{"id":2624,"date":"2014-01-17T18:26:11","date_gmt":"2014-01-17T18:26:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/?p=2624"},"modified":"2014-01-17T18:26:11","modified_gmt":"2014-01-17T18:26:11","slug":"a-year-without-god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/2014\/01\/17\/a-year-without-god\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year Without God"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former Seventh Day Adventist Pastor Ryan Bell has been begun a “Year Without God<\/a>” project in which he is trying to live as an atheist for a year. \u00a0It’s caused a bit of a media stir<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ryan is a really good guy. \u00a0I met him a couple of years ago at the Duke Divinity Reconciliation Summer Institute<\/a>. \u00a0We hit it off and hung out in the hotel lobby in the evenings having beers. \u00a0I understand, a bit, the trauma Ryan must feel at being tossed out by his home church as his views became more progressive. \u00a0I understand, a bit, the difficulty of breaking out of fundamentalism without losing faith. \u00a0But\u00a0I’ve never had any desire to be “without God.” \u00a0What I’ve always wanted, more than anything, is to know I’m “with” God.<\/p>\n

It’s not that I have purer desires or stronger faith than other people who “leave” God. \u00a0I think it’s more a matter of perspective. \u00a0If I say I’m done with God, I’m already acknowledging that God exists, I’m already claiming to know precisely what God is like, and I’m already presuming my prerogative to terminate any previous correspondence I’ve had with God. \u00a0If the whole exercise is supposed to represent a new intellectual honesty, it would fail from the start. \u00a0In my effort to live “without God,” I’d be stuck with Him at every turn. \u00a0 \u00a0It would in fact become an exercise in denial.<\/p>\n

I think all I can do is acknowledge the truth of my desire.<\/p>\n

I desire God. I desire to know God, and to be known and loved by God, and to know I’m known and loved by God. \u00a0The cognitive dissonance I feel between what I sense God is like and what I find in some theologies and practices is the stirring of knowledge, not the drag of doubt.<\/p>\n

I desire to be like God. \u00a0I desire to know what only God knows. \u00a0I desire to change what only God can change. \u00a0I desire to escape history and contingency the way only God stands outside history and contingency. \u00a0The cognitive dissonance I feel at my human limitations is the stirring of the will to control the knowledge of good and evil, not the wind of faith.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former Seventh Day Adventist Pastor Ryan Bell has been begun a “Year Without God” project in which he is trying to live as an atheist for a year. \u00a0It’s caused a bit of a media stir. Ryan is a really good guy. \u00a0I met him a couple of years ago at the Duke Divinity Reconciliation […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1531,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spirit"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p824rZ-Gk","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/davidopderbeck.com\/tgdarkly\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}