Žižek: Why Only an Atheist Can Truly Believe

[@julianphilosophy]

Thank you for watching. My “Complete Guide to Žižek ebook” covers this in more detail. You can find it here: www.patreon.com/julianphilosophy

[@decipheredofficial]

Julian, you are incredible at breaking down Zizek! New subscriber here. But yeah man, this is one of my fav Zizek takes. Being one who has studied world religions and metaphysics all my life, I loved hearing this from him when I first got on the Zizek train of study. Such a profound contemplation and way of looking at Christ on the cross.

[@mcosu1]

"If, in other religions, we pray to God, only in Christianity God himself prays."

[@aiya5777]

and it's rejected😭 thus the weeping God whined on the cross, questioning himself 😭 "Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?"😭 which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"😭

[@deror007]

@@aiya5777 Jesus was referencing Psalm 22

[@aiya5777]

@@deror007 how generous of you🤭 worshiping a bullied God🤣

[@andreaspriantono6791]

god that died by his own choice, and get resurrected by himself, then act like a savior. What a nonsense this god is...

[@aiya5777]

@@andreaspriantono6791 a pathetic God even if it does exist

[@jameshicks7125]

Zizek got me thinking about this a lot when I first heard him discuss it. The way I look at it is that within Jesus teachings one will find the means of ego building. Ego building is repairing the fractures from early childhood frustrations, neglect, insults and trauma arising from safety, security, comfort, certainty and belonging needs being disrupted in some way. If God or Jesus as God exists in a celestial "spiritual" realm then a parental phantasy develops displacing ego repair through his teachings. I claim that this enables jouissance because they can imagine in a phantasy of who they *could or would* be in Jesus or God's loving arms creating displacement or even dissociation from the present. This moves the theist back to Melanie Klein's paranoid/schizoid position. If God is dead and it is "up to us" then we move towards what she identified as the depressive / reparative position. This is what I work on as a psychoanalyst. I try to help my analysand move towards the depressive reparative position and away from the paranoid/schizoid position. Here they can embrace nuance and more easily evaluate their internal feelings and dialog without splitting (schizoid). If God is held as the ideal parent one can not escape the paranoid schizoid position. They must scan the environment, they must scan their thoughts and defer to splitting: right / wrong, good/evil, truth / lie , black / white, all / nothing categories. This moves the individual towards the infantile mind of primary narcissism. If the purpose of being a Christian is to love your neighbor, one must be able to see the nuance in their neighbor. The neighbor then necessarily becomes a subject rather than an object to be split into distinct components. It is only then we find the genuine interest, empathy and compassion for our neighbor because we have developed a healthy ego. We have accepted the degree of safety, security, comfort, certainty and belonging that we enjoy. It doesn't mean we have to like our neighbor "understand them" or "hear their story".

[@pobblebonk3]

Very nicely elucidation Julian, thank you from another Julian in Australia. As I was listening, for the first time I understood in philosophical terms the traversal I experienced earlier this year toward the end of my analysis. The whole babbling of my embedded story fell away as a fiction but a fiction which for the first time appeared as uniquely mine. Thanks for your dedication on this channel. It’s quite a gift.

[@mino7166]

yess! been looking forward to this topic alot

[@taboulefattouch4744]

Thank you for this brilliant explanation.

[@EinKleinerFisch]

nice Video as always :) In the Book recs you could include his newest one, „Christian atheism“, which as the Titel says Talk exactly about this principle

[@Zero-fh2wb]

“Religion is the greatest of philosophies; therefore, man cannot be a philosopher until he becomes a worshipper.”-abu zayd al-balkhi

[@taboulefattouch4744]

