I bother with this kind of exercise because, as a psychology guy, I believe that a great deal of how we navigate reality is bound up in our language. As such, I think that it is possible (or rather, that it is impossible not to) shift how nature is interpreted via language. As we move into a time when supernatural explanations have no place in the realm of legitimate science, it is also time to move away from theism as being the core assumption about the nature of reality. By shifting the focus from theism to naturalism, we can begin to develop the frame that naturalistic assumptions are the given, with those who disagree as being divergent. It is a strategy for shifting how we talk, and therefore think, about our relationship with the world as it really is.

While my worldview is certainly atheistic, and I enjoy reading some atheist writers (check out Friendly Atheist and Greta Christina), it doesn’t fulfill me to limit my commitments to what I don’t believe. That isn’t what atheists do, of course…they all have commitments of one kind or another. But atheism itself does not itself address what I consider to be key aspects of the human condition, i.e. existential anxiety, the need for a sense of agency and purpose, the drive to be connected, and so on.

The frustrating thing is that the best words used to describe these needs and drives are generally from the world of religion. As such, they come with all the baggage of superstition, myth, and absurdity. What I really wish we had was a vocabulary that adequately describes these deeper, more profound aspects of humanity without it sounding technical or mundane. But we don’t, alas, so we have to make due with shifting the vocabulary we have.

For some of us, naturalistic and atheistic as we may be, God will continue to be of great importance as the chief protagonist in the biblical narrative which forms the centerpiece of our Jewish culture. It is, has been, entirely possible to live in a world infatuated with God much as people are with Homer, Shakespeare, and Harry Potter. The key point is that we recognize that God is a literary fiction created by a people trying to understand itself in the changing vagaries of history.