Men are Atheist; Women are Pantheist
In the USA 65% of atheists are men. They are overwhelmingly young, white, college-educated, male Democrats. In his classic The Psychology of Atheism, Paul Vitz showed that the famous atheists all harbored deep resentments of their fathers: Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, and Feuerbach. Turning Freud on himself, he showed atheism to be quintessentially a masculine psychic violence against the father. It is neither rational, scientific nor intelligent, but emotional, volitional and pathological. It is psychic male violence against the father, male-on-male combat. Militant disbelief is the projection of deep, oedipal psychological forces.
The transcendent Creator God is by definition not knowable by the unaided human intellect. He is not a knowable being, but Being-its-very-self. He is not in or part of the universe, but transcendent of it and yet intimately immanent but never measurable or identifiable in a scientific way. Agnosticism is a reasonable, honest viewpoint as none of us really know God. The proofs of God's existence are not empirical evidence or logically compelling for the intellect-not-inclined-by-wil- to-believe. "Belief" in God is precisely a volitional act of trust, in some witness, intelligent in its own way, which grants access to a reality unavailable to the unaided intellect. Within belief there is a certain agnosticism: acknowledgment of human limitation and of divine transcendence.
The relati0nship of son to father, unlike that of the daughter, includes a battle, an agonistic struggle of one masculine will with another. We recall Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac and even Jesus' initial resistance to the will of his Father in Gethsemane. The daughter's more docile, trusting nature disinclines her to fight with her father. The son must do so, in some manner, to define his own identity and mission.
And so, male resentment and aggression can take the religious form of atheism. Female atheists [with exceptions like Rand and 0'Hair] are like female chess grand masters: rare. Vitz showed that feminine disappointment with the father more frequently shapes itself as pantheism or humanistic/nature mysticism.
Pantheism: Feminine Rejection of the Masculine
"Pantheism" from the Greek "pan" [all] and "theo" [God] affirms that divinity is present in all life, but not distinct from the universe as we know it. It contradicts theism which affirms an independent Creator who is the source of all being but independent and yet mysteriously immanent as love within Creation. It is not denial of the Divine; but rejection of transcendence, of the paternal and therefore of the "hyper-masculine" transcendence of God. Unlike the hard, decisive, assertive atheistic assault, pantheism is a passive-aggressive diversion, an avoidance of the paternal. It is:
- Monist. Alterity, "otherness" is banished: all is harmonious and monotonous. Tensions, binaries, contradictions are eliminated: creator/creation, male/female, natural/supernatural, time/eternity all evaporate into amorphous uniformity.
- Empathy and Compassion, the defining posture of femininity, dominate in response to suffering. But the physical/emotional sensitivity, without balance of the moral/intellectual/religious, tends to disordered sentimentality: self-righteous, even indignant advocacy of abortion, euthanasia, gender surgery for the young, obsession with faux-victimization, and resentment of the newborn as threatening to scarce resources.
- Asexual: The violent tension, attraction, fascination, dissonance, asymmetry and mystery of the masculine/feminine is dissolved into monotonous, androgynous gender-as-self-construct.
- Anti-Male as the distinctively virile is suspect as "toxic masculinity" and the preferred man is reconfigured as soft, sensitive, gentle, passive, and impotent.
- Anti-Female as the distinctively female as virginal and maternal is despised in an angry feminism that apes the depravities of disordered masculinity including careerism, sexual license, and narcissism.
- Sterility is preferred to fertility which is treated as a pathology by contraception and abortion in the catastrophic rupture of sex from fecundity.
- Animal-idolatry diverts the paternal/maternal instincts to sentimental affection for pets seen as equivalent of the human child.
- Freedom, Agency and Responsibility of the person are denied as the individual is viewed as determined psychologically by trauma and social circumstances. The reality of judgment, particular and general, as retribution, reward for good and punishment for bad, is despised as cruel.
- Scientism elevates the empirical method beyond its proper domain into a comprehensive philosophical worldview as that natural mode of knowing is not balanced by metaphysical and religious thinking. And so the invisible, non-measurable and spiritual are systematically excluded from the real.
- Anosognsic, emotional, unaware as the pantheist does not think ontologically and so does not self-identify with, say, the pantheism of Spinoza or Hegel, but feels union with the divine of nature and denies any transcendent reality.
- Hysteria as passivity, anxiety and vulnerability in the absence of the paternal and the presence of threats including global warming, fascism, homophobia, racism and other.
- Spiritual, not Religious as pantheists practice individually, rejecting historical-traditional-organized religion. Most identify as "Nones." However the belief system seems strong in mainstream liberal Protestantism and among more progressive Catholic nuns.
- Cult of the Body. In the absence of an immortal soul and the afterlife, the human body itself becomes divinized so that health, fitness, diet, looks, and exercise become obsessional.
- Disenchanted Nature Mysticism. The ecstatic union with nature is trivialized and depleted as the natural order is no longer expressive of transcendent Truth-Goodness-Beauty but is reduced to what is knowable to the human mind and scientific method.
- Desecration, the opposite of consecration, of the human person and the natural world as both are ripped away from communion with the Creator and isolated in sterile, meaningless futility
Conclusion
Pantheism is pervasive across theological liberalism, New Age fashions, and the retreat from traditional Christianity to the impersonality and passivity of alternatives from Asia.
Like the fruit offered Eve by the serpent in the garden, it assumes the absence of masculine companionship and replacement of trust in the Father with what is immediate, attractive, seductive.
It is a sadness to see our sisters lonely, suspicious, sterile... suspicious of God our Father, of their own radiant femininity, and of our iconic, if flawed, masculinity.
JMJ Jesus, Mary and Joseph...Pray for Us!
,Women atheists, like Ayn Rand and Madalyn 'Hair) are like female chess grand masters: rare and exceptional.
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