God, the Prayerful Atheists & Materialist Theologists “...What we find at the end of this road is atheism—not the ridiculously pathetic spectacle of a heroic defiance of God, but insight into the irrelevance of the divine, along the lines of Brecht’s Herr Keuner: Someone asked Herr Keuner if there is a God. Herr Keuner said: I advise you to think about how your behavior would change with regard to the answer to this question. If it would not change, then we can drop the question. If it would change, then I can help you at least insofar as I can tell you: You already decided: You need a God. (63) “Brecht is right here: we are never in a position to choose directly between theism and atheism, since the choice as such is located within the field of belief. ‘Atheism’ (in the sense of deciding not to believe in God) is a miserable pathetic stance of those who long for God but cannot find him (or who ‘rebel against God’. . .). A true atheist does not choose atheism: for him, the question itself is irrelevant.... ... “Today, theists no longer despise atheists—on the contrary, one of their standard rhetorical turns is to emphasize how, in leaving behind the abstract ‘God of philosophers,’ atheists are much closer to the ‘true’ God than metaphysical theologists: ‘The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy . . . is . . . perhaps closer to the divine God . . . more open to Him than [metaphysics] would like to admit.’(69) Even in Derrida’s late work, we find a variation on this turn, when, in his reflections on prayer, he points out how not only do atheists also pray, but how, today, it is perhaps only atheists who truly pray. . . . (70) Against this rhetoric, we should assert the literal truth of Lacan’s statement according to which theologists are the only true materialists.” Slavoj Žižek, “The Parallax View” (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), pp. 97-103. ---------------- (63). Bertolt Brecht, “Prosa 3” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1995), p. 8. (69). Martin Heidegger, “Identity and Difference” (London: Harper & Row, 1974), p. 72. (70). See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002).
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 19:31:25 +0000
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