There are still lots of people who don't get the whole thing about Christian Atheism (or at least the version I'm working on here). And that is understandable. Surely you either believe in God or you don't - if you believe, you follow a certain course; if you don't, you follow another. Why try to ride two horses (or donkeys - but that's for another day)? No man can serve two masters?
Well, it's not quite as simple as that.
The more I learn about human beings and how we wend our way through this world of dizzying complexity and craziness, the more I observe that we do so by subscribing to stories. Beliefs are stories that we tell ourselves, and we sometimes add the additional layer of stating that they are True. However not all stories need to be True to be useful.
This is where the Christianity Compatibility Layer re-enters the fray. An atheist will state the God does not exist (or is very unlikely); a theist will state that God *does* exist. But it's not at all obvious how these statements connect up to what decisions we make in the here and now. Perhaps a theist is looking forward to eternal reward and hoping to avoid damnation; the atheist isn't looking forward to anything much. But is it this thinking-ahead that is really determining how they choose what to do in a given situation?
When the Good Samaritan stopped to help the man at the side of the road, was he thinking about what God had commanded him to do? Or was he using something else as his motivator? It seems very clear that Jesus was pointing out the straightforward compassion that comes from one human seeing another in need - a neighbour, no less. In the authentic Christian tradition, if we are to hold up this parable (which we don't maintain as true in the usual sense) as a guide, we are clearly subscribing to the narrative and using it to inform our own decisions when faced with moral dilemmas.
And for the Christian Atheist this is exactly what the whole story of God and Jesus and even the Resurrection and the supposed Second Coming are - they are a story, and one to which we can choose to subscribe. The mental imagery of the Resurrection isn't just a historical mistake - it's a powerful narrative that retains its transformative power even if we know that it didn't actually happen.
I need to do a lot more to unpack this further, but in the meantime let me just re-emphasise that we can do better than just show that religion is based on things that didn't really happen. We can try to understand why the stories arose, what human needs those stories address, and what the consequences of the stories are. We can recognise that the stories themselves were shaped by the humanity of the people to told and re-told them, and that humanity is our humanity too.
So when we stand up and sing about God or Jesus, we're not lying, and we're not even taking God as a "metaphor". We're seeing God as a transformative story - one created by humans, one that has sub-narratives and tropes and twists and turns. And it's in that story that we too can find and express our humanity, because it's our story too. And we can shape it and use it to speak to others and to reach out and do some good in the world.
