III God-Problem

How could a meditation articulate itself with a loud or a quiet voice, a thinking or praying voice, an accepting or challenging voice, an extremely fragile and hardly convincing meditation on the God-problem? Speaking on already denotes a certain relationship of externality, which, far from facilitating our access to the problematic, makes it even more difficult for us, especially if one does not fall for one of the convenient solutions - in fact, dissolutions of the problem - that are named theism and deism, pantheism and atheism.

In the beginning, the gods and God existed without being compre­hended. God was first comprehended as the beginning of the world, the prince and principle governing all that is, the arche of the pan, the sacred, the honest and the salutary, the holon, the Heil, without being founded on anything, not even on itself. Then he was comprehended as the creator of the world, the producer and the cause of all that is, himself being self­created, self-produced, as causa sui, ens a se. Finally, he was comprehended as a creature, a production of the representation of the human - what the human was not, but desired to be - of the human who self-produces itself and wants to grasp through their thought and their science the true and the plausible, the causal and probabilistic laws both in nature, which pre-exists them, as well as in their own history.

Myths and poetry have elaborated the residence of the divine, before it emigrated to philosophy - ontotheological - whose logos says and conceals the manifestation and the occultation of phenomena, while operating a transition from beings towards their first and superior being, the divine. The divine then passes into the word of Scripture, called a revelation, that is to be safeguarded in and by theology and the Church. Faith takes prece­dence over thought and piety, it calls for the help of intelligence - fides and intellectus engaged in combat, where, in turns, each of these two separated worlds triumphs over the other - belief settles as the queen, and this new epoch of the divine will inspire, from one end to the other, modern - always ontotheological - philosophy. After the language of mythology and poetry, after the thought of (ancient) philosophy, after the faith and intelligence of theology and after, again, the thought of (modern) philosophy, both thought and literature as well as science begin to speak, triumphantly or nostalgically, either of the world deserted by the divine, or of the retreat or death of God.

First the human prays to the God, who created them. Then they pray to the God that they themselves created. The profanation of the sacred is a process that, although crumbling, still belongs to the sacred. It is the play of the sacred and the profane that constitutes the divine and religious world. The play that plays itself out beyond the sacred and the profane belongs to another era. This play would mark an opening to the play of the being of the world, which would not be overhung by a supreme being.

If the human invents its gods or its god, the gods or god invent the human.

What is the vague or precise question to which ‘God’ answers, in the course of uninterrupted and suddenly halted questioning, and what kind of answer does God bring to the recurring and halting questioning?

The concept of God and the concept of Being (being of the world and being of the human) lend each other their attributes.

God closes the question of why and opens the questioning that puts him into question, in the direction of what ‘founds’ him, annihilates him and does not replace him.

Mysticism burns the stages and ignores mediations.

The major theological and religious - and rather involuntary - ruse con­sists of operating with images of the invisible.

When there were angels, they were sweet and terrible. Were there any diabolic ones?

God, in his idleness, thinks when he does not play: he thinks pure thought, he is himself thought of thought, according to the thought of overworked humans.

Logical and ontological arguments can neither prove the existence of God nor demonstrate his non-existence. One cannot deduce his existence from his essence, nor can one say: either God is also the bad, the false, non-being, or, if he is not all, he is not.

God appears as the most triumphant, most overwhelming and most over­whelmed face of That become neutral - the divine - deified and person­alised. He seems to be at the centre of three great centres: physis-logos, God, the human. The sacred and the divine, divinity, the gods and God are un-sacredly mixed, are barely distinguishable and are approached in theoretical and practical, mystical and religious agitation, at the heart of the technicised world, with the lassitude and nervousness that this kind of enterprise and maintenance bring about; the indifference of the whole world with regard to the problem of the World - the unnameable opening - indifference, which goes hand in hand with a spasmodic thirst for the absolute and the sacred. The three great concentric circles, each of which englobes the others - physis-logos, God, the human - and which deployed themselves in a diachrony and with synchrony, even though they still constitute us, no longer constitute us.

Humans have a penchant for calling what is for them the most dignified and the most elevated by solemn, theological and religious names.

Is the divine - or the gods - everywhere? Doesn’t it thus risk being nowhere?

