The God described above is not easy to talk about as it's simply redefining God to mean reality.
Compared to the rest of your post ... okay, I got nothin' on that. Whatever.
Still, this is an interesting question because it deals with a matter of presuppositions. Neither theists nor atheists, in that superficial dispute, address the psychological and anthropological implications. "Redefining God to mean reality" is the process, philosophically and academically speaking, of removing theology from religionists in order to examine questions of God and religion in the context of a psychoanalytic meaning of history.
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Iceaura attacking Richard Dawkins is just hysterical.
In truth, "hysterical" probably isn't the word I would use, but I'm not actually picking nits on this occasion. It's just weird, or something.
Have any of y'all read "The Golden Bough" by Frazer?
Difficult. Huge. But that's the thing; it's anthropology and social psychology between LeBon and Brown. It is very nearly a unique field unto itself because its historical window was so narrow.
It's important to me from two vectors: In my days of witchcraft and occultism, Frazer was required reading, which, I'm sure, is supposed to mean something; in the time since, there is Stetkevych,
Muhammad and the Golden Bough, which is its own complicated question, but also a fascinating scrap of the literary record insofar as there is a Golden Bough in Islam and in the pre-Islamic record. Stetkevych's comparatively extraordinarily thin tome is also outstandingly difficult reading, but also, in its way, a striking example of scholarship exploring the meaning of partiuclar religious symbols.° There are seven pages, for instance, dealing with particular aspects of throwing stones, best reproduced instead of described, which is problematic in its own right, but as the psychoanalytic meaning of history goes, this particular psychoanalysis is demonstrative of at least
something about not only the difficulty of the subject matter but also the straightforward implications of stepping out of caricature frameworks in order to deal with the history in its living implications.
†
The thing is, we're not making religion go away; it's virtually impossible. Destroying theism eventually becomes a matter of semantics, and thus is similarly impossible. The better way to deal with the living implications of religion would seem to have something to do with challenging narratives°° and altering the discourse. This isn't a strictly competitive endeavor; in many cases, what people need is a way to tell the story within their framework, and while "God" is a complicating factor, the underlying behavior is perfectly human.
Karen Armstrong's
A History of God is much more accessible than Stetkevych, and also much more general; there are also Jeffrey Burton Russell's books on the Devil; reading even these surveys of records historical and literary changes the way one argues about and even against the proposition of God. Elaine Pagels, too, with her work on the Gnostic Gospels, as well as her exploration of the historical politics of Satan.
And it is easy enough to understand, to the one, that nobody really wants to study what they so loathe, but, to the other, the critique of atheistic discourse in the topic article would be considerably defanged if particular experience wasn't so easily accessible. Rational argument is harder, and there is a loud faction creating a powerful behavior pattern reiterating boundaries of acceptable knowledge and ignorance by trying to keep it stupidly simplistic.
There is a certain irony about it. Hart is an American theologian whose specialty includes European continental philosophy; the "light of being" statement is, to the one, an encouraging sign, but, to the other, very much unlike the evangelical Christianist narrative denigrating American political discourse these last nigh on forty years, speak nothing of the nigh on sixty before that. Monotheism has certain logical results; Hart clearly isn't ready to decouple God from that specialness people feel within their religious contexts, but the viable tautalogy runs, "God is", and the most part of religion that gives societies trouble has to do with screwing that part up in order to feel special. Compared to the God of, say, Kim Davis' religion, Hart offers a somewhat evolved notion of godhead. His work has potential to do more to help Christians transform their faith and, thereby, religion, than anything modern atheistic discourse has yet provided. Christianity has very nearly caught up to Diderot. Let's hear it for the eighteenth century.
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Notes:
° If you happened to catch the spectacle with some extremists a few weeks back, the one ripping on Islam included in hs misrepresentations ahadith pertaining to an episode at the heart of Stetkevych's examination, the march and raid on Tabuk.
°° See also, #3537126/186↗, or, rather, the brief summary: Why is certain behavior not illegal? Compared to history, when would it have become illegal? The latter is the counterpoint, and considers the way in which society's outlook on the behavior has changed: Why is it legal? Because the argument to make it illegal has not yet prevailed. And that really is a matter of history and how we read it; I just don't expect the institutions could pull off that kind of prohibition against church groups targeting children for brainwashing, such as the proposition went. Nonetheless, if a particular range of argument has not prevailed, it occurs with different context and empowerment than it did, say, thirty years ago. In this aspect, changing narratives create or allow potentials for further change.
