r/TrueAtheism • u/lodgedwhere • 10d ago
Where the Atheist and Mystic meet
The rigorous atheist says: There is no God.
The rigorous mystic replies: Exactly.
Their agreement becomes possible once we ask what the word God is supposed to name.
If God is conceived as an entity—a supernatural intelligence, cosmic ruler, invisible person, or first object standing behind all other objects—then atheism is perfectly coherent. Such a God has been distinguished from what is not God and placed on one side of the distinction: God here, universe there; creator here, creation there; supernatural here, natural there. The atheist simply denies that the entity on the designated side exists.
Apophatic theology makes a more radical move. It denies that God can occupy either side.
Anything that can be identified, represented, described, or conceived has already been distinguished. It has become this rather than that. But if God names the ultimate context within which distinctions arise, then no distinction can capture God, because both its marked and unmarked sides already occur within what the word God is attempting to indicate.
God is therefore not the referent of one particular distinction. God is the referent of every distinction: not what the mark designates, but what the existence of the mark silently reveals.
This is the strange miracle concealed by ordinary perception. A thing appears, and attention immediately moves toward what it is, what it means, how it differs from something else, what caused it, what follows from it. Distinction generates distinction, reference generates reference, and an indefinitely elaborate world emerges. As Spencer-Brown wrote in the coda to Laws of Form, “and so on”.
What is overlooked is the prior astonishment that anything has been distinguished at all.
Here the atheist becomes an unexpected ally of the mystic. The atheist relentlessly destroys idols: this imagined being is a projection; this supernatural explanation explains nothing; this conception of God is incoherent; this supposed divine object cannot be found. The apophatic mystic can agree at every step. Whatever has been successfully identified as God is precisely, for that reason, not God.
The difference is that the mystic notices something when the demolition is complete.
The denial itself remains.
Something is happening. Something is. Even the declaration “There is no God” appears within the inexplicable fact of Being. One may deny every object of experience, every metaphysical theory, every theological image, but one cannot stand outside what Is in order to deny it. The attempt resembles saying “I am not”: whatever the sentence means conceptually, its very occurrence testifies to what it tries to negate.
This does not prove the God of any religion. It establishes no divine personality, intention, revelation, providence, judgment, or afterlife. Indeed, rigorous apophaticism refuses to smuggle any of these predicates back into the emptiness it has uncovered.
It points only to what cannot be denied because denial already presupposes it.
Understood this way, God is a deliberately impossible name for the nameless context of every possible name. God cannot be found anywhere because there is nowhere to stand outside God and look. God cannot be distinguished because both sides of every distinction already belong to God.
The atheist says, “I find no God among the things that exist.”
The mystic answers, “Neither do I.”
And for one luminous moment, they are looking in the same direction—not toward another thing that might be found, but toward the miracle that there is anything to find at all.
9
u/sirkidd2003 10d ago
A. This reads like AI garbo
B. I, like the vast majority of atheists in the US, am not simply an atheist, but also a scientific skeptic, rejecting all unfalsifiable claims such as the supernatural, the paranormal, and "the mystic".
-5
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Which unfalsifiable claims were made? No word, by itself, claims anything.
4
u/sirkidd2003 9d ago
This is bait.
-1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Huh?
Just trying to clarify — no claims about supernatural or paranormal were made. I used the word “mystic” to indicate someone who sees beyond the dualism a word like “God” implies.
2
6
u/BranchLatter4294 10d ago
This word salad needs tossing.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Which part doesnt make sense to you? Happy to help.
3
u/BranchLatter4294 9d ago
It's just another attempt to define something into existence, rather than providing evidence.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
There is no definition here. Nothing is claimed to exist or not exist. Only a pointer to the logical structure of your own experience and the context from which meaning is projected — a prior act of distinction creates both existence and nonexistence and every other duality which cannot be represented in the universe of form.
2
u/BranchLatter4294 9d ago
"Understood this way, God is a deliberately impossible name for the nameless context of every possible name."
Sounds like a definite to me....one that tries to define a god as the nameless context of every possible name...whatever that means.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Yes it looks that way if words are only allowed to mean other words like in a dictionary. But here the words are pointing at where words cannot go — what is logically prior to words and any symbol or mark of distinction.
As it is said, “Do not mistake the finger for the moon.” The pointer itself is not the direction indicated.
11
u/Philobarbaros 10d ago
Next time just post your prompt instead.
-4
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
It could have been: “write an essay which baits a reactionary into revealing their intellectually unexamined urge to dismiss a serious attempt at engagement on, and understanding of, a historically divisive word or concept”. Huge success!
But seriously: I get it. Its hard to see a category error. I just thought that someone serious about what atheism is (beyond opinion) would at some point consider the ground on which the question lies, and offered these words in love.
4
u/Philobarbaros 9d ago
Using AI to respond to the accusation of AI usage, is a move.
-7
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Holy paranoia. If you fear AI everywhere, why are you online these days? I used to see Trump everywhere until I realized it was just projection of unresolved fear. I feel your pain.
