In the very early days of their history, Jews, Christians and Muslims were all called "atheists" by their pagan contemporaries. This was not because they did not believe in God -- obviously they did -- but because their conception of the divine was so radically different from that of their neighbours that it seemed blasphemous. Historically, atheism has rarely been a blanket denial of the sacred per se, but a rejection of a particular conception of the sacred. Even the most fervent atheists often have sacred things in their life: They see humanity or the natural world as inviolable, uniquely precious and mysterious.

And not all religions are concerned with theism -- with God. Buddhism, for example, has no conception of a Creator God, because it finds this idea unnecessary and limiting. But they certainly have a strong commitment to the transcendent and the ineffable, which they call Nirvana, and describe this in ways that are similar to the way theists speak about their God.

Often atheists today are rejecting the classical Western view of a personal God who is responsible for everything that happens on earth, who is wholly omnipotent, and utterly compassionate. Elie Weisel said that this God died in Auschwitz: He found it impossible to imagine such a divine being who would permit such an atrocity. As we look around the world today, many of us would agree with this.

But this Western notion of the divine is relatively recent -- a mere four hundred years old. Before that time, Jews, Christians and Muslims all insisted that though one could start with this notion of a benevolent father, one had to move beyond it, because God transcends personality. Some -- Maimonides, Ibn Sina, Ibn Arabi, Denys the Areopagite, Edckhart -- said that it was better to say that God did not exist, because our conception of existence is far too limited to apply to God. They said that God was not the Supreme Being, because that implied that he was a being like ourselves, but bigger and better. God was not "another being." The Greek Orthodox formulated the doctrine of the Trinity in the fourth century in part to remind Christians that they could not think of God as a simple personality.

For centuries, radical mystics and leading theologians in all three faiths would agree that there is "Nothing" out there: they often preferred to speak about God as "Nothing," because "he" was not a being like a table, a person or even an unseen reality like the atom that could be discerned in a laboratory or by mathematical proof. God was a different kind of reality altogether.

When we enter into dialogue with anybody, we should not go out to "win"; we should be prepared to be changed by our encounter with others, and see what we have to learn. Believers should reflect that historically widespread atheism has often indicated a major leap forward in religious thought -- as is evident in the case of Jews, Christians and Muslims, who were thinking about the divine in a radically different way.

And many atheists could be in revolt from a lazy, facile theology that has far too simplistic a notion of the divine. In recent years, we have seen people committing atrocities or starting wars in the belief that "God" told them to do it. In the Middle Ages, the Crusaders went into battle with the cry "God wills it!" when they slaughtered Muslims and Jews. Obviously "God"
willed no such thing; the Crusaders were simply projecting their fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto a deity they had created in their own image.

And we do not have to be Crusaders to fall into this trap. How often we hear preachers, broadcasters and lecturers claiming that "God" wills this and forbids that -- and it is uncanny how often these opinions of the deity coincide with those of the speaker. All too often people forget that God is transcendent and see him as a being like themselves, writ large, and with likes and dislikes similar to their own. Instead of using the concept of God to go beyond themselves, they use it to give a seal of absolute approval to their own prejudices. They have created an idol.

Monotheists have always warned against idolatry. It may be that the atheism that is taking hold is a rejection of a widespread idolatry which has forgotten that any conception of the divine is bound to be inadequate. In a restaurant, when we have had a strong-tasting first course, the waiter often brings a sorbet so that we can cleanse our palette and taste the next course. Today many feel the need to rinse their minds of inadequate ideas of God, and may have to enter into what the mystics used to call the dark night of the soul or the cloud of unknowing, so that we can all move forward.