The gods also knew how to be cruel and evil before the ontotheological constitution of metaphysical philosophy. Afterwards, the divine became good, identified itself with the good: every human play unfolded itself before the eyes of this God, evil from goodness.

God delivered in images and words remains equivocal - here, every­where, nowhere, elsewhere - and seems to await deliverance, even if it is exhausting.

The sacred and the divine, the divinity, the gods and God existed. Originally, archaically and primitively. Orientally and Asiatically. Hellenically and Romanly. Hebraically and Christianly. Christianity posits the three dogmas. The creation of the world by God. The incar­nation of God in the human. The trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. (Trinitarianism will reveal itself rich in theological and philosophical consequences; see Hegel.) With Christianity, God dies by becoming human. And humans kill him a second time. God, dead and killed, withdraws. He leaves a void. Refilled multiply: by theology and the ecclesiastical institutions, by the rhythmed and rhythmic celebration of a cultic, theatrical and mystical play, by the pains of faith having a very sure taste and intelligent enough for compromise.

At the base of the mystery, the ritual, the cult, the ceremony, the mass, destined to link human and god, there is birth, passion, death and resur­rection of a cosmic and anthropomorphic god, celebrated by humans, who taste this sacrifice through a sacred ‘meal’, where the human ‘eats’ the god, in communing.

All the mysteries celebrating in a ritual drama the birth, death and rebirth of the human and the god give themselves as (secretly or openly) initiatory and play the rites of the Church of the believers or of the atheists (in both, vocations are becoming rarer).

The term ‘divine’ designates the divinity, the god himself, and, secondar­ily, what in an analogical way articulates itself about it, although remaining below it. So the circle of problems, in which the divine and the divinity, the sacred, the gods and god, are linked - in their relations with the humans - remained unthought.

With God, do the gods and the divine, divinity and the sacred also die? It’s not so certain.

Are there gods who are not also, if not above all, black?

The God of Genesis created man in his image and likeness, from the dust of the earth, and, because it was not good for him to be alone, he created his companion, woman, from a rib of the sleeping man, so that they might become one flesh, be fruitful, fill the earth and subjugate it. According to the plan of the Eternal, man was destined to dominate over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the beasts of the field, over all the earth, and over all the creeping things that creep over the earth, living forever, in all innocence.

Man, created by God in his image - according to the Hebraic-Christian legend - bears the stigmata of his God, who is himself, consequently, in the image of man.

In this context, the human was interpreted as a tension between the animal and the divine.

New Roman">The place occupied by God remaining empty, one can very well conceive a theology and a religion of the void and the assaults aimed at occupying this void. Because the void is so attractive.

Disturbed by God’s corpse, one often takes others as his substitute.

The relation between the human and the divinity eclipsed all other rela­tions and became the model of relations, up to and including the famous problem of the self and its relation to the other.

The combat does not unfold between God and the human, but between theology and humanism. The theology becoming humanistic will cross itself with a humanism of theological origin.

In the shadow of God - even killed - everything screams his absence. A place remains empty.

Doesn’t the god who dies by becoming human prelude the death of the human?

The circle is the same: God dies by becoming man and man becomes like the gods by emancipating himself as a mortal and dying man.

The theological phase of thought is achieved, when it comprehends itself as the self-consciousness of God. Just like the anthropological phase, which will find its end in the self-consciousness of the human.

We are thus gradually losing God. However, how can one lose what one never possessed?

Are we losing God the father or the son of God, the son of Man? Are we losing Christ, when God became man and died through and on the cross for humans so that they themselves become God-like, like they were before original sin, and even after, having eaten the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Christ, a man whose life - speech and death, gestures and legend - changed the face of the world, imposes himself with all his childlike simplic­ity and with all his complexity on our meditation, offering an example that no one can follow.

Is the human effectively in search of a new faith and a new non-God?

Be patient a little longer and you will see it well: God without God.

It is in dancing that the Hindu god Shiva constructs and destroys the circle of worlds.

