Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
He's been there ..., 3 Jan 2007
Dan Barker is someone who's been there. He has been a Christian minister for many years who - in search for the truth - could come to no other conclusion than to become an atheist. He's obviously not an angry atheist, but a compassionate, kind, gentle, honest freethinker willing to share his story. Many deconverted people will recognize that story. Dan Barker is the living proof that leaving your religion does not make life meaningless. On the contrary, it opens up new dimensions. In this book, Dan Barker explores the fallacies, the inconsistencies and the harm of religious dogma. He analyzes and tackles all common theistic arguments ("proof") very intelligently. Dan Barker is a smart person who has done research in various areas, and mainly the area he left behind: religion/theology. I'd recommend this book specially to religious people, to read it with an open mind, and perhaps to get to understand the reasoning of the non-religious who really thought things over.
This review is based on the hardcover version, published in June 2006.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not so much a case for Atheism as for better Christianity, 24 Dec 2008
I am a Christian, but if my Christianity was the the Christianity of Dan Barker, then I too would have become an atheist.
What Dan appears to have really rejected is that kind of "put your brain in neutral" Christianity which dominates North America. It is a christianty which portrays Christ as white, that believes the world is 6000 years old, which has a theology which manages to be both incredibly simplistic and lightweight, while also being incredibly dogmatic and picky.
This is the Christianity which Dan was a part of, and it was this Christianity he rejected.
This is where it gets confusing though, as since his deconversion, he has critised the likes of C.S. Lewis, yet, when he does so, it is as though he is critising through the eyes of the simplistic fundamentalist. It is really quite bizzare.
In this book, Barker has a chapter on "Bible Contradictions". Now, I was aware of nearly all of these at 14 years of age, and the counter arguments. Many of them are "old chestnuts". People like Josh Macdowell have written extensively on them.
Yet Barker seems to write about them as if in a vacuum. Surely he would have come across these very contradictions himself as a Christian and be aware of the counter arguments? One might argue that he was aware of the counter-arguments and simply choses to disagree with them, but if this is the case, why does he not at any point discuss the counter arguements?
A vast amount of scholarly research has been done on the genalogy of Jesus for example, yet Barker's treatise is to simply place two verses side by side from two gospels to appear to create a contradiction over the father of Joseph and say "There ya go..contradiction". This is flatly disingenious. If he is so confident he has a valid point, why not discuss it and flesh out his argument? The man supposedly studied the scriptures for years, so he should surely be capable of taking the debate on from doing little more than going through the bible with a highlighter pen, picking verses at random to create contradiction.
Another example is his "contradiction" which compares the Bible verse saying "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God" with another verse which describes Job as "perfect". Again, he simply slaps the two verses alongside each other, and says "There ya go..contradiction".
He makes no attempt to consider the fact that the story of Job has all the hallmarks of a parable or allegory, not of a piece of history.It contains and has obviously theatrical elements (such as God and Satan having a wager) and Job's ranting silioquy.
He might have made a real point to make about critisising an overly literalistic interpretation of scripture using this example, but to instead portray it as an example of the Bible being flawed, just because it's not flat-out literalistic is not enlightened or freethinking, its crude and uneducated. He merely demonstrates failure to understand the science of textual critisism.
Dan Barker, I'm afraid, does not appear to have been a very informed Christian, and he continues to be a not terribly informed atheist. That would be ok, if Dan Barker were a simple man writing a simple book, but apparently Dan Barker is a member of societies for individuals with exceptionally high IQ. He surely knows that many things he portrays in this book as simple are far more complicated in reality.
Consequently I can only see this book as being a kind of dumbed-down "Atheism for Kids" manual, filled with arguements which he must himself know to be flawed and over-simplistic, but, because he ultimately supports their conclusion (there is no God) he chooses to peddle them in a poleimic fashion. That seriously lacks intellectual credibilitiy in my view.
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