I was raised in the Syriac Orthodox tradition, was committed to the Church and attended the liturgies on a regular basis. It was always emphasised that according to our belief God suffered excruciating pain in Golgotha and that He died a real death like any human since as adherents of Miaphism we are to believe that JC humanity and divinity are mystically coexisting in the one divine person so it is not Christ in his humanity that suffered rather it was God who is a human since "before all ages" since he is coeternal with his father. Interestingly, there was an aura of superiority that our take on the trinity (one that is impossible to logically reconcile which is why I opted out of the cult of the Nazarene altogether in the summer of 2020) was true to the point that only we (and the people who share our Christology which are mainly Egyptian Copts, Armenian Othodox and Ethiopians) are blessed to recognise this seismic "reality" which manifested itself in a lax and dare I say decadent laziness when it comes to acting on the "beef and potatoes" of the "Christian Life". Hence there was (and continues to be) little to no concern for charity, little to no deep bible study (bible stories are recited pretty much as they would be spoken out of a cartoon book with biblical themes plus the obssession with Saint Ephrem who was a poet lacking any spiritual or theological depth. Needless to mention there never was any evangelisation or outreach activity. The geostrategic and economic turmoil in the middle east was and continues to be the 'excuse' for what amounts to a communal escape . Today a couple of sleepy small towns in Sweden boast more Syriac Orthodox than the entire Syriac Orthodox population of Syria and Sweden alone has 250% more Syriac Orthodox than the entire country of Iraq where in the early 1980's there were 600,000 Syriac and today only 150,000 are left. If you come on a Sunday to any of the Syriac Orthoox Churches in Sweden, Germany, North America, The Netherlands, Australia etc. you will see stunningly beautiful women who basically spend 1.5 to 2 hours before the kurbana (liturgy) service begins to do their hair and make up. The men will wash their flashy sports and luxury cars (most also buy special license plates with their names or something Syriac related at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars each) and groom themselves using the most expensive perfumes and designer clothes and shoes... I used to call it Calvinism on steroids but since I was introduced to Zizek's concept of the Atheist Christian I realise he is in fact accurate on this matter.

[@ZecZli]

"We are all atheists of a - wrong God." (Our Roman Catholic 😎 Pope's Paul VI quotation from the 1970s....)

[@ZecZli]

More precisely in this case would be - 'of the wrongly understood God'.

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

yeh, as a fan of Zizek, but also a nerd for these topics and issues and debates, this is just philosophical wank. this is the kind of philosophy that goes nowhere, means nothing, and is so outwardly self-satisfied and self-serving, I realise why people hate philsophers so much. these topics couldn't be simpler, and I resent all this dancing around as if its anything more than: "I think X!" "Do you have a reason to think that?" "A B and C" "Those reasons are fallacies" "...well... ughrgobnaeorgboaejbrgojbaergbnj" "riiiiiiight"

[@itzcoatlesquivelnieves8134]

Amazingly argued

[@tristanreynolds5748]

What topics are simple? Certain not the Bible or philosophy of religion

[@Rivulets048]

Reddit philosopher spotted

[@anthonybrett]

@@Rivulets048 Lol oooh yeah! For sure.

[@jclive2860]

They're simple to people who dont really care for them. The thing is if everyone thought like that then things like religion would be almost obsolete. Society could become closer to a utopia with everyone being philosophical thinkers. Perhaps it is the next stage of evolution. It is what made us humans after all. Abstract thinking separated us from the other sapiens.

[@parsley8554]

Gona have to look at this a few times i think

[@aosidh]

Still trying to puzzle out what this description of Christianity has to do with having a magical psychic connection to god/Jesus!! I swear I'm not trying to be a fundamentalist atheist 😹

[@mcosu1]

Julian, this was interesting but incomplete without talking about the new Christian Atheism book. Its quite different than Puppet and Dwarf for instance.

[@upsetforever7643]

He is right "Beware the converts zeal" is most appropriate in the case of atheists.

[@apachecoh]

Hi Julian, you don’t mention “Christian Atheism” (2024), maybe it’s because of the video’s date?

[@tl5707]

I always am confused by this, 'the gap between god and man is transposed back into man himself'. Does it mean the infinity is now inside man? Just understand it literally?

