[MD] MOQ and some interesting a-theology quotes about non-gods

[David M]

Hi all MOQers

Just been reading Nigel Leaves book about the UK ordained theology Cambridge 
fellow Don Cupitt called Odyssey on the Sea of Faith. Cupitt made a TV 
programme called the Sea of Faith in 1984 that introduced me to Nietzsche 
and Jung and intellectual history generally. Don is an interesting 
theologian, who many consider as being an ordained atheist. He describes 
himself these days as a post-modern thinker and as a post-Christian creative 
religions thinker. Check him out on WIki if you like. In the US he is 
associated with the Jesus seminar and the Weststar institute. He is 
interested in Buddhism and anti-essentialist thinking and calls himself a 
non-realist. Anyway, here are some quotes from Don given in Nigel Leaves 
book. There are some very interesting points that seem very close to the 
MOQ. The first two from his book Mysticism after Modernism, the third from 
The Religion of Being (that is largely about Heidegger and is very 
interesting and MOQ relevant) and the 4th quote is from a letter to Nigel 
Leaves. Cupitt is very strong on the value of change or DQ, and how the 
linguistic turn fits in with MOQ friendly notions of experience. For Cupitt 
religious experience should be found at the leading edge of now-experience. 
Anyway see for yourselves what he has to say below. By the way, despite the 
below, he is disinclined to think the word god is very useful these days. 
Once again the really out-there talk of god sounds like talk of DQ to me, 
especially when theologians even question whether the word god is really a 
very good one to be using.

David M



"The older "platonic" kind of mysticism was usually claimed to be noetic - 
by which I mean that people saw religious experience as a special 
supernatural way of knowing something Higher that was itself correspondingly 
super-natural . . .But now, with the end of metaphysics and two-worlds 
dualism . . .we should give up the idea that mysticism is a special wordless 
way of intuitively knowing the things of another and higher world . . . The 
mysticism of secondariness is mysticism minus metaphysics, mysticism minus 
any claim to special or privileged knowledge, and mysticism without any 
other world than this one. We now get . . . that feeling of eternal 
happiness, not by contrast with, but directly off everything that is merely 
relative, secondary, derived, transient, sensuous and only skin-deep. We 
have quite forgotten the old hunger for what is basic, rock-solid, certain 
and unchangeable: we are content with fluidity and mortality . . . 
Relativism should not be a bogey to us: it is true, and religiously speaking 
it is good news . . . Why shouldn't we just give up the idea that there's 
something wrong with being secondary and fleeting?"

"Esse est deus is Eckhart's formula; Be-ing is God. Here, I suggest, we 
should (with Martin Heidegger perhaps) locate Eckhart's idea of God. Be-ing, 
life, the outpouring play of secondariness in the Now-moment: that is as 
close as language, or we, can ever get to God . . . We experience 
everything, totalized into the Now-moment; eternal happiness in the solar 
efflux of pure contingency. All eternity, here and now . .. All we have to 
do is to get our own relation to existence right. Just get on the leading 
edge of the Now-moment and wait very still and attentive, until you find 
yourself beginning to surf it . . . Eckhart has found a way of writing 
religious happiness."

By Being Heidgger means:

"...pure groundless fleeing contingency, already passing away even as it 
arrives, which is why Being does resemble God in allowing us only to see its 
"back parts." Capital-B Being is being that is prior to any determination, 
pure transience. It cannot be described in language and it cannot be grasped 
in thought; but it is always presupposed by language, and it sustains 
language. It gives itself to us, and it emerges within language. We know 
nothing but the field of view, the field of our own experience. This field 
is differentiated by language into a field of Be-ing in beings. So Being 
comes out in our world, the world of language, the only world."



"On non-language, everyone seems to find the point hard to grasp. I've 
argued that all our thinking is transacted in language . . . Therefore all 
our apprehension of the world is language-mediated. But in that case what's 
the difference between a complete description of A and A's actual existence? 
We can't say in words, so we use the non-words "non-language" of Being 
(under erasure). Being (under erasure) is prior to the distinction between 
Plato's timeless Being and temporal becoming. So it may be written as 
Be(com)ing. It is the indescribable, gentle, constant-yet-only-contingent 
forthcomingness of everything. Being (under erasure) gives itself to 
language. Being (under erasure) is not a thing, not even a proper noun, but 
it deserves religious respect . . .It is not an Almighty Lord, as God was. 
It is immanent and ubiquitous. It supports our language as hot air supports 
a balloon . . . we do indeed need a sort-of-idea of something out there 
beyond all the equations; but it must remain indescribable and purely 
immanent."