{"id":2193,"date":"2021-06-06T22:54:53","date_gmt":"2021-06-06T22:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=2193"},"modified":"2024-02-08T08:18:01","modified_gmt":"2024-02-08T08:18:01","slug":"book-review-god-alexander-waugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/?p=2193","title":{"rendered":"BOOK REViEW: God, Alexander Waugh"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Another in my ongoing series of archival reviews.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I really loved this book. Waugh’s colourful and irreverent romp, through the huge swathes of material – mostly biblical, but going much wider overall in terms of sources, albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity – much of which is either bizarrely arcane, pure gibberish, or frequently a mixture of both, is both educational and highly enjoyable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not a book likely to be admired by the devout. I was in fact first made aware of it, indeed given it, by a believing friend who themselves refused to read it, for fear it would undermine their faith: exactly why they should<\/em> read it in my view. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Waugh is a little disingenuous in his intro; by the end of the book – well, long, long before then, in truth – one gets a strong sense that Waugh finds the highly irrational, deeply contradictory, and frequently plain nasty image of the almighty, as glimpsed through his multifarious sources, a very ill-defined (through over-description, rather than any want thereof), nebulous, and on the whole repugnant creation of the human mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is nonetheless remarkable how many of us non-believers feel so drawn to examining what a believer might choose to call our ‘apostasy’. But personally I think that just goes to show how deeply enmeshed in our lives and cultures religion remains, for both those with and without \u2018faith\u2019. And I was brought up \u2018in the faith\u2019. Or rather within a number of the myriad bastard offspring cults to have proliferated under the name Christian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And though I might share the desire of many contemporary \u2018naturalists and free-thinkers\u2019 (a phrase I got from A. C. Grayling), in wishing to see humanity’s consciousness collectively evolve beyond the religious phase, unlike Dawkins and some others – who at one point seemed to believe such a state was imminent – I think we’re a massively<\/em> long way from any such state of lucidity or rationality. But then that’s exactly why books like Waugh’s God<\/em> are so important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He is at times flippant, and frequently very funny. But underlying it all, and despite the occasional lapse into cheap shots at straw-gods, is a very serious and in my view laudable desire to see, both for oneself and as a society, just who on earth the particularly damnable god of Judaeo-Christian tradition is exactly.

Personally I loved this book and, having gone as far as buying copies for friends, would obviously recommend it to anyone interested in such things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Another in my ongoing series of archival reviews. I really loved this book. Waugh’s colourful and irreverent romp, through the huge swathes of material – mostly biblical, but going much wider overall in terms of sources, albeit concentrating on the Judaeo-Christian deity – much of which is either bizarrely arcane, pure gibberish, or frequently a … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “BOOK REViEW: God, Alexander Waugh”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paGwUa-zn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2193"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11340,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193\/revisions\/11340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sebpalmer.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}