[@nightoftheworld]

4:26 *Xtian atheism* “Zizek’s basic argument, to simplify somewhat, is that if you really want to be an atheist-you have to become a Christian. Whereas to remain an atheist is in-fact to hold onto an outdated Christian logic that believes in the idea of a universal transcendental deity-or perhaps believes in Him precisely by disavowing Him.”

[@omkarbhausahebchattar5407]

An similar argument was made by osho in the 70s but it was much broader.

[@Skibidibobobeebop]

You suggested every zizek book about god/christianity except Christian atheism. Why is that?

[@ryanmoore2812]

Julian, have you studied the Kierkegaardian Critique of this kind of Hegelian interpretation of Christianity? Specifically within Johannes Climacus' Philosophical Fragments and PostScript to Philosophical Fragments? Kierkegaard makes similar but also distinctly different points on this matter, positing the god man as the absolute paradox which is unapproachable through speculation. He argues that the god man is objectively absurd and cannot be reduced to God or Man but must be both.

[@lhooq21]

Is it possible that every freed Christian is also obfuscated through a capitalist materialist situation?

[@BlasterMaster80]

Never once have I felt the need to disprove a God; that would be burden shifting.

[@itzcoatlesquivelnieves8134]

Holly crap, after years and years of listening to that argument over and over again I think I finally got it... If you want to be an atheist you got to become "like" a christian in the sense that they are free from the old idea of god, but if you keep being a facebook atheist, your idea of god is just as irrational as an old fashioned fanstic's one... Damn.

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

nah, its dishonestly and almost patronisingly framing theism as somehow the default, when it isn't. its toying with words; the worst kind of philosophy.

[@nts4906]

There is literally no such thing as a rational idea of God. The entire purpose of the idea of God is an antithesis to rationality itself. God is always the fatigued reactionary ideology of one who gives up and wants comfort without earning it. The only rational response to irrationality is a negative one. Religion has the same place in the world as doctors not washing their hands. It is simply a mistake and one that all humans would be better off without. Hegel knew this. Zizek is too much of a populist and wants to appease the herd of idiots.

[@anthonybrett]

@@satyasyasatyasya5746 "framing theism as somehow the default" Can you prove that it isn't? To borrow Lacan, we all seek the "big other". From the standpoint of evolutionary biology, every single tribe of humans, separated by oceans and landmass devised their own religious systems. I'm not arguing for the metaphysical belief in "god" but there is certainly good evidence to suggest that the drive to theism may well be innate.

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

@@anthonybrett "Can you prove that it isn't?" you... you literally did the thing... this is a joke, right?

[@anthonybrett]

@@satyasyasatyasya5746 Hey, I'm not the absolutist here, you are. You said, and I quote..."framing theism as somehow the default, *when it isn't*" How do you know it isn't?

[@Suyanto231]

Thanks you

[@miguelangelous]

…. and I agree

[@abdallam4039]

So if the “old” notion of god as an almighty deity who exists and interacts with his creation and so on is false, what is the “new” notion?

[@taboulefattouch4744]

By the "old" notion of God I assume you mean the Platonist take on the "one" who is all good. That "one" is according to Plato not active in the world and Johannite theology elaborates on the issue identifying JC as the demiurge and describing the indifference of God the Father in unequivocal terms. The Gospels do not depict the Triune God as an "almighty" deity and the insistence of JC on a strict adherence to every iota in the scriptures existent at the time are an oxymoron and an internal contradiction that is so evident that it is the seed that leads any common sense Christian to become a "Christian Atheist" as per Zizek's ingenious description. It is only the consumerist capitalists and the prosperity mega churches and so called "charismatic" movement that actually believe that God (aka wealth and material pleasures and social recognition) exists and wants them to be on a constant 'high'. This reality is exactly what Zizek refers to and it is not "new" but somewhat modified in our day and age due to social alienation, high mobility and tech slavery.