The Heraclitean logos, rhythm and time of the world, is cosmic and divine, playful and royal, like a child-king, who plays - by combining chance and calculation, contingency, rules and necessity - with dice (or small stones: calculations) to displace pawns (or figures) on a chequerboard (or chessboard). Αιών παΐς έστι παίζων, πεσσεύων · παιδος ή βασιληίη. ‘Time is a child playing, playing dice and moving pieces; the royalty of a child.’ At the same time, human games, children’s games, show the other face of the same medallion, manifesting and refracting in the little games the supreme game: ‘Children’s games as human opinions.’ To the Heraclitean logos player corresponds, with continuity and especially with a solution of continuity, the ‘logos’, the divine wisdom of the Proverbs of Solomon in the Old Testament, who addresses the children of God and man - before, in the New Testament, the child Jesus invites all children to come to him, for to them belongs the kingdom (of heaven), and before the Gospel of John proclaims the governing identity of the Logos and of God - claiming (in the language of the Vulgate, which poses the problem of translations and transpositions) that it was present while God created the world and that it was at play: Et delectabar per singulos dies, I ludens coram eo omni tempore, I ludens in orbe terrarum; I and deliciae meae esse cum filiis homimum. ‘And I was delighting, day after day, / playing all the time in his presence, / playing on the earth’s surface, / and finding my delights among the children of men.’ In Ecclesiastes, the governing child renders visible the other side of the supreme game played by the wisdom given birth by God: ‘Woe to you, city, whose king is a child!’

The Ecclesiast who proclaimed in the name of God All is vanity could not say All is play.

Serious and playful at once, the Platonic Socrates says once, in the Cratylus, that ‘even the gods love play’. In The Laws, Plato calls the human ‘plaything of god’ and god ‘the checkers-player who combines all things by moving pieces’. Plato fails to rule on the nature and fate of the divine game and the human game. Sometimes the game is depreciated as that which ‘does not entail any inconvenience or advantage worthy of being mentioned and taken seriously’ (ibid.), sometimes the entire life of the human is consid­ered as a game celebrating the divinity: ‘serious matters deserve our serious attention, but trivialities do not; that all men of good will should put God at the centre of their thoughts; that man, as we said before, has been created as a toy for God; and that this is the acme in his favour. So every man and every woman should play this part and order their whole life accordingly, engaging in the best possible pastimes - in a quite different frame of mind to their present one.’ That is to say? ‘The usual view nowadays, I fancy, is that the purpose of serious activity is leisure - that war, for instance, is an impor­tant business, and needs to be waged efficiently for the sake of peace. But in cold fact neither the immediate result nor the eventual consequences of warfare ever turn out to be real leisure (paidia) or an education (paideia) that really deserves the name - and education is in our view just about the most important activity of all. So each of us should spend the greater part of his life at peace, and that will be the best use of his time. What, then, will be the right way to live? A man should spend his whole life at “play” - sacrificing, singing, dancing - so that he can win the favour of the gods and protect himself from his enemies and conquer them in battle.’ The founder of philosophy as metaphysics, namely as ontotheology, does not come to the end of the divine and human game: the latter - yet at the service of the former - is considered sometimes as a badinage, futile and infantile, and sometimes as an extremely serious and educational occupation, as what is highest and divine; better: it is considered to be both at once. Not ontology, nor anthropology, nor politics, nor poetics manage to wholly sanctify or minimise the game that is played between mortal humans and immortal gods or to specify its rules. In fact, gods, children, the youth, adults and the elderly play. ‘All young things find it impossible to keep their bodies still and their tongues quiet. They are always trying to move around and cry out; some jump and skip and do a kind of gleeful dance as they play with each other, while others produce all sorts of noises. And whereas animals have no sense of order and disorder in movement (“rhythm” and “harmony”, as we call it), we human beings have been made sensitive to both and can enjoy them. This is the gift of the same gods whom we said were given to us as companions in dancing.’ The young people, however, aspire to constant change, which is fatal for the immutable laws and to the regulated cele­bration of festivals: ‘All legislators suppose that an alteration to children’s games really is just a “game”, as I said before, which leads to no serious or genuine damage. Consequently, so far from preventing change, they feebly give it their blessing. They don’t appreciate that if children introduce novelties into their games, they’ll inevitably turn out to be quite different people from the previous generation; being different, they’ll demand a dif­ferent kind of life, and that will then make them want new institutions and laws. The next stage is what we described just now as the biggest evil that can affect a state - but not a single legislator takes fright at the prospect.’ In turn, the artistic, creative, poetic, plastic and musical activities of adults are discredited by the conservative thinker of the Republic as mimetics: they are only play and not serious work. As for the wise old people, ‘they play concerning the laws a cautious play fitting the elderly’.

