Hong Kong Liberal Religious Forum

Nontheism @ Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheism

Nontheism is a term that covers a range of both religious and nonreligious attitudes characterized by the absence of—or the rejection of—theism or any belief in a personal god or gods. It is in use in the fields of Christian apologetics and general liberal theology.

Christianity

Certain liberal Christian theologians, including Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong (who seeks to build on the ideas of the late Anglican bishop John A.T. Robinson) define a "nontheistic God" as "the ground of all being" rather than as a personal divine being. Spong refers to a theistic God as "a personal being with expanded supernatural, human, and parental qualities, which has shaped every religious idea of the Western world."

Both Robinson and Spong owe much of their theology to the work of Christian existentialist philosopher Paul Tillich, including the phrase "the ground of all being". Another quotation from Tillich is, "God does not exist. He is being itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore to argue that God exists is to deny him." This Tillich quotation summarizes his conception of God. He does not think of God as a being which exists in time and space, because that constrains God, and makes God finite. But all beings are finite, and if God is the Creator of all beings, God cannot logically be finite since a finite being cannot be the sustainer of an infinite variety of finite things. Thus God is considered beyond being, above finitude and limitation, the power or essence of being itself.

Secular humanist Sidney Hook wrote in an essay called "The Atheism of Paul Tillich":

With amazing courage Tillich boldly says that the God of the multitudes does not exist, and further, that to believe in His existence is to believe in an idol and ultimately to embrace superstition. God cannot be an entity among entities, even the highest. He is being-in-itself. In this sense Tillich's God is like the God of Spinoza and the God of Hegel. Both Spinoza and Hegel were denounced for their atheism by the theologians of the past because their God was not a Being or an Entity. Tillich, however, is one of the foremost theologians of our time.

John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk cofounded the Jesus Seminar, a group of academic scholars who seek, following Rudolf Bultmann, to "demythologize" Jesus. Some also consider this work to be a nontheistic examination of the life and work of Jesus.

David Boulton edited "Godless for God's Sake: Nontheism in Contemporary Quakerism" (Dales Historical Monographs, 2006), in which, according to the jacket copy, "27 Quakers from 4 countries and 13 yearly meetings tell how they combine active and committed membership in the Religious Society of Friends with rejection of traditional belief in the existence of a transcendent, personal and supernatural God.".

Nontheist Friends
www.nontheistfriends.org

Nontheistfriends.org presents the work of Friends (Quakers) who are more concerned with the natural than the supernatural. Some of us understand “God” as a symbol of human values and some of us avoid the concept while accepting it as significant to others.