[@The-Underground-Man]

In my view, old notion of God is an elderly man on the sky with long white beard witch many atheists accuse religious people of believing and new notion of God is that God is something transcendental but we don't really know what that is. In religious texts there is no descriptions of God, and all religions teach that human beings have no capacity to understand God, and giving ANY imaginary attributes to God makes no sense. We can't even imagine God, so how can we describe him correctly? Every priest or religious scolar will give you the same answer, religion teaches that we don't understand God, that's why the word belief is used, you don't know, but you can believe, and people who truly understand religion take it as such, religious people and atheists boath. People who understand religion never claim that God exists, because we don't know, but they still believe in him. This is what religion is about, it's not about debating the existence of God because we have no understanding what we're debating about. Truly religious person never debates the existence of God because to them, it is pointless.

[@asyetundetermined]

⁠​⁠​⁠the failure point in this laughably divorced from reality navel gazing is finding this so-called common sense Christian. I suspect Zizek may have been taking the piss with this one.

[@aidanknight1574]

How exactly does the resurrection of the body of Christ fit into Zizek’s Christian (existential) Atheism, if at all?

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

it doesn't. this is all just nonsense and bending words and trying to say something outwardly contradictory but pretending its not, to be smart. Zizek does this sometimes. I have so many issues with this video, yeesh lol

[@he1ar1]

Jesus before his death was man and his resurrection does not change that. Something like this did not exist in Roman Religion. Who liked to philosophise and ponder which gods in other cultures were the same gods as theirs. Jesus has no parallel with Roman Religion, unlike the Jewish god who was associated with Saturn. Hence Christians were called atheists.

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

@@he1ar1 the Romans actually had the cult of Mithra/Mithras, and jesus like figures were super common in the ancient world. also, there was no historical jesus who could have died as detailed. its like robin hood or somehting, if you took a time machine, you'd not find the man who fits all these stories.

[@nts4906]

@@landonn420Those ideas are just apologetics to preserve the historical position of Christianity. They think religion had more validity than it ever did. Instead, religion is basically like when doctors didn’t wash their hands or when humans sacrificed children to make it rain. There is no sublation or preservation of the underlying concept. There is just rejection of stupidity and the need to leave it behind completely.

[@leo--4341]

Christians are coping

[@richardthompson1138]

Not only comedians make a career out of making jokes 🙂

[@commonwunder]

No one can ever win the, ( A single father figure controls everything ) cosmological/ontological argument. Neither rowdy atheist or strident theist has ever 'won' the argument. The profundity of the question is without doubt. But if history can teach you anything, is that this debate has raged for millennia. So what does that tell you? All you're doing is offering 'momentary credence' to your view ...and for the others, that follow that view. Religious debate is a never-ending 'rally' in tennis. To rise up to it and to participate in pure language games ...is peculiar. The 'smart' people on both sides should realise this? Those that are listening to you, are already indoctrinated into what you believe. The iconoclastic atheist and ardent theist are all one and the same. They both fight a winless war. Sisyphus personified. For believing in a father figure is fruitless, a life-sized placebo lozenge. But believing you can use logic or empiricism to counter a belief system, based on the idea this life is a test of faith, without any internal validation, or proof, is beyond idiotic. Religion is a self-perpetuating 'closed' system, ... it cannot be defeated. That German guy... Einstein, he may even have had a famous quote, on it... something about insanity and repetition.

[@asyetundetermined]

I’m not sure what world you guys live in, but in mine an atheist answers the god/meaning of life/why something and not nothing questions with an “I don’t know” and fights theism only in as far as its political influence presents a practical challenge to their ability to live freely. This philosophical gobbledygook applies to a percentage of the world’s population that amounts to nothing more than a rounding error. Pure wankery.