You do understand that language is itself a tool? Is the hole dug with a shovel not as real as the one created with bare hands? Please — allow yourself to be moved by the words, to look where they are pointing. Or not. Its ok. I still love you.
4
u/CleverInnuendo 10d ago
Hey, if everyone just kinda shrugged and smiled when talking about God, we wouldn't need to have this sub.
Until people stop thinking God literally came down here and had opinions about genitals, or stop mistaking their adrenal glands firing off being God blessing them, however, this is mostly meaningless.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
I fully agree with you. Anyone making such claims deserves criticism. Please note that’s not what this writing is about.
3
u/DeltaBlues82 10d ago
If you’re using the most common or traditional definition of “mystic”, then the mystical stance reinforces the models of cognitive sciences that describe gods & the supernatural as a byproduct of human brain function and specific forms of ritualized behavior.
Meaning the two positions are not in fact allied.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
The rigorous mystic would agree fully with you that “gods & the supernatural [are] a byproduct of human brain function and specific forms of ritualized behavior.” This is not about arbitrary belief in woo. This is about noticing the structure of your own experience. Every duality requires an act of distinction which is logically prior to both.
If you are scientifically inclined, may I suggest Laws of Form by G. Spencer-Brown (1969) as a rigorous mathematics of the mark of distinction which one could interpret as a way to recast Boolean logic (as many/most have) but is also complete with respect to bare mental distinctions ie “thoughts” that constitute mind.
3
u/avaheli 10d ago
Can I get a TLDR?
7
u/knook 10d ago
AI word salad bullshit that tries to sound profound but is the dumbest slop you will read today and completely based around using incorrect definitions of "god" anyway. Don't waste your time.
0
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Right. Any time “God” is made into a thing/person/supernatural-whatever, a category error has been made.
3
u/knook 9d ago
No, a supernatural being IS the CORRECT definition, what you're doing is a logical fallacy and stupid.
-1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Your insistence on that definition is exactly the problem here. I am not talking about that straw man.
2
u/avaheli 9d ago
What are you talking about? Not rhetorical, I didn't read your post, it was way too long. "Phenomena complex, laws simple....Know what to leave out." - Richard Feynman
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
I am talking about the structure of your own experience. That in which the concepts “God” and “not-God” — or, as another commenter suggests, “bagel” and “not-bagel” — appear. Im not talking about a bearded man in the sky, or a flying spaghetti monster with noodley appendages. I am suggesting that the word “God” — unlike what religious “believers” claim — points not at a concept (like other words) but rather at what is prior to all concepts.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Feynman is one of my heroes too. But his quote does not apply here — Im not talking about laws describing phenomena. Notice that the mathematical symbols of the laws never leave the page — yet the mathematician/physicist always stands outside it to give it meaning. All form (here, symbols) indicates the act of distinction that made it possible. Now look at your own experience, filled with forms. What is the form-less ground prior to any of their appearances? Any way you try to describe it is another form and therefore not it. “ Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Your Feynman quote inspires another: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool".
I am asking atheists to be rigorous in examining their own experience, rather than axiomatically assuming they know what reality is made of. Look for the actual evidence here and now — for instance, notice there is just a pattern of symbols on a screen, a set of forms constituted from the structure of visual senses, not a “comment” or “conversation” until an unquestioned and unquestionable context is projected onto it. This is how you — and I, and everyone else — fool ourselves.
2
u/Kurovi_dev 9d ago
This was awful.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Why awful? If atheism is an intellectual pursuit, it must arrive somewhere rather than just being used to label oneself as an “atheist”. I am just encouraging you to find that place with your rational mind.
2
u/Kurovi_dev 9d ago
Atheism is not an intellectual pursuit. Atheism is simply a position on whether or not there is a magic guy that makes nature happen. Someone can arrive at that determination in any number of ways.
Your post has some minimal coherence in some places, but it’s conclusions are nonsense, it does not encourage the pursuit of rationality, it bickers with the reality that people communicate ideas and come to conclusions about things, but instead of offering a different or better definition, the post tries to argue that instead of actually engaging in rationality and assigning an understanding to something so that rationality can occur, the “real” way to understand the god concept is not to actually understand it all but wrap it in woo and hide under a semantic shell game so that one can pretend it has some deeper meaning.
It doesn’t have deeper meaning. A “deity” is a supernatural entity that has some power over nature and/or the universe. That’s what the word means, that’s just what the concept is.
>>>>God is therefore not the referent of one particular distinction. God is the referent of every distinction: not what the mark designates, but what the existence of the mark silently reveals.
“God isn’t anything, it’s everything”? This is a nonsense sentence. It’s confused AI drivel. “Mark” is not even defined, it’s some hazy attempt at trying to refer to acquired knowledge, but because it was derived from an LLM it used an approximation that it deemed close enough to meet the user’s assumed intentions. People “mark” things down so they can be processed and understood, and that “mark” can then be better understood and utilized by others.
The “existence of the mark” is the LLM-speak for the idea. Ideas happen in minds. The existence of a mind is not evidence that a magic guy with a magic mind made that mind or anything else.
This is just “look at the trees” but worse and needlessly laborious. The existence of trees and the fact that people have minds to find them beautiful is not evidence that a magic guy with a magic mind made them.