In his book The Gay Science, Nietzsche, wanting to reverse Platonism and Christianity to provoke the crisis of atheism, and not in the name of the true world or the apparent world (that is to say, neither in the name of its being nor in the name of its distinction), gives the word to the Insane, the madman, and lets him ask his questions: ‘“Where is God?” he cried; “I’ll tell you! We have killed him - you and I! We are all his murderers. But how did we do this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all of the suns? Are we not continually fall­ing? And backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it gotten colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? Don’t lanterns have to be lit in the morning? Do we still hear nothing of the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we still smell nothing of the divine decomposition - gods, too, decompose! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves?”’ (It is me who underlines, and ‘the me is hateful’ he had said who wagered, played with the existence of God, namely Pascal.)

The gods don’t just play. Thought a little more consequentially, they reveal themselves as playthings.

The human is not a marionette in the hands of good and bad demons and gods; gods and demons are not the playthings of the human.

Did the divine, playing in all idleness or activity, appear to humans because they had experience of the game, or did these latter-born ones suspect the power of the game from their tension towards the divine?

Sometimes the most advanced theology was, in its high and brief moments, negative. It said what God is not, what one cannot say about him. God is nothing (particular), it claimed. He is ‘thus’ nothing (this nothing is always something). Even more rarely, a certain theology almost succeeded in grasping in flashes God as the Game, preparing unknowingly a grasp of God as one of the figures, or even the most militant and humblest figure in the play of the errancy of time, young and old, new and ancient, constantly pursued, misrecognised, lost, found again, forgotten, disguised, murdered, resurrected, reinvented. But the human needed a positive the­ology, a kerygma emplanting in the past - the source - the happiness of paradise lost through the fault of original sin, flying over the misery of the present time and leading to the future salvation already announced, the three dimensions of time coexisting and over-dimensioning in and by ‘eternity’, infinite elastic time. This theology militated and militates, tri­umphed and triumphs, sank and sinks, was reborn from its ashes and now becomes seeking: it demythologises, dissubjectifies, disobjectifies. It is the avant-garde. Who also delivers the combats of the rearguard.

There is a Christian and minor poet who writes the following about the game played between the God of man and the man of God:

style='font-size:10.0pt; line-height:112%'>I have often played with man, says God. But what a game, it is a game from which I still tremble.

I have often played with man; but God, it was to save him, and I have trembled enough from not being able to save him,

Of not succeeding in saving him. I want to say that I have trembled enough through fearing not to be able to save him,

Asking myself if I could save him.

I have often played with man, and I know that my grace is insidious, and how much and how she turns and plays. She is more cunning than a woman.

But she plays with man and turns him and turns the event and it is to save man and keep him from sin.

I often play against man, says God, but it is he who wants to lose, the fool, and it is me who wants him to win.

And I succeed sometimes,

Until he wins.

Indeed, we play who loses wins.

At least he does, because if I lose, I lose.

But him when he loses, only then does he win. Strange game, I am his partner and his opponent, And he wants to win against me, that is to say, to lose. And myself, his opponent, I want to make him win.

The world no longer resounds with the ‘sound of divine dice’, of which Zarathustra spoke. Soon the absence of this sound will fade.

At a certain moment, it was decided that enthusiasm (έν θεω) was infe­rior to reflection and thought. Since then, there have been no more gods. We no longer believed in cultic games.

It is not the world that is a divine game. It is God who is a mundane game.

The children of God and the humans who heard themselves called by the divine word, often played a puerile game consisting of speaking to God like children to their doll and of God like a little lead soldier.

The god of Islam and Mohammedanism enters the scene after the unfolding of the last religion, Christianity. The Qur’an is a bastardised and desert-like work, a provincial reprise of what has already been played out world-historically. So, when it tells us ‘Life is only a game and a pastime’, as opposed to the future life, which is the only serious life, as well as to divine and eternal time, it is just a repeat.

Neither militant, nor triumphant, nor succumbing, God could per­haps become little by little a master piece dismissed from a superannuated game.

