Ian Harris explains how conceiving of God beyond theism gets beyond the apparent arbitrariness of life and death.
We hear too often of the sudden death of young people by mishap or malevolence, or of their slow death by degeneration or disease. Everyone will know people who have lost sons or daughters before they reached their teens, or husbands or wives in early adulthood.
So when I once suggested people might value this life more highly if they treated their time on Earth as if it were all there is, with no prospect of an afterlife beyond it, some people reacted sharply. A priest commented: "That's fine, perhaps, for those who enjoy threescore years and ten or more, especially if in reasonably good health and relative affluence. But what of those cut off in their prime (or earlier) by illness or accident or others' violence?"
For those unfortunates, how could there be any sense of fulfilment?
Where is the comfort that belief in an after-life once offered to those who mourn, and for many still does?
Where does God enter the equation?
There are no easy answers.
But for the secular Christian - that is, one whose understanding of the way the world functions is secular, but whose outlook is also steeped in the Judaeo-Christian tradition - the starting point must be to hold steadily to both the secular and the Judaeo-Christian points of reference.
God is then not the objective, supernatural being of traditional Christianity, Judaism and Islam, but God reconceived without those ancient theistic assumptions.
That removes at a stroke the unanswerable dilemma of a God who is all-powerful and all-loving, yet who is presumed to take a life early ("It's God's will"), or to choose not to avert a murder, disease, accident, natural disaster or war.
Conceiving of God beyond theism gets beyond the apparent arbitrariness of all this.
Emphasising Godness in everyday life means accepting human beings, not God, are responsible for causing injustice and perpetuating poverty - and therefore for correcting or preventing them.
It also leaves space for the role of chance both in causing untimely grief and in narrowly averting it.
It is tragic when a child's life is cut short, and only natural to want to believe he or she will continue in another dimension after death. At the very least, this would satisfy basic notions of fairness.
That, however, implies the value of a human life is what it might have become one day. It is closer to both Christian insight and secular understanding that a child's life, at each stage of development, is of supreme value in and for itself.
The same goes for adults struck down in their prime. It does not require the assurance of an after-life and its compensatory bliss to affirm their lives are of infinite value simply by virtue of their humanity.
That is precisely what is asserted in the astonishing Christian myth (in the sense of a story conveying deep religious truth) of God becoming human.
One way of interpreting that is to see God, symbol of all the best that people can conceive in meaning, purpose and values, embodied in the human Jesus - and potentially, by extension, in every human life.
It follows that people can choose to live out Godness in their ordinary lives, experiencing and expressing the timeless values of love and compassion, freedom and hope, creativity and service.
Concern for dying children and victims of violence then shows in the way people treat them while they are still alive. In doing so, they accept the responsibility that goes with being human: they don't evade it and leave it to a supernatural God in another world to pick up the pieces. Also, while belief in an afterlife may well comfort many who mourn, it is of no practical use to the dead.
The fifth-century North African bishop Augustine offers an interesting slant on this theme.
When a close friend died, Augustine said it seemed as if half of himself had died, too, since the friend was so much part of him in life.
But then he realised that in a sense he had not lost his friend at all, because "we can never lose those whom we have loved if we have loved them in God, since we have in fact loved them in the God we never can lose".
Augustine is pointing to a reality in the middle of the here-and-now which also transcends the here-and-now, a reality which could legitimately be described as eternal.
Use the word "Godness" for God, and secular Christians should readily concur.
• Ian Harris is a journalist and commentator.
