I’ve never met an atheist I didn’t like.

But, then, I’ve never actually met an atheist.

Not really.

Oh, I’ve met a number of people purporting to be atheists, but when it came right down to it, they each held up some guiding force that is “bigger than all of us.” It could be “for the Common Good,” or “Common Sense,” or “Nationalism,” or “Right Ethics,” or something, but it fits into my broad, general definition of having a “god.”

Truth to be told, what most self-avowed atheists are railing against is the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And if that God exists in the way “He” is presented in much of religion and culture, I’ll rail against “Him,” too.

I’m reminded of a story about the late Harry Emerson Fosdick, the long-time pastor of Riverside Church in New York City. One evening, a distraught student from Columbia University burst into his study and announced, “I have decided that I cannot and do not believe in God!”

“All right,” Dr. Fosdick replied, “but describe for me the God you don’t believe in.”

The student proceeded to sketch his idea of God. When he finished, Fosdick said, “We’re in the same boat. I don’t believe in that God either.”

What’s that? You can’t picture some all-powerful being up above the big blue sky? Neither can I.

Don’t agree with the Christian Coalition’s highly-publicized religio-political agenda? You’re not alone. Can’t conceive of one that “allows” hurricanes, tornadoes, world hunger or economic deprivation? I’m with you.

Can’t take the Bible literally as the inerrant, infallible Word of God? Can we talk?

Can’t fathom a God who would move someone to rage for hours on end outside the Hub, to the point of calling women whores and sluts in the name of religion? That idea of God sounds like my idea of the devil.

I don’t believe in that God either.

In his book, The Existence and Attributes of God, Stephen Charnock questions whether noted atheists through history were “downright deniers of the existence of God.” Perhaps, he says, they simply “disparaged the deities commonly worshiped by the nations where they lived.” Perhaps, he says, the “atheists” were of “clearer reason to discern that those qualities, vulgarly attributed to their idols, as lust and luxury, wantonness and quarrels, were unworthy of the nature of a god.”

I’ll admit that, even in this age, there are major problems with organized religion. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that the number one cause of atheism in 20th-century America is Christians. That there are those who proclaim God with their mouths and deny that same God with their lifestyles is what an unbelieving world finds simply unbelievable.

Martin Luther, with characteristic bluntness, acknowledged that religion can be one of the most wicked and ruinous forces in human experience. It is like water — it can refresh and cleanse or it can engulf and drown.

It has been proposed that Jesus never had to deal with irreligion. As far as is known, neither Jesus nor any of his disciples ever met an atheist. The controversies in which he found himself were not “religion v. no religion.” Instead, they were of good religion v. bad religion — of a high, transforming, inspiring type of religion against a low, degrading, unethical type that did people more harm than good.

Paul Tillich, a Lutheran theologian dead for 30 years now, identified God as “the depth and ground of all being.” That is to say that the only way one can deny God’s existence is to say, “Life is shallow. Life is empty. Life has no meaning. Life has no depth. Life is only surface.”

God’s good name and character gets attached to all sorts of bad religion and spiritually unhealthy stuff. There are those who suggest that we may have to start all over again in learning about and talking about God, so tainted has the name of God become, thanks to the human failings and shortcomings of God’s followers.

I wouldn’t go that far.

But I would say that — if you would deny God — talk to me instead about depth. Talk about that which you take seriously without any reservation. Talk about what is important to you — your highest standards and ideals, your ultimate concerns. Talk about where the deepest part of you is rooted.

I’ll contend that we’re beginning to talk about God.

People that know about depth and who seek that depth in life know about God — whether they use that name or not.

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Rev. Scott Grotewold is a pastor at Collegiate United Methodist Church and Director of the Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry at ISU.