Over at HuffPo, Rabbi and real estate magnate Alan Lurie takes up the question, “Can the existence of God ever be proven?” His answer: certainly not. Does that, then, mean that he gives up the idea of a God? Heavens, no! Don’t you know about the new theology?

Lurie compares arguments about God to a disagreement about a painting. One person may be deeply moved by the daubs of paint on a canvas, while another is left cold and unconvinced by the other’s emotional experience.

This person may try to explain her experience, but she will ultimately fail to convince someone who only sees pigment on canvas, and who may conclude that her experience is delusional, and that the study of aesthetics is a waste of time. To the person who was so deeply impacted by the painting, though, such an assertion completely misses the point, and does nothing to convince her that her experience is not real, and that she was not touched and expanded by her encounter.

An emotional experience with a painting is, of course, “real” in a different way than a celestial sky-fairy who cares about us and intervenes in the world is “real.” One is a subjective feeling about an object, the other an assertion about the existence and nature of something outside of oneself: a universal reality. People don’t kill each other about their different reactions to paintings, but they do when it comes to the nature of God.

To Lurie, then, the prime “proof” of God’s existence is the emotional experience of God, not evidence for the existence of a celestial being:

In this way, arguments and experiments can not prove the existence of God because God is not an hypothesis. For human beings, God is the experience of a transformative relationship with creation itself, in which we know that the Universe is inherently meaningful, that we were created for a staggering purpose that will unfold over eons, that love and gratitude are the essential actual materials of our lives and that we are holy beings. The experience of a relationship with God is not one of religious doctrine, does not come from statistics, experiments or argument, and is certainly not in conflict with science and reason in any way. It is also not about righteous certainty or judgment. The experience of God expands the possibilities for our lives and increases the feeling of mystery and intellectual curiosity about the world. Reason and observation are crucial elements in faith. Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive and are no more in conflict than civil engineering and poetry. As a rabbi and person of faith, I have no interest in proving the existence of God and certainly do not want to convert anyone to my religion or way of thinking. What I am passionate about, though, is helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God because I know that such a relationship can create powerful positive personal and communal transformation. One brings another to the experience of God not through philosophical or material proof, but through living the example of gratitude, purpose, compassion and love.

It’s not clear to me whether the good rabbi is an atheist who simply thinks that there are benefits to entertaining a “transformative relationship” with a nonexistent being (I’m reminded of the old joke, “What do you call a Jew who doesn’t believe in God?” Answer: “A Jew”), or simply someone who will buy the existence of a celestial being without proof (implied in “helping bring others to an experience and relationship with God”). And he fails to explore the consequences of bringing people into a relationship with a nonexistent being. Isn’t that really a lie, like having a transformative relationship with Harvey the Rabbit or the notion that David Koresh was a religious prophet? There’s a reason why Dawkins called his book The God Delusion.

It baffles me that these people take their ideas so seriously, but what’s really amazing is that others take them seriously—so desperate are they to take anything as “evidence” for God.

Lurie, who has apparently abandoned the traditional notion of God, still sees tremendous value in forming a relationship with a God who may not exist. That’s not only delusional, but condescending. Only clerical garb can render such ridiculous ideas immune to ridicule.

When I read this stuff, I’m often reminded of the first verse of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men”: