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A review by jmanchester0
Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist by Dan Barker
1.0
I realize this book is about 20 years old, but I'm getting tired of all these "books" that everyone seems to be printing that are merely collections of reprints of previously published essays or articles or blog posts. Especially when you think you're going to get something a bit more cohesive - something fresh and new.
Especially when they are a collection of poorly written articles and essays.
Maybe "poorly written" is too strong. But it's very pedantic, and at the same time comes across as not extremely intelligent. These don't really sound like his arguments - more like he's parroting someone else. But it sounds like he's making them his arguments - like he came up with them. You know when you read something, and you can tell the author thinks that he is awfully clever, but he's really not? That's what this whole book feels like. Or like when a child writes a story. It's cute, but if she wrote it as an adult, it would be really missing something.
He presents a lot of straw men in the form of actual arguments from believers - I call them straw men because many thinking Christians reject them. Many of his arguments seem to be a response to fundamentalists who want to argue him into believing in God. Which I would tend to disagree with, too.
What Parker is really arguing against is a fundamentalist faith. He spent five years coming out of that and ended up an atheist. I've spent the last 20 years coming out of that, have the same issues that Parker does, but I have reached different conclusions. When he talks about what Christianity is, it really seems like he's talking about the fundamental Christianity he grew up on. And that's what he's taken to task. I guess I just don't see that the arguments that he is making necessitate a complete rejection of God. I guess, while I agree with many of his arguments, I do not concur on the conclusion he reaches based on those arguments.
I guess in many ways, I have lost faith in faith, too. This has led me to a more deistic approach to theology. I see the evidence around me, and assume there must be a God. So all of his discussion about what made him an atheist has changed me too. But it's just made me an un-fundamentalist Christian.
He states, "Christianity is responsible for fostering patriarchy and slavery..." True, unfortunately. But its because people don't listen to the words of Jesus. But I completely disagree with the next sentence of the book in which he states, "A true Christian cannot be a feminist." This is simply false. I believe a Christian will naturally be a feminist by listening to the words of Jesus. Why more Christians aren't, I can't explain. And that's a problem, I agree. But I know too many Christian feminists to support that statement. Maybe Barker has never met one.
The thing that's really annoying about this book, though, and what caused me to rate it so low, is he's so patronizing. I was less put off by P. Z. Myers. But Barker seems to be saying to Christians, "I used to be stupid like you, but now I'm a freethinker." I guess he's lost his gift of evangelizing. I kept hearing, "you're so dumb, and I'm so smart" through the whole book. His whole approach - his whole attitude - is very offputting. He's basically traded one set of fundamentalist beliefs for another. He was a hardcore Bible banger, now he's hardcore anti-Bible. With the exact same smug, I-have-it-all-figured-out attitude. It'd be offputting whether he was talking about Jesus, or about there being no Jesus.
And his songs?!? Good grief. Maybe he should have kept the evangelizing part of his old life and left the songwriting part. It's just hard to wrap my brain around atheist hymns.
Especially when they are a collection of poorly written articles and essays.
Maybe "poorly written" is too strong. But it's very pedantic, and at the same time comes across as not extremely intelligent. These don't really sound like his arguments - more like he's parroting someone else. But it sounds like he's making them his arguments - like he came up with them. You know when you read something, and you can tell the author thinks that he is awfully clever, but he's really not? That's what this whole book feels like. Or like when a child writes a story. It's cute, but if she wrote it as an adult, it would be really missing something.
He presents a lot of straw men in the form of actual arguments from believers - I call them straw men because many thinking Christians reject them. Many of his arguments seem to be a response to fundamentalists who want to argue him into believing in God. Which I would tend to disagree with, too.
What Parker is really arguing against is a fundamentalist faith. He spent five years coming out of that and ended up an atheist. I've spent the last 20 years coming out of that, have the same issues that Parker does, but I have reached different conclusions. When he talks about what Christianity is, it really seems like he's talking about the fundamental Christianity he grew up on. And that's what he's taken to task. I guess I just don't see that the arguments that he is making necessitate a complete rejection of God. I guess, while I agree with many of his arguments, I do not concur on the conclusion he reaches based on those arguments.
I guess in many ways, I have lost faith in faith, too. This has led me to a more deistic approach to theology. I see the evidence around me, and assume there must be a God. So all of his discussion about what made him an atheist has changed me too. But it's just made me an un-fundamentalist Christian.
He states, "Christianity is responsible for fostering patriarchy and slavery..." True, unfortunately. But its because people don't listen to the words of Jesus. But I completely disagree with the next sentence of the book in which he states, "A true Christian cannot be a feminist." This is simply false. I believe a Christian will naturally be a feminist by listening to the words of Jesus. Why more Christians aren't, I can't explain. And that's a problem, I agree. But I know too many Christian feminists to support that statement. Maybe Barker has never met one.
The thing that's really annoying about this book, though, and what caused me to rate it so low, is he's so patronizing. I was less put off by P. Z. Myers. But Barker seems to be saying to Christians, "I used to be stupid like you, but now I'm a freethinker." I guess he's lost his gift of evangelizing. I kept hearing, "you're so dumb, and I'm so smart" through the whole book. His whole approach - his whole attitude - is very offputting. He's basically traded one set of fundamentalist beliefs for another. He was a hardcore Bible banger, now he's hardcore anti-Bible. With the exact same smug, I-have-it-all-figured-out attitude. It'd be offputting whether he was talking about Jesus, or about there being no Jesus.
And his songs?!? Good grief. Maybe he should have kept the evangelizing part of his old life and left the songwriting part. It's just hard to wrap my brain around atheist hymns.