The human projects towards and in God what will become human again.

What pushes up should not make us underestimate what pushes down.

We are led to the era that realises the errant truth of Christianity, that is to say, renders it effective and annihilates it, even and especially through bourgeois secularism and the enterprise that would be socialist, which open onto the nihilism destined to be vanquished by itself.

Already the triumph of Christianity erects itself on the defeat of the Christian message.

Theism, deism, pantheism, atheism will unite - ecumenically.

By killing ‘life’ within themselves to love God alone, the desert Fathers, the anchorites and the hermits, reached a kind of total disgust: this was orig­inally the noonday demon.

Humans transfer on to their similars and society this feeling called love that they accord to God.

Sometimes Nietzsche thinks that God died out of pity for humans. Unless death among the gods was only a prejudice we could think in our turn.

Atheism restores the interest in the problem of God.

size=2 color=black face="Times New Roman">God and religion cancel and justify human life. This in turn denies them, by remaining in search of a justification. Even atheology continues to move in dependence on theology or metatheology.

God, the incarnation of weakness, battles alongside the strongest, over­whelmed by his own force and that of the victors no less than by the sighing of fallen creatures.

To speak of God, to pose or to suppose his existence, to pose or to oppose his non-existence, signifies to remain in a misunderstanding. Should it be time to elaborate a, let’s say, theological approach, a theology more inter­rogative and questioning, linked to the problematic experience of belief and faith, to shake those who passionately desire to believe without being passionate believers, taking their desire and their desire for a desire as faith? The terms ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ turn in their hinges. Without ever exiting. All persona and all res turn to the mask and the nothing, all truth and all reality - divine and/or human - topple as pieces corresponding to the play of errancy.

Believing in the divine will already imply a will to believe.

Perhaps from the start, they believed in it and did not believe it.

Like any other domain, one could take the theological and religious domain and study its rhetoric, to examine in which metaphorical and meto­nymic terms God is spoken of.

According to a version that knew and could dominate, all the great think­ers thought the thought of God, the greatest thinker.

Onto-theo-logy, ecclesiastical institutions, the words and gestures of piety no longer encounter - without ever having encountered - the absolute, the supreme and all-powerful, omniscient and omnipresent Being, the founda­tion of all that is, the necessary and sufficient reason, the first motor, the causa prima. For two thousand five hundred years, all philosophical and met­aphysical thought is, positively and/or negatively, onto-theo-logical, equally all ethics, which would become furiously secular, humanist and socialist, by reversing the signs. Since Presocratic and pre-philosophical thought, through the Platonic-Aristotelian deployment that goes through Platonist and Aristotelian - Augustinian and Thomist - Christianity, to the thought which wants to be post-Christian and metaphilosophical, everything moves on onto-theo-logical rails, even when everything derails or when every­thing lives, which comes down to the same, in and of antitheology. At the same time, all the acts that punctuate life, love and death, all the leads and all the relations to what is - from the animal to the divine - remain impregnated with it. Christianity remains the most formative, the most intelligent current because the richest in contradictions, the most amalg- amable to other often contrary currents. It mondialises itself as such, effec­tively coins its God and its precepts, generates what succeeds it. But it is not yet the hour of the inheritors.

The inheritors, and not the mere successors, of this history and legend of the world that begins with the creation of all that is, which marks the moment of the fall of the human into sin, which celebrates the incarnation of God in the human, who dies and lives in expectation of the final apocalypse and redemption, would lead the onto-theo-logy of the Logos-God, the God of the revelation, source of faith, hope and grace, the God of mystic ecstasy and organised cult, towards their suppression. This suppression would go up to the suppression of suppression. Suppression of suppression is not synony­mous with nothing. These are the massive unveilings, which annihilate the nothing and their own being. The negation of negation would not pose itself as a synthesis, a third element, which abolishes and contains two antag­onisms, each riveted on the other, where the opposite no longer mingles with what it opposes as a new thesis. How to speak and act in the name of the ontotheological and mystical God, when the suppression and the sup­pression of the suppression are (always incompletely) achieved? What God has been will be to think and to experience otherwise. How? In the horizon of rickety affirmations recognising themselves as such? How to avoid the chitchat about the mystery and the enigma, the absence and the secret, the withdrawal and withdrawal that withdraws, the silence and the unspeakable, the unthought and the unplayable?

