanics of Virtue ** Post-Atheism