Well, I finally finished the Comte-Sponville book.

It took me a while; it was hard to read more than a short section of a chapter without stopping to reflect on whether (and why) I agreed or disagreed with whatever I’d just read.

Comte-Sponville’s grew up in a Christian household, but has in adulthood come to describe himself as an atheist: one who doesn’t believe there is no God, but who simply hasn’t found reason to believe there is a God. His book comments on several popular “proofs” of God’s existence—ontological, cosmological, physico-theological—and points out the weaknesses in all of them. (These weaknesses are genuine, and easy to see for those who explore these “proofs” in depth. Comte-Sponville’s arguments here are ones I recognized from my introductory theology classes.) It’s impossible to “reason your way” into believing in God.

But more important than reasoning, says Comte-Sponville (echoing one of my chief complaints about John Wesley’s view), is experience:

One of my main reasons for not believing in God is that I have seen no evidence of his existence. This is the simplest argument of all, and one of the most powerful. I cannot help thinking that if God existed, he should be easier to perceive or feel. All you would need to do is open your eyes, or your soul. I keep trying to do this. And no matter how wide I open them, what I see is the world and what I love is humanity. (94)

And this is where I wanted to jump through the page, sit down with the author, and talk. “It is the theory that decides what we can observe,” said Albert Einstein, and while Comte-Sponville and I observe the same truths about the universe—not least the unpredictable but inevitable process that causes all living things to decline, suffer, and die—we do so with very different theories about what and who God is. “What I see is the world,” he says, “and what I love is humanity.”

YES! And the world is God! Humanity is God! This is what, I believe, the Jesus stories (like so much other religious mythology) are trying to tell us.

YES, the world is full of transcendent mystery: where did the unique personality of a newborn baby come from? When did it enter the bundle of cells that would host it in the world? Where will it go when the body’s metabolism stops and the flesh begins to decay? It’s hard even to conceive of a universe in which we have scientific answers to these questions. But do we need to personify that Transcendence… whittle it down to fit inside our comprehensive abilities… ascribe to it a catalog of prescriptions and proscriptions and preferences… in order to call it “God”? Or is it enough to acknowledge that there is Something greater than we can even begin to fully understand? Doesn’t that very acknowledgment work better than any doctrine to fill us with the awestruck peace—the humble gratitude—that the disciples felt on the Emmaus road?

And YES, our truest relationships are with other mortal beings. Burning-bush experiences are rare even in scripture; we more often encounter one another at the water cooler and on the street. But does the fact that the most life-changing words are spoken by human lips make them any less miraculous?

Toward the end of his book, Comte-Sponville celebrates the lives of mystics as role models for atheistic spirituality. He quotes the French Jesuit Henri-Marie Cardinal de Lubac’s distinction between prophets and mystics:

“The prophet receives and transmits the word of God to which he adheres through faith; the mystic is sensitive to an inner light that exempts him from believing. The two are incompatible.” This is because, as de Lubac said, “mysticism eats away at myth, and eventually the mystic can do without it; he tosses it away like an empty shell, while remaining indulgent toward those who still need it…. Mystics are defined by a certain type of experience, comprising self-evidence, plenitude, simplicity, eternity…. All this leaves very little room for belief.” (190-91)

We LGBTers who grow up in the church learn early, and are reminded often, that the church is as human an institution as a prison. (The difference is simply one of directionality: prisons are defined by who they let out; churches by who they allow in.) In order for me to find Truth within the church’s mythology, I’ve had to discard much of the “letter” of the stories, and attend to the “spirit” that I believe transcends the literal details of so many religious documents. And yes, this does leave little room for “belief,” in the doctrinal sense.

But what it makes room for is a fidelity to the truths of human existence: the universe is bigger than we are, but what we do still makes a difference in the universe. It’s pretty amazing, really.

Would I be able to convince André Comte-Sponville that his atheism and my faith have remarkably similar symptoms? That they bear similar fruit? I doubt it; we use different names for the Absolute, the Transcendent, and the Mysterious. But I could point to one of his own sentences, and celebrate with him its truth and power:

“All that remains is the all,” he says, “and little does it matter what you call it.” (194)

Amen.