Speaking and saying, thinking and doing, living and experiencing, indi­vidually and world-historically, privately and publicly, the question of the problem of God that pivots once in the direction of the question of the God­problem and once again in the direction of still-empty space-time, signifies not filling the emptiness, the opening, the gap, the nothingness. Through the entangled play of myths and demythologisations, even demystifying mystics and mystifications, could we keep ourselves open by also playing the game of all the closures that, closed, support us to shake and shake us?

God and the Devil - Satan, Lucifer, negativity, evil - are linked together for life and death. The one constantly becomes the other, each one thinks to triumph over the other.

The diabolical problem of evil and error, of falsity and sin, is the cross of every theology of an omnipotent God who fails to accord predestination and human freedom.

Hell and damnation (eternal), paradise and salvation (universal), are the two complementary and opposing terrains on which the ontotheological and pedagogical attempt remains oriented to frighten and force the freedom of adhesion, remaining two major projections of positive aspirations and negative fears.

Try to draw up the most exhaustive table of contraries; then you would perhaps take into account that religion in general and Christianity in par­ticular bet, successively and/or simultaneously, at moments and/or at once, on all the contraries.

God was supposed to be each of the contraries, each of the contraries taken separately, the unity of contraries: suffering and joy, asceticism and play, mortification and rebirth, mystical and rational, the focus of faith and the object of the intellect, near and far, unnatural and natural, inhuman and human, punishment and reward, etc., etc. He was equally considered as present-absent, but not as existing and non-existent. He does not succumb to a contrary power, which would remain attached to him: he is chased and slips away.

The theology of heretics lets accede to language not only the word but also the delirium of God, and often manages to envisage the world as a false or falsified creation.

The Christian world is dead. The post-Christian gods live their mortal lives.

To want to utter words or accomplish acts conceived as sacri­legious is to remain in the dependency of a sacred God not radically problematised.

Those who deny the existence of God, claim his non-existence, remain prisoners of the Platonic-Christian world. The reversal they want to effect - on the same basis - aims to replace the dead and killed God, by setting reason, human consciousness and practice, social progress, well-be­ing, on the empty throne. In view of the great style of this myth, of this word, of this legend - constituents of the world - in view of the force of an ecclesiastical foundation founded through Peter because his faith was hard as a rock, this same Peter, who had three times denied his master, Christ - as any historical and worldly realisation renders effective and ‘betrays’ the original inspiration (so there has never been any ‘true’ Christianity, ‘true’ democracy, ‘true’ socialism) - the assaults delivered by bourgeois and Marxist humanism, by psychoanalysis and Freudianism, by realism and surrealism are still somewhat ridiculous. Most certainly, they also set in motion a certain negativity, which a consolidating epoch uses to establish the republic, if not the one of the golden mean, at least the one of the medium term.

In a world emptied of gods and empty of God, what will animate rites and ceremonies, celebrations and festivals? What will become of a certain sacredness, be it secular and profane?

In disarray, who of us would not wish, most deeply in one’s heart - by confessing it or not - that God or a father or a mother comes to speak to them like to a child, revealing the truth to them and offering them salvation? It hardly matters whether this remedy belongs to the illusory or the unintelligible.

This supreme and warming clarity, which we desire more than anything in the world, no one can dispense it to us.

How differently would believers and unbelievers talk about God and their feelings regarding him if they could do it anonymously.

The dazzling God became a hidden and absent God before becoming and remaining a killed and dead God.

Deicide is this absolute crime perpetrated by the human, who, by killing God, died in becoming human the first time, died as human a second time, lets him die a third time, without suspecting that the human inaugurates thus the era of its own death, already in motion and destined to last a long time. The humanism that is installed on the empty throne of God, by com­pleting the reign of God, leads, through its triumph - not so triumphant - towards its own exhaustion.

God is finished when we have finished him. All taking place in fundamental incompletion.

After the death of God, one has often - involuntarily and unconsciously - identified God with the cosmic, historical and human logos or dialectic, without fully comprehending what was said and done and without illuminating the premises, the steps and the conclusions.

Atheism is another - and derived - act of faith animated by the lukewarm ardour of unbelief and indifferent to the high power of indifference.

