I suspect that we think about the ultimate because we can’t manage to see ourselves as ultimate. Or infinite. Or eternal. Or all-knowing. And that hurts! It hurts to be a too, too solid, limited, fragile creature.

So, we think about the Spirit of Life. God. The gods. The Ultimate Concern.

Search the internet for the names of God. Besides the ninety-nine that Sufis chant, just start with “A” and work through time and geography. Or read Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods. I’ll bet you don’t know them all! Furthermore, you probably only believe in one or two or five at the most.

Always, human beings have pinned names on the absolute.

We call those who do not believe in the gods not a word of their own choosing but “a-theist.” Everyone is defined by the naming of the ultimate. We human beings take this quite seriously.

Alan Watts called this ultimate thing, “the which of which there is no whicher.” That about sums up the idea, doesn’t it?

Inevitably, with the naming comes the assignment of attributes: “Omnipotent.” “Omnipresent.” “Omniscient.” I learned to chant these long, hard words as a child in Sunday school. It’s what God was— Everything. Everywhere. All the time . . .

Walking to school? Yes! In the bathroom? Yes! Watching dad working at the factory? Yes!

The thought was reassuring. And frightening. And threatening. This was the Big Guy in the Sky, who had walloped the world in a flood and made Noah a sailor. The Big Guy who waxed the Egyptian kids and drowned—again with the drowning!—hard-hearted Pharaoh’s army.

This was the Big Guy who would wipe out the world with fire next time. And He really, really didn’t like human nature.

“But wait!” I said. “What about . . .” And so it went, ‘round and ‘round in my little primate brain. I was wrestling with the which of which . . .

Naming the ultimate. Assigning attributes to the absolute.

“The which of which there is no whicher.”

Always this ultimate was about what we—poor farmers in the Midwestern United States—weren’t. And this exhausts at least one avenue of inquiry: we limited creatures want some “whicher” out there that keeps an eye on the (clearly dangerous) machinery of the universe.

But then my little primate brain realized just how blatant a case of wish-fulfillment this was. And so off I went, searching for another “which.” About that . . . next week.

I subscribe to the notion that separating out religion from other meaning-making systems is valid only for the sake of convenience. I agree with anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith who says,

Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. (Imagining Religion)

Allowing for humor and rhetorical overstatement, Professor Smith’s point is that we human beings exist in a matrix of symbolic systems that we separate out only for the sake of contemplating (and one hopes clarifying) them. In our minds and in our lives, the meanings are all mushed up, a puree or whip of meaning and purpose. Sometimes we question the powers that be in our lives; often we don’t.

Since Emanuel Kant, it has been clear to many people that human beings are meaning-making creatures and that the meanings we create exist in systems of narrative and symbol. In these systems, it’s us or them: we control them, or they control us. Whenever we aren’t paying attention, it is the latter.

Religions are one way human beings create meaning. A religion is a subset of narrative and symbol within a system. A system separated only for convenience and clarity.

Given this mushy matrix, removing what is conventionally called “religious” (or “spiritual”) from a personal or collective meaning-making system does not leave a hole or gap, but is rather an opening that other symbolic systems will fill.

If the god concept does not guarantee or underwrite meaning and purpose for a human being, something else will . . . perhaps even the insistence that life has meaning and purpose without the god concept! (Hence the “angry atheist” syndrome.)

Think for a moment how many people you know who actually take meaning and purpose from the god concept. My suspicion is that the concept actually functions as shorthand for something else in most human lives.

Theologian Gordon D. Kaufman gives his view, writing:

The central question for theology is not . . . primarily a speculative question, a problem of knowledge at all. Most fundamentally it is a practical question: How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what cause give ourselves? Put in religious terms: How can we truly serve God? What is proper worship? (Face of Mystery: Constructive Theology)

Put succinctly: “What’s your cause?”

Your cause might be survival. Approval. Family. World peace.

