After brushing off his own high standing in his opening words, Zizek argued that a much bigger societal view — belief in God — is an illusion.
Zizek delivered his lecture, titled “Why Only an Atheist Can Be a True Christian,” to a packed crowd in McCosh 50 on Tuesday afternoon, with overflow audience members watching a simulcast of the lecture in a second McCosh auditorium.
The philosopher sprinkled Soviet jokes, Woody Allen references and examples from his experience growing up in Communist Yugoslavia throughout his 90-minute lecture.
He noted that parents and many children do not believe in Santa Claus. Yet children pretend to believe in him in order to get presents and not disappoint their parents.
“You can complicate the structure, but you see in this simple example how a certain belief can function objectively without anyone in the first person believing in it,” he explained.
Similarly, religion itself functions as an illusion, he continued. “We know it’s an illusion, but it fully functions as an illusion,” he said. “What happens in Christianity, in the moment of the cross, [is that] God himself dies on the cross.”
Zizek, a proudly proclaimed atheist, said that his favorite theological text, the Book of Job, is also his favorite repudiation of God’s omniscience.
In the passage, Job asks God to explain the extreme suffering in his life. God responds that Job couldn’t possibly understand the actions of the creator of the universe.
“Usually this passage is read as the assertion of the arrogance of God,” Zizek said. But Zizek said his preferred reading of the passage holds that the world has become so complex that God does not understand its full scope.
At another point in the lecture, Zizek argued that God does not exist in a state of partial knowledge, but rather that he is “dead.”
Zizek also argued that disbelief in God is a view supported by religious texts such as the Talmud and the Bible.
God has put his trust in people, Zizek said. “This is, I think the true message of Christianity: God dies on the cross; we are condemned to freedom.”
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