Nagarjuna, the second-century Buddhist logician, developed a method called prasanga — the technique of following an opponent's premise to its own collapse, not to win, but to reveal that the premise was load-bearing for something the opponent hadn't admitted they needed. His target wasn't atheism or theism. It was svabhava — the idea that anything, including God, possesses a fixed, self-contained essence that doesn't depend on relation to anything else. What he exposed is still uncomfortable: the moment you define God as completely self-sufficient and independent, you've made God unable to create, respond, or care — because those are relational acts. A God who is genuinely affected by nothing is also genuinely uninvolved. The theologians who want both total independence and genuine love are smuggling in a contradiction they've named 'mystery.' That isn't a dismissal — it's a clarification about where the real weight of the question falls. If God is real, the interesting pressure point isn't existence but relation: not whether there is a ground of being, but whether that ground can actually touch anything. Carry that today as a sharpening instrument, not a weapon.

Who in your thinking about God are you protecting from the relational problem — and what would you have to give up if you stopped?

Drawing from Madhyamaka Buddhist Philosophy — Nagarjuna (c. 150–250 CE)