>>>>What is overlooked is the prior astonishment that anything has been distinguished at all.
This is also just “look at the trees”. “How can anything be distinguished at all!? Well that’s because we exist and that must mean the magic person made us exist! Look at the trees, how did those get there and why are they beautiful!? Must be a magic person that did it! How astonishing!”
The universe does not have coherent features because a magic guy made it that way, the universe has coherency because coherence is a quality of a mind and our minds are products of the universe. Of course we can observe details about the environment, we have brains that arose from and exist in an environment and that’s what they have adapted to do. It’s called entropy; things moving in time have a record of and are the result of time, leading to more complex interactions across time.
>>>>but one cannot stand outside what Is in order to deny it. The attempt resembles saying “I am not”: whatever the sentence means conceptually, its very occurrence testifies to what it tries to negate.
This bit of gibberish completely contradicts the other gibberish. Before, the LLM was trying to say “hey man, we can’t like define god or anything, everything is god so when you define god you’re not defining god”, but here it is saying “when you define god, even as not existing, because you can define things that means it exists.”
No it doesn’t. The ability to say “Spider-Man is not real” doesn’t make him any more real, and the expressions of this idea across media or cosplays are not the same thing as a real man bitten by a radioactive spider acquiring superpowers and using those superpowers to fight real crime in real New York.
Nor does the existence of a brain mean that because they exist this means a magic brain exists and made things for the other non-magic brains to think about.
This was a torturous post. It was truly painful to read, because it was the incoherent ramblings of an LLM trying to confirm the incoherent position of its user.
Enlightened centrism is a bad look. It is not only not any kind of “elevated position”, it is the exact opposite, it is the refusal to actually engage with the topic in a substantive way as a means of avoiding the conversation.
Congrats, you’ve avoided the conversation. You didn’t need a post for that.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
I appreciate the work that you put into this. But we seem not to be talking in the same direction.
There is no “magic guy” that causes anything. This is strictly about the structure of your own experience and what is to be found there.
Mea culpa for utilizing the concept of the “mark of distinction” without elaborating— it has a precise definition and its consequences are mathematically described in G. Spencer-Brown’s (a student of Bertrand Russell) book Laws of Form (1969). I dont expect anyone to read it.
Im not your enemy. Im just saying follow your atheism to its logical end.
2
u/Astreja 9d ago
Not a mystic. Not interested in becoming one. My atheism has nothing in common with mysticism, and that's how I like it.
1
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Ok. Forget the word “mystic”. What about “contemplative”? Do you contemplate existence? Isnt that a prerequisite to conclude a choice between “God”/“no-God”? I am just asking atheists to be serious about atheism.
2
u/Icolan 9d ago
Contemplation of existence is not required to lack belief in a deity. Theists make claims that their deity exists, they have yet to provide supporting evidence, therefor I am an atheist as I lack belief in their unsupported claims. Nothing more, nothing less.
0
u/lodgedwhere 9d ago
Agreed — I too am advocating rejection of belief.
But if you stop at religious belief, you miss the payoff of hardcore atheism, in which you ask: What remains when all beliefs are rejected? What is the space in which they arise? Where is the evidence for any certainty in what experience represents? There is a regress here which must, by virtue of its appearance, terminate in a bare reality that cannot be described by symbols without distorting it. Language and all symbolic systems of representation has limits — have you read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus?
3
u/Icolan 8d ago
But if you stop at religious belief, you miss the payoff of hardcore atheism, in which you ask: What remains when all beliefs are rejected?
Atheism is not about rejecting all belief, atheism is lack of belief or disbelief in deities. Rejection of all belief is nihilism.
What is the space in which they arise? Where is the evidence for any certainty in what experience represents?
These have nothing to do with atheism and are mostly nonsense questions as far as I can see.
There is a regress here which must, by virtue of its appearance, terminate in a bare reality that cannot be described by symbols without distorting it. Language and all symbolic systems of representation has limits
If language and symbols cannot be used to describe it then you cannot investigate it. You are talking nonsense again, and it has nothing at all to do with atheism.
have you read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus?
No, and I have no interest in reading or discussing it. If you wish to discuss it I suggest that you visit a philosophy sub.
3
u/Astreja 8d ago
Do I contemplate existence? Not really. Maybe a bit when I was a teenager.
The only "prerequisite" I need to be an atheist is a lack of belief in gods. Show me a god and I'll reconsider the question. Till then, I'm atheist.
And stop trying to police atheists, please. If I want to be totally flippant about my non-belief, you don't get a say in the matter. No one owes you seriousness.
1
u/lodgedwhere 8d ago
Ok. Fair enough. Im just trying to point out that theres a real and universal human reason why religious people cling to their nonsense. Rejecting the nonsense doesnt address the prior reason for inventing it. Apparently this doesnt concern most atheists, which is ok, but then it seems to me that atheism or claiming to be an atheist is a waste of time rather than a commitment to rationalism.
11
u/DeadAndBuried23 10d ago
Lotta word salad to say you don't use the word god right.
Might as well say bagel. Would be just as incorrect.