Finding God, Losing God: The Spiritual and Irreverent Upside of Losing Faith

ISBN-13: 9780996526302 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 492 str.

Bart Nedelman

Opis

If you're looking for love without God, you’ve come to the right place.Bart Nedelman takes the no-god, no-need-for-god proposition and makes the case that there is far more love, peace, civil liberty, and equality to go around when no God is around — and a far more fulfilling personal freedom and spiritual upside to cutting God loose to fend for itself. Finding God, Losing God is a religious romp and a moral slugfest with Bart making the cost-benefit take of finding God or losing this archaic fiction and bottomless well of human misery well worth considering and long overdue.
 
But why stop there? It’s open season on a rogues’ gallery theological thuggery of all stripes: evangelical goons-for-Christ politicians, Tea-Party whiners and fundamentalist Islamist bullies, and rock star televangelists who gleefully mislead their naive and painfully gullible adherents, especially about whom and what Jesus wants them to vote for. Bart calls them on the unrelenting mayhem and gratuitous harm they cause with their genitalia obsessions, misogyny, goofy worldly pronouncements and extraterrestrial claims of truth, their con games, and the irrational and intellectual insults theologians, televangelists,  priests, Islamists,  faith-based politicians and newscasters attempt to push across our boundaries every day.
 
In a series of real conversations between two brothers, Zach, highly educated and a PhD who found Jesus late in midlife, and Bart, a secular humanist/atheist and Mensan, the restricted religious mind is revealed and held in stark contrast to the open secular humanist mindset. In their often humorous and brutal battles the differences between these two approaches to finding meaning in our lives and personal responsibility becomes clear. Finding God, Losing God reveals how the god-virus overwhelms its host, even highly educated and intelligent hosts, dismantling their rationally objective and creative centers of thought.
 
Zach, who came to Jesus and now burnishes a patina of moral goodness, becomes increasingly morally incensed by his humanist-atheist brother’s humorous and penetrating questions and analysis about the viability of belief in God and the harm such beliefs inflict not only upon the true believer, but America and the world, at large. After all, what’s the sense of finding Jesus and becoming morally superior if you can’t become morally incensed at what your moral inferiors think, say, and do? The verbal fireworks are often laugh out loud funny and penetrating.
 
Here is some Bart Nedelman:

Evangelical Christians and Muslims, all fundamentalist religionists, wolf down their religious beliefs like a dog gobbles its dinner, without stopping to chew or think upon what they swallow whole.

Gods are like auto parts – all fail in time.

Faith strikes home when the single desire to believe exceeds the thousand reasons for not doing so.

Those claiming to be spending their life doing God’s work will surely find, upon dying, that they were unemployed the entire time.