Redemption for Nonsupernaturalists — Confessions of a Supply-Side Liberal

Link to “The Wondrous Cross,” performed by Christy Nockels, on YouTube

People sometimes ask me if I believe in God. I answer that I am a nonsupernaturalist, and believe in God as a nonsupernaturalist can. To define “nonsupernaturalist,” see my post “What Do You Mean by 'Supernatural'?” In effect, it makes physicists the arbiter of what counts as supernatural.

If you google “Teleotheism” you will go straight to my blog post “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life” which gives the basics of my belief in God—or as I prefer to say: “the God or Gods Who May Be.” (See my bare beginning of a prayerbook in “The Book of Uncommon Prayer.”) In 2021, I elaborate that to these dimensions of god:

God Within: our highest and best self (even when nascent).
God Between: what emerges when the highest and best selves of more than one person interact.
God Ahead: the best that we can build together; or as I put it in “Teleotheism and the Purpose of Life,” the greatest of all things that can come true.

As time goes on, I come across more and more strands of nonsupernaturalist religion. In my sermons, I recommend Unitarian-Universalism as an institutional framework, though recently other aspects of its religious mission have begun to be overtaken by wokeness. Liberal Judaism and very liberal Christianity are congenial to nonsupernaturalists. There has always been a strong nonsupernaturalist strain in Buddhism, especially in Zen. (For Zen, I highly recommend the Zen koan practice sequence in Sam Harris’s Waking Up app.) And Jordan Peterson is digging deep into religion from a psychological and essentially nonsupernaturalist point of view—though he is careful to express agnosticism, allowing for the possibility of the supernatural. (See for example Jordan Peterson’s talks on the Bible.) I also see a strong strand of nonsupernaturalist religion in resurgent Stoicism and in the Human Potential movement. (See “On Human Potential” and other links at the very bottom of this post.)

Today, I want to talk about the need nonsupernaturalists, just as supernaturalists, have for redemption. A big barrier to positive change in our lives is the pain we experience in beholding the badness in our lives and the badness we see right now when we look inside our hearts. By “redemption” I mean help in coming to terms with our own badness in a way that doesn’t paralyze us.

For those who can simultaneously retain and temporarily suspend disbelief, I think the Christian supernaturalist narrative has a lot to offer even the nonsupernaturalist. As for any religion trying to claim that the divine is all good, Christianity has difficulty explaining the evil in the world. (See the Wikipedia article “Theodicy.”) But for the purpose of understanding redemption, take the existence of evil as an unexplained given. As well, take as a given that our own personal badness will cause serious disruptions in the world, that especially effect us individually because we are at the center of those disruptions. Then, starting from that point, dive into the Christian narrative of a being who loves us so much that he is willing to die a horrible death and suffer in other ways to help us deal with our own personal badness. Jesus preaches forgiveness and dies and suffers to further forgiveness—our forgiving others and our forgiving ourselves. We desperately need to forgive others and to forgive ourselves. So the Christian narrative brings hope. I am a nonsupernaturalist witness that, simultaneously retaining and suspending disbelief, this narrative still helps me to face my own personal badness.

To see what I mean about the Christian narrative helping you to face your own personal badness, try an experiment. Contemplate for a few minutes some of the ways in which you have been genuinely bad in your life—things you regret from an ethical point of view. Once you feel the weight of it emotionally, try listening to Christy Nockels’s video at the top of this post “The Wondrous Cross,” and see what that does for you psychologically. It may not work as well for you as it does for me, but if there is any lifting at all of the paralysis that often comes from contemplating one’s own badness, that backs up my claim of the redemptive value of at least some parts of the Christian narrative, even for a nonsupernaturalist.

Don’t miss my Unitarian-Universalist sermons on my blog

Also, don’t miss Noah Smith’s religion posts:

Other Posts on Religion:

Posts on Positive Mental Health and Maintaining One’s Moral Compass: