My article in The New Humanism

I wrote an article for The New Humanism, the magazine of Harvard's Humanist Chaplaincy. Check it out!

Love is the best

It's been almost a month since I last posted, so I'm pretty intent on posting something today. There are a few topics I want to get into, but there's a fair amount of work to be done before they are ready to exist in blog-form; and frankly I don't have the time for all that yet.

So today I submit to you a passage that had a profound effect on my journey towards atheism, and certainly is an inspiration to ideas about secular spirituality.

This passage is from Ludwig Feuerbach's "The Essence of Christianity," in a chapter in which he examines the phrase "God is love."

Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty....What then is the true unfalsified import of the Incarnation but absolute, pure love, without adjunct, without a distinction between divine and human love? For though there is also a self-interested love among men, still the true human love, which is alone worthy of this name, is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism. (part 1, ch. 4)

When I first read this I found it mind-blowing, and the effect has not faded-- to me it means that "God is love," is not a statement about how loving God is; it's a statement about how godly Love is! Love saves us. God only saves us insofar as God exemplifies love. Without love, God is just some powerful authority figure. Love is the key element. Love saves.

Granted, Feuerbach's definition of love (that which impels the sacrifice of self to another) is not terribly self-positive. I think a higher concept of love includes both sacrifice for the other and a certain manner of self-love. But besides that, he just cuts right to it, showing us how love is the true divinity, not the actual figure of the Godhead.

What I especially appreciate here is that Feuerbach asserts that Love transcends the human/divine divide. This is not the case, often, with an idea like "good," on which people tend to equivocate, assigning different meanings to notions of "human good" versus "divine good." Thinkers attempt to justify God's actions by calling on a divine, transcendent notion of good-- which is fine for justifying God, but leaves us humans wondering what to do with our own notion of "good." But it seems that Love must be the same, regardless of whose love it is. Love is only love if both (or all) parties involved can call it Love.

I anticipate doing some more writing on Love in the next month or so, so stay tuned for that.