Often the god concept becomes the straw man who underwrites preexisting wishes and prejudices. The symbolic systems we live in are difficult to see and even more difficult to separate into understandable strands. Most difficult of all is putting all the strands back into a conceivable whole. Yet, finally, there is no religion, no politics, no self. Only the forest of symbols we wander in.

As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”

The turtles go
out of their water
this time of year,

slow on roadways,
slow to mating
somewhere,

or slow to dates
with car tires.

No, there’s no
enlightenment–
there’s no one

there. (That’s
Buddhism 101
each day teaches.)

No, there’s no
virtue–
there’s no one

there. Only
being.

Lost in this
movement I rub
the cat’s head,

a black cat, a warm,
cloudy morning.

There’ no cat.
There’s no I. There’s

only purring,
this congeries
of movement

to movement–
to car tires,
to this ache

of loss
and fulfillment
in each instant.

There is
this flow
only to be

and savored.

Incarceration nation,
where did you put
your young men?

You put them in a plea bargain;
you put them in a felony record;
you put them out of your mind.

Incarceration nation,
your heart is in a prison cell;
your future is in a prison cell;
your conscience is in a prison cell.

Incarceration nation,
where did you put your future?
Where did you put your hope?
Where did you put your justice?
Where did you put your freedom?

Incarceration nation,
where did you put
your young men?

You put them into poverty;
you put them into despair;
you put them into chains.

Incarceration nation,
you took your children;
you took your hope;

you put them in a prison cell;
you put them in a felony record;
you put them out of your mind.

Incarceration nation,
you put yourself
into a prison cell
into fear; into hate;
into racism;
into money’s death spasm;

Incarceration nation,
where did you put
your young men?

They are the universe
aware of itself;
they are consciousness
trapped in money’s death spasm.

Incarceration nation,
why have you
imprisoned yourself?

If a triangle could speak, it would say . . . that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped. ~ Baruch Spinoza

I remember going home for the first break of my first semester in college. We, my mother, father, and I, were driving along the Mississippi River in Missouri, along the New Madrid Fault Line, traveling from our family farm in the southern part of Illinois to visit some relatives near Memphis, Tennessee for Thanksgiving. I, eighteen years old, was driving.

As I drove, I was paraphrasing the above observation of Spinoza, which I had just been studying in an intro to philosophy class at the community college I was attending. The community college was only twelve miles from our family farm, but a world away for me. My philosophy class was taught by the first openly gay man (“open” is a flexible term when applied to the attitudes of the 1970s), and my mind was racing with new ideas.

Spinoza’s argument seemed so elegant to me; so irrefutably true: We are not created in God’s image, but rather we create our gods in ours. If triangles could think, they would consider themselves created in the very image of god. If ants could think–and who says they can’t?–they would create an ant god (and who says they don’t?).

Neither my mother nor my father had any idea what I was talking about. How would a triangle think? Why would an ant think about god? Those things didn’t make “good horse sense.”

Both of my parents grew up in rural southern Illinois. They attended one-room schools–not the bucolic one-room school houses of US nostalgia, but places where the overworked teachers had, at best, a full year of college education and had to contend with whatever learning disabilities and behavioral disorders appeared among the in-bred hill country population. The teachers were generally paid in chickens, eggs, and firewood.

Consequently, both of my parents were nearly illiterate. Abstract thought did not come easily to them. As a matter of fact, the only negative statement I ever heard from either of them concerning orthodox Protestant Christianity was spoken decades later by my father, when the subject of the Resurrection came up. Out of the hearing of my mother, he said, “It just don’t seem possible, does it?”

I answered gently, “No. It doesn’t seem possible.” That’s as close to mystery as my father ever got.
On that day driving along the New Madrid Fault, I realized that Spinoza could not speak to my parents. And I discovered something else: I had the power to destroy the faith of poor, oppressed people such as my parents who had nothing else to fall back on. I stopped the argument when I was eighteen, and I have never argued religion again.

The chance to think abstractly, to pursue truth wherever it leads, is a powerful gift. A privilege. As with all power and privilege, it must be used responsibly and humbly.