Spiritual atheism

Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and in an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed: "God is necessary, and so must exist ... Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist ... But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?" According to Antinoff, spiritual atheism begins with a triple realization: that our experience of ourselves and our world leaves us ultimately dissatisfied, that our dissatisfaction is intolerable and so must be broken through, and that there is no God. Continuing where writers such as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris left off, Antinoff's unique and prescient take on deity and spirituality makes this eloquent book a critical contribution to the understanding of the quest for salvation and enlightenment in a world full of chaos and need.

"God is necessary, and so must exist -- yet I know that He doesn't exist, and can't exist" -- The untenability of God and the insufficiency of woman/man -- Religion redefined -- Religious atheism is not psychology -- The religious impulse in a world without God and the possibility of an atheistic transcendence -- Spiritual loneliness -- The failure of sexual love to satisfy the ultimate spiritual longing -- The failure of artistic creativity to satisfy the ultimate spiritual longing -- Hedging one's bets : three postscripts on the conflict within and between art and love -- The failure of human experience to satisfy the ultimate spiritual longing -- Evading it -- Confronting it -- Resolving it.