Scan barcode
A review by megatsunami
Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality by Barbara Bradley Hagerty
I liked this book. I enjoyed learning about scientific studies of spiritual experience. I was a little ambivalent about the author's personal opinions being so clearly a part of the ideas put forward, and felt that at times this compromised her analysis... but hey, at least she was honest about being biased toward the existence of God.
But what really drove me crazy was that, aside from a few token references to "He or She", the God that she imagines is clearly, solely male. She even refers at one point to stripping away all the trappings from our idea of "God" - then follows this up by saying that what's left would be "the sum of his attributes." Um... if you stripped away all the trappings, then "God" wouldn't be male. (I won't even get into all the times she refers to "man" or "mankind.") Why is an NPR religion journalist so ignorant about gender? Why is someone who's so interested in every other aspect of what God might be like, totally narrow-minded about God having to be male?
Also, her idea of God, besides being male, seemed very Christian (or possibly more broadly, Judeo-Christo-Islamic) to me, and did not fit with my conception of the divine. She talks about a new conception of God based on science, but doesn't seem aware that there are other conceptions of "God" out there. She could have talked to Witches and heard ideas about Gaia, the Earth as living consciousness, the Goddess as the totality of being. These concepts are totally in line with the ideas she was exploring, but she just (apparently) wasn't interested.
But what really drove me crazy was that, aside from a few token references to "He or She", the God that she imagines is clearly, solely male. She even refers at one point to stripping away all the trappings from our idea of "God" - then follows this up by saying that what's left would be "the sum of his attributes." Um... if you stripped away all the trappings, then "God" wouldn't be male. (I won't even get into all the times she refers to "man" or "mankind.") Why is an NPR religion journalist so ignorant about gender? Why is someone who's so interested in every other aspect of what God might be like, totally narrow-minded about God having to be male?
Also, her idea of God, besides being male, seemed very Christian (or possibly more broadly, Judeo-Christo-Islamic) to me, and did not fit with my conception of the divine. She talks about a new conception of God based on science, but doesn't seem aware that there are other conceptions of "God" out there. She could have talked to Witches and heard ideas about Gaia, the Earth as living consciousness, the Goddess as the totality of being. These concepts are totally in line with the ideas she was exploring, but she just (apparently) wasn't interested.