I don’t have an opinion on the book, but I have an opinion on Eric Metaxas. The guy has utterly gone off the deep-end and is into all sorts of conspiracy theories and Christian nationalism nonsense now. He has been reduced to punching people on bikes and blowing festooned shofars at Trump rallies. I wouldn’t waste my time even reading a review of something he wrote, he has lost all credibility he ever had as an academic or an intellectual.
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What do you have when wishful thinking goes so far as to make a complete break with reality? My response to the title of this book was looking up “psychotic breaks” to understand something about them and the people who make claims completely contrary to reality.
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Now that’s something.
Thanks for the update. I know next to nothing about him. Now I know the kind of stuff I wish I didn’t need to know.
Sadly, there were thousands or 4 and 5 star “reviews” on Amazon, which tells me, in this context, more about the readers and what they reflect of US culture than it does about the book.
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A-theism is alive and well right here. What reviews do the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times let alone The Times, The Telegraph and The Guardian give it?
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Not even a yawn from the Post or the NYT.
Too lazy to grab my ID to log in to some resources at the moment.
Publisher’s Weekly does reviews focused on public libraries in the US. They wrote this:
Is anybody going to actually read this book? (Don’t look at me.)
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I’ve never read a book on atheism. What could there possibly be to say?
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Well, Richard Dawkins and co have made a career and a lot of money out of it, soo…
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Oh, maybe after I finish all the print books at my house (better prioritize those as these eyes are failing fast), and the ebooks on my ereaders, and the ones I will want to read that aren’t here yet.
There is a bit of a back up.
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But have they said anything, really? Or is it like business management books that just shake up all the same known phrases in a new order, and republish them?
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The latter. Add first class marketing
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He’s said he’s prepared to sacrifice his life for 45.
Well they haven’t made any money off me.
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I’m amazed at the amount of pre-judgment that I just read. I don’t know anything about the author, but the book is pretty interesting. I am not quite half way through, his comments on water I found particularly interesting. I was an Associate Dean for a number of years at a medical college and would meet some very smart people. One man, had a PhD in Physical Chemistry. he came to believe in God through his studies on the angle of Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms. He worked with a Nobel Laureate at Berkeley.
He also has some very interesting stories about Archeology. I was treating one patient, a psychiatrist, who was searching for God and when a priest told him that Archeology disproves the Bible, he stopped his search.
There are some good things about Archeology there so far.
I think our culture has become so critical and judgmental. You see this of course in politics.
I was very critical of the Bible but had not read it. The first thing I read was from 1st Samuel and the story of Hanna and Elkanah. As a psychiatrist, trying to find out people’s life stories, I thought, ‘this sounds like a reality’ Of course, as I read on, I was impressed by two things. One was how self-centered people are. The second was how much they turn away from God.
So far Metaxas book has some merit.
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Who was the man? What do you mean by the angle of hydrogen and oxygen atoms? How would that make somebody believe in God?
I looked it up on Wikipedia once, worth looking at. I got a C in P Chem
Yeah, and Metaxas is definitely part of the problem not the solution. The guy is a whole situation. From his Twitter yesterday:
https://twitter.com/ericmetaxas/status/1586710616043315203
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Please point to the article. Who was the man you mention?
Perhaps Metaxas’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.
There is somebody willing to say as much about just about any book ever written. That there might be something of interest in any book, I am willing to concede. But that is no argument in favor of reading them all. Triage is as necessary in choice of reading material as in medical treatment. Knowing what the vast majority think atheism is about and the anger it engenders in most of them, I have no reason whatsoever to peer between those covers. But then I’m not a Christian. I suppose there may be some prurient interest for Christians in reading this just as so many of my fellow nons find in watching Hitchens cleverly bash believers on old YouTube debates. But I think we can both do better to feed our inner good wolf than to enjoy the gory sight of our inner bad wolf feeding.
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