Ideas and Challenges
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when “God” is only rightly known and loved within the confines of special communitya Jewish God or a Hindu God or a Buddhist God. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has rightly noted, “God is the God of all humanity, but between Babel and. In truth, God is not a Christian God or a Muslim God or one
the end of days no single faith is the faith of all humanity.”of human faiths does not necessarily imply a diversity of gods. Yet insofar as members of any religion claim ultimate truth for their all-too-human conception of the divine, it is not clear what status other communities can^11 The diversity
and ought to have in orienting society.tradition that its faith and interpretation of God are one and the same with the divine, obviously true and ultimately real. Hypertheism claims that “Hypertheism” is the term we use for the conviction of a community or
one’s vision of God and it alone is sufficient to speak of the mystery, power, and truth of the divine. Accordingly, human life must become enfolded within that community’s vision and faith and every aspect of existence made to conform to its convictions about God. Hypertheism is a term for
the f law of theistic religion that endangers the meaning and purpose of diverse forms of human life.of theism and humanism and which also necessarily pit religion against Hypertheism and overhumanization are concepts for internal distortions
humanism. Ironically, they are both forms of over-reach on the part of human beings, either in terms of the radical extension of human power beyond bounds or in terms of claims to know without failure or distortion the will of God. It is not surprising, then, that there are thinkers and
movements who reject any form of humanism, secular or religious. Humanism is false on this account not only because it focuses on the worth of actual human beings to the seeming exclusion of other living beings, but because it tries to explain the working of complex systems
solely with reference to the lives and actions of individual human agents. The rejection of the priority of human agency is one defining feature of contemporary forms of secular able that other thinkers and movements disclaim all forms of theism and anti-humanism. Likewise, it is understand-
especially the idea of one supreme divine agent. Theism is wrong in this view both because it denies other religious communities and because it believes in a supernatural divine agent somehow operating within a uni-verse otherwise functioning according to natural laws. These claims fuel
the fires of religious and secular look that rejects humanistic assumptions about the forces that define the world. To be human is to be par t of some larger whole, and it is this whole, Anti-humanism is not somehow anti-human. It means, rather, an out-post-theism.