The Case for God
Where to buy The Case for God books online?
- ISBN13: 9780307269188
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the fantastic lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now reflect and speak about God in a way that veers so very much from the thinking of our ancestors?
Answering these questions with the same depth of knowledge and profound insight that have marked all her acclaimed books, Armstrong makes clear how the changing face of the world has automatically changed the importance of religion at both the societal and the individual level. And she makes a powerful, convincing argument for drawing on the insights of the past in order to erect a faith that speaks to the needs of our dangerously polarized age. Yet she cautions us that religion was never supposed to provide answers that lie within the competence of human reason; that, she says, is the role of logos. The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, quietly, and even joyously with realities for which there are no simple explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”
Buy Cheap The Case for God Online
Related posts:
Quoting the product description…. “The task of religion is “to help us live creatively, quietly, and even joyously with realities for which there are no simple explanations.” She emphasizes, too, that religion will not work automatically. It is, she says, a practical discipline: its insights are derived not from abstract speculation but from “dedicated intellectual endeavor” and a “compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood.”
Clumping religions together to find universal truths is not the way to find God. Religion is trying to do things in your own might to try to get up to God – while Christianity is Christ coming into your life to have a relationship with us. you cant extract universal truths from all religions – because ultimately they all contradict each additional. either all are incorrect or one is right. Christ says the Truth will set us free. Christians don’t try to be a better person based on some philosophy – there is a transformational change – bc Christ is living in them through the Holy Spirit. The word transformed is translated metamorphisis, as in caterpillar to a butterfly. it is a supernatural change done through God – Jesus Christ living in a Christian. The Bible uses the word Sanctification – it means the process of being purified, to be made holy. This is what Christ does – He walks us through the fire to be brought back to God. Only Christ can do this – only Christ was the sacrificial lamb – the Just – for the one-sided us. It is not until we die to self – surrender – admit we can’t do it – question God to help us – that we can be born of the Holy Spirit. This is supernatural – most believers can tell you the exact time they were born of the Spirit of Christ.
Christ rose from the dead, the Bible has over 2000 prophecies (Jesus filling over 300 – Dead Sea Scrolls carbon date before Christ confirm) and the end of days ones are all lining up, 1000 promises all do what they promise to millions of believers over time. I encourage anyone to read “Case for Christ” -as a replacement for. you will find significant truth about the Bible – that is the way to finding God. Romans 10:17 Faith comes by hearing hearing by the Word of God.
Question yourself – if you went out of your way for your spouse for 2 weeks preparation a huge event – how would you feel if she did not even thank you, acknowledge you, & even gave credit to their x-spouse. why should God reveal Himself to people – if they don’t appreciate what He has already done for them.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” Jesus is either lieing, telling the Truth, or a perfect lunitic. God will not share His glory with another.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
As with all theological writings, this book fails to prove that there is an actual divine being. Of course, there is a case for God, but not for the being of one, but for the need for one.
Some people need a god to get through their lives. They can’t seem to grasp what’s really happening around them and they are willing to accept that a divine, omnipotent being exists, who makes things take place according to a divine plot.
Nowhere in this book did I see any instance of proof additional than the belief of a deluded bunch of people. I suggest everyone to read this book, because we need more atheists.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I wrote a review of Armstrong’s The Battle For God, in which I encouraged all to take issue with the shocking and outrageous claims made. Specifically, her aver that the Bible was originally meant to be read allegorically, and that literal interpretations are a recent invention.
Well…. here she goes again. This time, it must be admitted, she made a bit more effort to substantiate her opinion. (Which is why I offer 2 stars as a replacement for of 1.) But still, as additional reviewers have pointed out…. she is way out on a limb, all by herself, lacking help from the facts.
The truth is QUITE clear. The Bible has permanently been read factually, except for a few rather bookish types. Even now.
Take the tale of the fantastic flood. You can 1- read it as history. 2- read it as allegory. 3- reject it as rubbish. Choice number 2 is the preferred choice by the sort of people who admire Karen Armstrong. (Or watch shows by Bill Moyers.) Doubtlessly such people like to hear that allegorization has a fine ancient past pedigree… but the fact is that it does not. Literal interpretation is as ancient as the hills.
Believers and unbelievers alike should admire the intellectual honesty of Pierre Bayle and admit that the God of the philosophers is NOT the God of the Bible. To invent allegories to blur the honor is dishonest. Aristotle was no Christian. Augustan was no Aristotle. And Armstrong’s arguements will not stand more than a few years. We may expect this book to go out of print within a decade.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
It is a rare occasion that I find it hard to point out any redeeming features in a book-when I struggle to find a single positive to write in a review. Sorry to say Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God is one of persons books-one that is so monstrously terrible, so hopelessly dreadful, so wretchedly miserable, that it took concerted effort just to end it. Heck, even the take in stinks-a pile of religiously-significant books floating at a weird angle over a unadorned background. I tell you what: I will concede the font. The book is set in Granjon, a very nice, classical font that is very consistent with the earliest Garamond type faces. It is classy and classical but lacking being antique. But that is as excellent as the book gets.
I can save you thirty-five bucks and many hours of your life by telling you that 99% of what Armstrong has to say about God and religion she squeezes into the Introduction and the Epilogue, which together take up just 23 of the 340 pages of this book. There she spews into the world what she really believes about God and persons who seek to follow him. Though she writes about all faiths, she focuses nearly exclusively on Christianity. The reader will learn, among additional things: that nobody before modern times was foolish enough to judge that the Bible should be read as fact, as if the Creation account has any value beyond a mythological attempt to clarify the world’s beginning; that the doctrine of the infallibility of Scripture was unknown until the 1870’s when Hodge and Warfield dreamed it up; that Socratic dialogue with atheists would help us know how we can be more faithful believers in God; that truth is establish not by understanding or believing, but by doing; that the purpose of religion is to learn new capacities of mind and heart; that the danger to religion and the danger to the world is not religious adherents, but fundamentalist believers-persons who judge in the exclusivity of their faith and who fall into ancient beliefs such as the infallibility of their scriptures. And that is just a sampling of a mere 23 pages.
The rest of the book is an extended revisionist look at the history of religion in all-purpose and the Christian faith in particular. Armstrong seeks to show that the modern Christian God (I hesitate to capitalize God in the way she uses the name) is vastly different from the “unknown” God of pre-modern times. God was once mysterious and unknown, so transcendent, so additional that people could not hope to really know who he is or how he acted. But then modernism had to come along and ruin a perfectly excellent deity by insisting that God could be known, that he even desired to be known. What the leader believes we need to do, of course, is return to God as a mystery, to God as an indecipherable force who combines the best of all the world religions. Along the way she pauses to offer a few words about nearly every religious leader and every philosopher who ever uttered God’s name. It is absolutely exhausting and, for simplistic ancient-school fundie Christians like myself, utterly vexing. With her facts on the basics of the Christian faith so far from the truth and with her obvious bias, I really establish myself reading deliberately trying not to comprehend, not to retain, what she said. After all, having proven herself utterly untrustworthy in the basics, how could I trust her in anything else?
The Case for God, then, is in no way a case for the God of the Bible or, really, for the God of most additional faiths. Rather, it is a defense of building the thought of God respectable again, even if it means radically changing what we mean by that name. It is an absolute mess and easily one of the most dull, most obnoxious books I’ve ever read.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
I just perused thru the book but it follows Armstrong profound knowledge of the History of religion,although in this one she appears to be more theist.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5