In the bespectacled eyes of atheism, God is nothing. Thus, we are (not) delivered from nothing.

Does the death - of God, of the human? - impose itself more than life? Christ and Christianity live this death. Atheism lives off crumbs. It dies the life of God.

The process of desacralisation, of secularisation, of profanation that unfolds itself on all the stages, puts in circulation and in scenes the formerly deistic or theistic look of the world, follows the Christian cannibalism, which followed the archaic cannibalism, another and new cannibalism.

The race continues without ‘God’ and ‘without’ religion, while one devotes oneself to an indeterminate je ne sais quoi, which one is incapable of naming.

Our epoch: the poorest in gods, the richest in junk religiosity.

Even more difficult than the constitution of an atheological thought is the confrontation and the surpassing of the problem of death and the absence of God in a direction leading beyond atheism.

According to the evangelical exploration of the firmament, the obscuring of the stars will be a sign preluding the glorious parousia, as it marked the moment of death of the one whose birth was announced astrally. Where resides the disaster?

Christianity formerly grafted itself onto all the religiosities and preceding religions; now by generalising itself in and through its abolition, it dies, fertilises and contaminates, gets contaminated.

The death of the Christian world makes everyone believe, believers and unbelievers, that they will recover more liberated and more victorious, released from the tricks one has played on them. Will the dead turn in their graves? And will the living turn towards what does not cease to be of the order of the future?

The powerful anthropocentrism of the prayer of the powerless human proves salutary. Genuflexion and prayer help the one who prays. Does the human still feel the need to prostrate themself before what is stronger than them? In any case they do.

To love God in order to not love humans is for self-love tempting and satisfying - thus also dirty. To love humans is also an abstract programme.

Morality and law, the state and the police, replace the commandments of the deceased God.

Die and be reborn trumpets the watchword of all religiosity and all enter­prise aiming at the animation and the mortalisation of life and death. Mortal humans and immortal gods perpetually exchange their lives and deaths. The temptation of conquering both life and death remains tempt­ing. Mortification of life and resurrection of the dead go together. The dead grasps the living, life grasps death. In what space-time and under what disguises however do survival, rebirths and resurrections take place? Would death alone be immortal?

One talks much about waiting for another future. The nostalgia for God occupies us, the temptation to substitute the human is great, and anticipa­tion operates through humans. We came into the world too late for God and too prematurely for the Other, who abolished itself. The future could consist only in a retake of the Same, whose logos-physis, God, the human - it hardly matters whether they believe themselves anecdotes or history itself - have been, are and remain, through their surpassing, the foci of an obscure light. To see and to accept the withdrawal which withdraws itself and the other as the face and mask of the same - this could not take place. The very words which speak of the suppression which suppresses itself will be barely heard and quickly suppressed, even if they should emerge again from time to time in time. God will remain the central theme of a renewed and more questioning ontotheology, the reference system of a modernised and ecumenical Church, the focus of a cult that has become more sober, the invisible guarantor of a progressivist ethic, the welcoming and gathering home, the hole creating a constant draught of air. The believer will invoke him without too much fear and trembling, the unbeliever will continue to stubbornly deny a position they declare non-existent, reason and heart will seek to unravel their affairs, mystical ecstasies will democratically keep their rights.

God has been, he has been said and lived, revealed and conveyed by the major legend of humanity. He died in becoming human and was killed by humans. It is the phantoms that inflict the most burning injuries and pro­voke our sleepwalking actions and reactions. Phantoms are, as phantoms. Do they exist too? Are being and existing different and identical? The suppression of suppression - the suppression of the atheistic negation which denies the position of God - will be covered up by the flood of the world, the nostalgia and the hope for the world beyond, sacred or profane. This flood, this nostalgia and this hope will equally cover up the untenable words of a meditation on the God-problem, which, beyond apology and polemic, remains disarming and disarmed.

Lost between several dedivinised divinities, the still historical and modern human no longer knows to which saint to devote themself, what is the deity who must preside at their highest and last moments, when the demons assail their planetary becoming.

Plants eat water, air and earth, animals plants, humans animals; gods humans - before being eaten by them; devoured devourers, they are all both.

Into what does God pass by passing away? Evidently into nature, into the human, into history.