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Post-theism is the belief that the belief in a god belongs to a previous stage of human development and, thus, a division of theism vs. atheism is obsolete. It is a variant of nontheism. The term appears in liberal Christianity and post-Christianity.
Frank Hugh Foster in a 1918 lecture announced that modern culture had arrived at a "post-theistic stage" in which humanity has taken possession of the powers of agency and creativity that had formerly been projected upon God.[1]
Denys Turner argues that Karl Marx did not choose atheism over theism but rejected the binary Feuerbachian choice in The Essence of Christianity altogether, a position which by being post-theistic is at the same time necessarily post-atheistic.[2] At one point, Marx argued "there should be less trifling with the label 'atheism'", as he insisted "religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself."[3]
Related ideas include Friedrich Nietzsche's pronouncement that "God is dead" and the transtheism of Paul Tillich or Pema Chödrön.
