atheism for lent, day 28: kill your God

In 1943, French philosopher Simone Weil (pronounced “vay”) died at the age of 34 after a lifetime of poor health, a tuberculosis infection, and, possibly, self-starvation. She wrote extensively throughout her life, but her writings didn’t become famous until a decade or two after her death. Born into an affluent Jewish family, she was noted as strongly altruistic and tended toward mysticism later in life.

In La Pesanteur et la Grâce (Gravity and Grace), her book of reflections, Weil writes about contradictions: “God exists”; “God does not exist”; “my love [for God] is not illusory”; “nothing real can be anything like what I am able to conceive when I pronounce this word.” Ah, my mystics-leaning heart dances a jig over these words in this particular sequence! No matter how we imagine God, says Weil, we are not picturing anything like how God really is. Except that God doesn’t exist in the first place. But God does exist. But we love an illusion. But we don’t. Yay, paradox!

In so many words, Weil also makes note of the concept “the only way out is through.” The only way to get to the true God is to deny the false God we think we know. From this perspective, the atheist — confronted with the Christian explication of “God” and subsequently denying that God — is actually closer to the true God than the theist who continues to insist on the God they think they know.

🎶 “Oh, Courtney, do you know Jesus?”🎶

-“No, and neither do you, because what you’re thinking of as Jesus isn’t.”

I know we’re talking about God here and not Jesus, but I think it applies just as well.

Weil writes:

“Of two men who have no experience of God, he who denies him is perhaps nearer to him than the other…. The false God who is like the true one in everything, except that we cannot touch him, prevents us from ever coming to the true one.”

–Simone Weil,
Gravity and Grace

I think I’m in love.

This is exactly where I’ve been about God (who does not exist but also exists) for the last few years. Everything I’ve ever believed about God is wrong — because even if God exists, God is so far beyond the tangible world I’m familiar with that I can’t possibly describe God with any fraction of accuracy whatsoever. This is why Weil calls atheism a “purification”: it strips us of our conceptions of God, our false God we have imagined for ourselves. In religious language, this atheism strips us of our idolatry. Form a conception of God and worship that God, you’re worshiping an idol. It might not be crafted of human hands, but it is crafted of human mind — and therefore a sham.

Here, death of God theology maintains a strong belief in God while disavowing any God we can possibly describe. This God dies to us and must die to us again and again, continuously. As soon as we speak the words “God is/wants/has/loves/hates/works/listens/waits/acts etc,” we must kill this God in our minds and hearts — because what we have just spoken is a lie in comparison to the Reality of God. If “God” died on the cross for us 2,000 years ago, then we must continue to put God to death in ourselves daily. Hourly. (An inversion of 1. Corinthians 9?) The God we imagine cannot be allowed to live.

Weil is my jam.

XOXO