[@domsjuk]

To me, one of Zizeks more uninteresting and overstretched tangents. Maybe I absolutely haven't grasped the depth of it, but this argument just seems to be elegant semantics and associative play aiming at ideological self-awareness, cultural dialectics and (naïve vs. critical) Christian theology rather than saying anything concrete about Atheism (which is just a Zizek-typical stooge strawman) and living in an emancipated way beyond dogma. Are you really set free, liberated from the Master through God enacting his crucifixion and seemingly embracing and subordinating to the free will of its own creation, by him setting it all up in that way and subsequently disenchanting it again though the resurrection and promise of the eternal afterlife? It might just be another flex of the truly omnipotent either way - and be all the same to him. Freedom under God still doesn't free you and following the argument even predicates you to be bound to his metaphysical framework. Leaving humans room for play, staging death of either god or human doesn't change that, nor stabilizes belief nor give you anything more than a presumed revelation. Isn’t this then even the exact same kind of nihilism and sham liberty promoted under capitalism? You are doomed to be free, and this freedom in turn is just a justification for the irresponsibility of the system. Assuming nature is arbitrary (made by God) rather than contingent (emerging from the chaos of nature) doesn't really make a difference either, I think. There might be something way smaller than the argument in the psychological point, that there is less need for Mastery and authority in “atheist Christianity” than a naturalist world, but again I think this is theoretical, discount-freedom pivoted on irrational belief, kind of like a hospital where there is a medicine against everything, but it's all homeopathic.

[@yazanasad7811]

People in public secular but religious in private

[@Vashro]

lol nice face from zize

[@asyetundetermined]

This has absolutely no practical value in relation to how actual living, breathing humans conduct the business of life.

[@Nilnaberius6727]

If you think that jealous god died on the cross to taste it's own tears you should note how terrible man truly is in a sense beyond good and evil, personally myself I find abraxas most compelling by the antichrist's writings

[@Normal-u5w]

God is the mirage in the desert for wanderers and Christ the litteral centrally planned paradise.. Only the finite sensuality of the flesh can distinguish "good" from "bad" in casting out the serpent wanderer

[@Normal-u5w]

Serpant reps liminality

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

ok, firstly, a smear of so-called athesit zeal is an aesthetic strawman. if an issue matters, people act like it. second, atheism is not 'disproving gods' its the position that the theistic proposition has not met its burden of proof. No proof therefore, no belief. *this is basic, and framing it as anything else is dishonest*

[@kylecargill1248]

that was fast. you are correct, but you come off really salty XD

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

@@kylecargill1248 its not salt, i just don't like dishonesty.

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

@@thotslayer9914 to be without belief is not the same as denying the proposition. its like saying "i don't buy your story" you don't have to disprove it, if they don't meet their burden of proof, you default to "don't belive you buddy" its that simple.

[@kylecargill1248]

@@satyasyasatyasya5746 fair, but try to remember that not all dishonesty is conscious. ego tends to defend itself by tricking you into not thinking through positions or doing research. it’s probably not malicious, and if it isn’t, the best way to engage in such discourse is to have a softer hand, at least in my opinion

[@satyasyasatyasya5746]

@@kylecargill1248 I expect better from professional philosophers though. Which is who is presenting these videos, no? Sure, a normal person can "trick themselves" but to see a a professional do the same thing, is somehow worse. One is gentle with those who deserve it. But not with someone who should - and likely does - know better.

[@marcelodepijama]

🤦‍♂

[@SnowCones101]

What Zizek is doing here is super interesting, but relies so much on these extremely pigeonholed definitions of both Christianity and atheism that it just doesn't seem to line up with reality. Maybe he makes it more clear in the books.

[@JohnLovell-q9p]

That sounds stupid and not interesting

[@RayMcNamaraMusic]

Came for Zizek, got bait and switched. Leaving a downvote on my way out. Byeee

[@noobslayeru]

The Christian God has always been the God of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, etc. atheists reject that there is such a thing as “existence itself” which has divine-like properties (necessity, simplicity, perfection, etc) If you reject this, then you’re just not a Christian. Christianity is not atheistic, nor were the Christians like Leibniz, who held to the divinity of existence itself.

[@brianrainosek1178]

Goes to show you can say anything about anything.

[@tristanreynolds5748]

Angry Atheist or angry evangelical? Let's be good liberals and respect his religion mmk?

[@brianrainosek1178]

@@tristanreynolds5748 i don't exactly classify myself as angry