The term “nontheism” was created to avoid the negative baggage that comes with the label atheism. Many atheists are actively against religion—as dogmatic and fundamentalistic as the religious people they attack. Those who want to distance themselves from this active rejection of religion but who still share the same disbelief to God choose to call themselves nontheists.
Subjects to check
- religious naturalism
- Spinoza’s God-or-Nature (Deus-sive-Natura)
Resources on nontheistic spirituality
From Andrew Brown
Others
- Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason (1993)
- Closer to Truth: Atheism’s Arguments Against God
- Trilogy
- Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion
- The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism
- The Will to Imagine: A Justification of Skeptical Religion
- Evolutionary Religion (2013)
- Religious Experience and Scientific Method (1926)
_…the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, and they are all in communication with each other, influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole. (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, freedom, I might say a kind of salvation, in turning one’s affection outward toward this one God, rather than inward on one’s self, or on humanity, or on human imagination and abstractions - the world of spirits.
I think that it is our privilege and felicity to love God for his beauty, without claiming or expecting love from him. We are not important to him, but he to us.
I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches. This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him_
(Robinson Jeffers: A Letter to Sister Mary James Power, October 1, 1934 cited in The Wild God of the World, Stanford University Press, 2003, p. 189).