When we say God, we are speaking above all else of the difference between the creator and the creature. Communion with God as creator as what essentially towers above us opens up the possibility of transcendence. Transcendence means above all self-transcendence. This does not mean running away from the world, but transforming our relationship to it. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sphere of morality, which seems to be the center of Dave s concern.
Morality demands self-sacrifice.
As Plato argued in the Republic , self-sacrifice is possible only when we come to the realization that while we can belong to the abiding Good, it can never belong to us. Even as it offers itself to us in an act of participation and communion that grounds our being, it withholds itself from us. We are moral when we learn to love the Good more than we love ourselves. The denial of transcendence is the denial that we have anything beyond this life and this world to aspire toward. Where I see religion and philosophy coming together is in the attempt to establish a relationship to the beyond.