I agree with this characterization of nontheist friends in wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheist_Friends

A nontheist Friend or nontheist Quaker is someone who identifies with, engages in and/or affirms Quaker practices and processes, but who does not accept a belief in a theistic understanding of God, a Supreme Being, the divine or the supernatural. Like theistic friends, nontheist friends are actively interested in realizing centered peace, love and happiness in the Society of Friends and beyond.

Friends have recently begun to examine actively the significance of nontheistic beliefs in the Society of Friends, in the tradition of seeking truth among friends. Explicit nontheism among Quakers probably dates to the 1930s, when some Quakers in California branched off to form the Humanist Society of Friends (today part of the American Humanist Association), and when Henry Cadbury professed agnosticism in a 1936 lecture to Harvard Divinity School students. In 1976, the first workshop on nontheism at Friends General Conference was held.

The main nontheist friends’ website [1] is one significant site for this conversation, as are nontheist Quaker study groups. Os Cresson began a recent consideration of this issue from behaviorist, natural history, materialist and environmentalist perspectives. See Roots and Flowers of Quaker Nontheism [2] for one history. Friendly nontheism also draws on Quaker humanist and universalist traditions. The book Godless for God’s Sake: Nontheism in Contemporary Quakerism (2006) offers recent, critical contributions by Quakers. Some friends are actively engaging the implications of human evolution, cognitive anthropology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary history, evolutionary biology and biology in terms of Quaker nontheism.

Nontheist friends are a small group of individuals, many of whom loosely relate to the unprogrammed tradition in Quakerism. Friendly nontheists are attempting sympathetically to generate conversation with others who are more comfortable with the traditional and often reiterated language of Quakerism. Questioning theism, they wish to examine whether the experience of the reality of direct and ongoing inspiration from God (the inner light) - “So wait upon God in that which is pure. …” (George Fox in Royce 1913:54) - which some Quaker traditions see as informing Silent Meeting and Meeting for Business, for example, might be understood and embraced with different language and discourse.

I think you divide the religious world far too cleanly between “the fundamentalists” and “all authentic religions.” There is a far greater spread of religionists out there than you seem to acknowledge, and the beliefs of most are far more supernaturalistic than the beliefs of myself, or of the most liberal theologians.

Indeed, there are theologically liberal Christians who see the Christian myth as a metaphor for a god they acknowledge to be unknowable, and the supernatural stories about Jesus/God as poetical, and made up by people. But there are far, far more Christians who do not, who in fact subscribe to the various creeds and catechisms that completely fly in the face of the more sophisticated, metaphorical conceptions of God put forth by Spong, Tillich, and others. Tillich’s notion of God as the ground of being, yet most decidedly not a being, in fact not even existing as we generally use that word, has never been mainstream theology. It has always existed on the edges of Judeo-Christian religion, but never at the center.

I will also admit that many (not all) mainstream seminaries are wrestling with and teaching religious problems that most of them would not dream of unveiling on Sunday morning before the pews. For instance, a great many seminaries are willing to admit the unavoidable fact that the Gospels are contradictory on factual matters, and therefore all cannot be true accounts of Jesus’s life and teachings. But, again, very few pastors share these insights with their congregations. Many of them would lose their posts if they did.

So, for all your claims, it is still very much a radical and minority religious claim to say that there is no conscious entity that created the universe, and no conscious entity that can answer prayers, that prayer has no effect on the outside world other than the psychological effect it might have on our actions in that world.

I also need to call attention to your statement that “There is, for example, not one Christian theologian of repute who believes in a individualized “God” floating around on a cloud hurling thunderbolts and dispensing justice.” If you remove the purely rhetorical part of that statement, “floating around on a cloud hurling thunderbolts,” it is no longer true. Many Christian theologians believe God exists distinct from the world and dispenses justice. Some do not.

Thanks for your comments. I agree with much of what you say here, but I think you misstate the position of atheism, or at least of many atheists. Certainly of this atheist.

I have met very few atheists–in fact, only one I can recall–who are willing to assert that the absence of God has been or can be proven. An atheist is simply a person who believes there is no God.

A mathematical description will suffice concerning my “God Belief”: The set of all Gods may be empty. The set of all actions of all Gods effecting our lives appears empty.

The position of an atheist is illogical. The proof of the non existence of something that doesn’t exist is impossible.

The position of a theist remains without any proof.

As physics gains more insight into the basic nature of matter, we may arrive with evidence supporting the deist (the belief, based solely on reason, in a God who created the universe and then abandoned it, assuming no control over life, exerting no influence on natural phenomena, and giving no supernatural revelation). However, this remains to be seen and, since the God(s) seem to exert no influence on us, this is barren and needs no further consideration.

The pantheist belief (belief that God(s) and the universe are the same) is also barren since it still leaves us on our own.

The bottom line? We are on our own and we must define our own purpose for “being.” I accept that I am “my brother’s keeper.” I should, to the best of my ability, take great care to secure the well being and safety of all that I can, alive and inanimate.

You seem to believe that many people who call themselves theists believe in an individualized God. Nothing could be farther from the truth. With the exception of the crude beliefs of the fundamentalists of all religions, no one else believes in such a concept of God. Fundamentalists of whatever religion have only a crude capacity of spiritual understanding and so must invent concrete notions to characterize that which they aspire to know more intimately.As their fears subside and their capacity for spiritual awareness becomes more subtle and wider ranging, these so-called fundamentalists will embrace other avenues of their chosen religion perhaps even ending up in the more mystical approaches of their religion as they mature in spiritual understanding.

There is, for example, not one Christian theologian of repute who believes in a individualized “God” floating around on a cloud hurling thunderbolts and dispensing justice. Most have beliefs in God that center around the ‘ground of all being’ concept or the ‘cosmic consciousness’ concept. That you cannot understand what is meant by these terms does not mean that they have no meaning. It only means that you do not yet have the capacity to access their meaning.

The problems with creating a theist-nontheist dichotomy are that the distinction is based on false premise and that you polarize and politicize a non-existent issue with the effect of preventing communication between theists and non-theists and, even more importantly, placing more obstacles in your own ability to ever know the subtle, cosmic expansiveness and Joy of that which is God.

Albert Einstein recognized the difference between God and man’s ability to know and manipulate the universe when he said, “I want to know God’s mind. The rest is just detail.”

In an essay called “Une philosophie du bonheur” (”Another Philosophy of Happiness”), unfortunately written in French (unless you can read French…), I suggested to equate God with the Universe, so a Quaker meeting for worship for instance could be considered by nontheist Friends simply a time for worshipping life or the Universe itself and feeling deeply rooted in it, in a mystical communion with it and with the other human beings surrounding us. A French thinker, Pierre Hadot, called this feeling “oceanic feeling” and said this was the real descent of every religion beyond poly- or monotheism. This is the real significance of pantheism as well, I guess.
Oceanically yours
Fabrice

I am a nontheist because I can get along quite well without using the word “God.” Here I make common cause with atheists. I can also appreciate God-language when it is used poetically and metaphorically (as it is used by many Friends who consider themselves theists). But saying I can get along without God-language isn’t to say that I have no appreciation of an aesthetic dimension which poetic Friends might consider theistic.

“I affirm (1)a wider order of being to which humankind is indebted and to and for which it is responsible; and (2)a creative power to that being which is the source and substance of all existence.”

This has been my credo for some years now. I do not feel that it is theistic, nor do I feel obligated to defend it or speak on it (if at all in theistic terms). So can there be a nontheistic theism? I couldn’t say, but it is possible to be a nontheistic mystic!