In the modern religious landscape, the figure of God has become a battlefield. On one side stand the theists, affirming divine existence as a literal fact. On the other, the atheists, denying the same. But as Joseph Campbell observed, this opposition arises not from divergent truths, but from a shared misunderstanding — the misreading of mythic symbols as factual claims.
Campbell saw myth as the language of the soul, a symbolic system designed to orient human consciousness toward mystery, transformation, and meaning. But when myth is read literally — as in the case of the Old Testament — its symbols are stripped of their metaphoric power. They become historical propositions: God is a being; creation did occur in seven days; divine judgement will arrive.
This reification gives birth to a pair of opposites:
Theists, who affirm the literal truth of mythic symbols,
Atheists, who reject them as falsehoods.
Yet both positions remain trapped within the same semiotic frame — a frame that equates myth with fact.
Here, a fascinating resonance emerges with the teachings of Buddhism. Unlike traditions that defend or reject metaphysical claims, Buddhism redirects attention to the very craving for belief. In Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), mental processes such as hope, fear, and believe in are understood as desiderative stances — semiotic enactments of desire and aversion.
To say “I believe in God” is not a neutral proposition. It encodes wanting — the wish for order, meaning, salvation. To say “I do not believe in God” is often to encode fear — of illusion, of manipulation, of misplaced faith. These are not mere opinions. They are affective investments in the way symbols are interpreted.
Buddhism recognises this and offers a different path: not to believe or disbelieve, but to see through the very mechanism of belief itself. The symbolic forms of Buddhism — from the figure of the Buddha to the cosmology of karma — are not propositions to be accepted or rejected. They are semiotic technologies for dismantling attachment to symbolic form.
Zen masters speak in riddles. Nagarjuna dissolves conceptual frameworks. The Buddha refuses to answer metaphysical questions — not because the answers are unknown, but because the question itself is symptomatic of clinging.
Sufism offers a similar gesture, but inflected with the language of ecstatic union. The divine is not an object of belief, but the beloved sought through poetry, paradox, and longing. Rumi writes not to instruct belief, but to dissolve the self in the dance of presence. The divine is encountered in the burning away of separation — a symbol lived, not grasped.
Taoism, too, refuses to reduce the ineffable to assertions. "The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." Like Buddhism, Taoism recognises that naming — and therefore believing — already imposes distortion. The Tao is not a god to believe in or reject, but the flow of becoming, to be followed without grasping. It is a path of alignment, not of creed.
Christian mysticism offers yet another current of resistance to literalism. From the apophatic tradition of Meister Eckhart to the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich, mystics have treated God not as an object to be known but as a mystery to be entered. For them, faith is not belief in propositions but participation in the divine mystery — a dark radiance that defies speech.
Eckhart speaks of a God beyond God — a symbol emptied of all attributes, a space where the soul and the divine are one. This is not the God of catechism, but the groundless ground of being. Like Buddhist sunyata, it reveals the limits of language and the futility of grasping.
So while theism and atheism are locked in a contest over facts, these traditions — Buddhism, Sufism, Taoism, Christian mysticism — bypass the conflict by refusing the premise. They treat belief as a process of desire, not of truth — and teach the liberation that comes from ceasing to grasp.
In this light, Campbell and these wisdom traditions stand aligned. All call us to recover the symbolic function of myth. All warn against the corruption of symbol into dogma. And all point toward a space of meaning beyond belief — a space where the sacred is not affirmed or denied, but encountered.
And so the real pair of opposites is not theist vs. atheist, but:
Literalism, which clings to myth as fact,
Symbolism, which opens myth as meaning.
The former fuels the war of belief. The latter disarms it.
To believe in God as fact is to demand certainty. To meet God as symbol is to awaken to mystery.
No comments:
Post a Comment