Non-Theist Christianity

Presenter: John Whyte

It is not clear that belief in God is an essential aspect of pursuing a religious life or of being alive to spiritual experience. In fact, the God idea – no doubt generated and adopted for the good reasons of reflecting our need for bewitchment, our craving to understand human experience and our sense that human liberty must be tempered by accountability –  creates a divide in human experience that can separate us from a  rich and ennobling engagement with life’s full spiritual possibilities. While God can be a harmless metaphoric interface with experience, the causal improbabilities associated with dominant conceptions of God probably serve to drive the modern mind away from spirituality and away from the undoubted good of following the gospel’s central mandate to live mercifully.