I have a close friend that doesn’t believe in a god. He, like many of our contemporaries, thinks that to believe in God is to believe in a god. And so then it is more of a game of pick and choose. Evidentally most people do this based on culture and preference. They chose a god and it serves a purpose.
Maybe it helps them think everything happens for a reason so that they can be comforted by fatalism. Maybe it is a god that conveniently indulges their infidelities or justifies their violence or predjudice. Or maybe it is a god they don’t even know they worship, a god like Eros in a new disguise at the desk-altar of porn.
Whatever it is people choose a god and it works for them. And it is great but the catch is that you have to be dumb enough to do this. But, if you are smart you are kinda screwed because you realize that’s a fiction. So then in your rejection of gods and other fictions you aren’t left with much.
This can be pretty bleak because then you become the god, your fancies do, your reason does, your self does. Your understanding is your god at this point and transcendence is at best a brain state brought about by practices or ideas that your contrive. Your god is a closed loop within your own subjectivity. And this is seen as much more enlightened than the worship of Zeus. Clearly Zeus had greater explanatory power than a human subject!
But we were not wrong in rejecting Zeus, nor are we wrong in rejecting human subjectivity as gods. In fact we weren’t wrong in rejecting gods period. Because gods are not what monotheists worship. In fact to be a monotheist is to engage in a path of progressive purification of the gods and gods as such. It is a path that rejects every god. In that sense it is quite similar to atheism.
But its rejection of every god is purposeful because it is not focused on a god or a being at all but rather the source of all being, being as such. God, as understood in monotheism, is not a god or a being, not even a supreme being. God doesn’t belong to a category of being rather God is that uncontingent creative ground from which beings that can be categorized are ultimately dependent. This fundamental reality doesn’t exist in time or space like gods do but rather is the fundamental cause of both time and space. This reality isn’t conceptual, in fact it can’t be conceived. To conceive it is to distort it. It is the origin and end of the totality of compounded or contingent realities.
It is the ground that when posited prevents the notion of an infinite regress of beings without there being being as such to give being to beings. It is the ground but it is also the end, the telos of the totality of all contingent reality.
This is not a god, no, not even a power, or a place, or state, or a change. Instead when we say God we are rejecting all of that. What we are affirming is that there is an immaterial ground and end to the entirety of everything that is. It is this divine reality which alone is worthy of worship truly because it transcends every conception, because it retires every god and every reality that falls infinitely short of it. It will always evade classification and be beyond conception, it will always be disfigured by our concepts. As soon as it becomes a god we have lost it entirely.
As the ground of all that is we say that it creates ex nihilo, that is, out of nothing. But, it is not nothing. But neither is it some thing. It is what creates the conditions for the possibility of thingness as such and requires no thing but its own selfsame reality to do this.
So, with my atheist friend, I don’t believe in a god or gods either. But, I believe the reality we commonly call God is the most reasonable explanation for being and beings as such. To believe in this understanding of God is a rejection of the gods. Pagans understand this.