What Bothers Me Most about Christianity: Honest Reflections from an Open-Minded Christ Follower

By Ed Gungor

New York Times bestselling author ed Gungor offers a provocative look at the questions that bother not only opponents of Christianity but dedicated believers as well. with candor and good will, Gungor joins the discussion generated by the multitude of atheistic books currently in the market and offers a thoughtful, reasonable response.

In What Bothers Me Most about Christianity, Pastor Ed Gungor owns up to the valid criticism that affronts Christianity. With his trademark sense of humor and unabashed honesty, Gungor explores the ten most troublesome aspects of Christianity, addressing questions such as:Why does a loving God allow evil to exist in His world? If the Christian church is so good, then why have so many horrible acts been committed in its name? Why was God so harsh to His children in the Old Testament?

Maintaining that having faith is not intellectual suicide and that mystery is an essential quality of the Christian belief, What Bothers Me Most about Christianity opens up the forum for amicable discussion between thinking people on both sides of the debate, from aggressive atheists to unswerving Christian believers. Gungor maintains that balancing faith and reason is indeed possible and that devoted Christ followers need not shy away from asking the tough questions. As he guides readers through these fundamental issues, they will find that their honest wrestling will actually bring them to a deeper, more mature understanding of faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Howard Books
• Release date: Jun 2, 2009
• ISBN: 9781439100820

Ed Gungor

Ed Gungor is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, There Is More to the Secret, as well as several other books. Lead pastor of The People’s Church in Tulsa, Gungor also makes regular media appearances and speaks in churches, universities, and seminars nationwide.

Book preview

01

A HIDE-AND-SEEK GOD

it bothers me that God is intentionally hiding

I believe in God most of the time. But I have moments when I wonder if I’m wrong; times when I have a taste of doubt in my soul. Faith is a tricky business. Those of us who embrace it live our whole lives for someone we’ve never seen, and we believe in things we are convinced of but cannot prove (at least empirically).

This could easily be resolved if God were visible. It bothers me that he isn’t. I mean, come on, it would be such an easy matter for God to appear as God every once in a while, in ways that are undeniable. It would sure clear up some matters and show folks who’s right (I love being right). I especially feel this way when believing in God gets me labeled as a crazy by those who claim that faith in God has as much value as belief in the Easter bunny or tooth fairy.

I wish every person could have a peek at God, even if only once before the person dies. I’d even vote yes for people to see God while they are kids and then, when they come of age, to stop seeing him. Then they could wrestle with whether he is real or imaginary. That would be better than his being invisible. But invisible he is, and he’s invisible on purpose.

Judeo-Christian thought has a rich tradition concerning the God who hides.¹ God loves to hide; he loves to tuck himself so completely into the backdrop of life and creation that many completely miss his presence. Isaiah comes right out and says it: Truly you are a God who hides himself.² The Bible records that after Jesus’ resurrection, he was with two of his disciples who knew him well, yet they were kept from recognizing him.³ Jesus’ own disciples had no clue they were walking along the road with the resurrected Christ. He was hiding. God also hid from the biblical patriarch Jacob, who exclaimed, Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.⁴ God often told Israel, I will…hide my face.⁵ The psalmists repeatedly lamented how God was hiding from them.⁶

But it gets worse than God’s hiding his presence. When it comes to his message, he cloaks it in obscurity, making it fairly inaccessible. In one of Jesus’ prayers he said I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned.⁷ What’s up with that? Even Jesus’ disciples didn’t get what was going on: The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.⁸ When teaching the crowds, Jesus would say, If you, even you, had only known…but now it is hidden from your eyes.⁹ He claimed, This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand.¹⁰ God often hid the meaning of his message from people.

After Jesus departed and the apostles began to teach about faith, they alluded to this conspiracy of hiddenness. Paul wrote, We speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden.¹¹ The apostle repeatedly called the gospel a mystery that was kept hidden in God¹² only to be revealed at a special time to a special group of people.¹³

WHAT’S THE POINT?

Any thinking person has to ask, Why would God hide? If, as Paul said, God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth,¹⁴ why would God hide from people or make his message obscure? The whole notion seems counterintuitive. But as I’ve wrestled with this question, here are the best guesses I’ve encountered as to why God functions this way.

Allowing Faith to Be Faith

Perhaps God hides because he has chosen to establish a relationship with humanity through the pathway of faith. In order for faith to be faith, God must remain invisible and unprovable to the senses. If God could be seen as plainly as the sun or experienced as unquestioningly as gravity, faith would not be required. God’s existence would be an undisputed fact.

The pathway of faith insists that relationship with God is a matter of human free will and not forced or involuntary. Faith can only exist in freedom, where we can choose to believe or not to believe. Because God uses faith as the only modality for connection with him, any relational connection between us has to be the result of choice or free will. As I wrote in the Introduction, if we aren’t honest about the tensions in faith, problems emerge.

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Because God uses faith as the only modality for connection with him, any relational connection between us has to be the result of choice or free will.

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Christian theology sees God as almighty, all-knowing, and everywhere present; and yet, he respects the right of those he created to disregard him. He only wants authentic relationship with us, so he honors our right to ignore him. Authentic relationships require choice. Forced friendships or shotgun weddings do not constitute real relationships. But the choice to discount God would be impossible if God were visible. Why? Because God’s presence is ubiquitous—he is everywhere interacting with us, in everything from holding creation intact,¹⁵ to choosing when and where we would live,¹⁶ to causing all the good we know,¹⁷ to giving us life and breath.¹⁸ Only invisibility affords us the choice to ignore God. Because he is invisible, we have the option, via faith, to leap past that invisibility into a relationship with him.

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The choice to discount God would be impossible if God were visible.

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Maybe this conspiracy of hiddenness is like the hide-and-seek game children play. God hides; those who want to find him, look for him. Scripture tells us well over a hundred times to seek the LORD¹⁹ or to seek his face.²⁰ Perhaps the call to seek God is a call to this hiding game. It seems that God has rigged the game so that the persistent, dedicated seeker always finds him. God promises to those who seek him, I will be found by you.²¹ Jesus adds, Seek and you will find.²² The notion that God is playing hide-and-seek with us is fairly scandalous, yet amazingly brilliant. Maybe this is why faith is partially fun. For me, it’s both bizarre and fun to have a relationship with a Being I have found but can’t see.

The Romance of Belief

Another possible justification for why God hides is that faith involves more than the rational mind; it also involves the heart. Whenever you address matters of the heart, you must push past mere intellect. God’s hiddenness requires that faith rest on more than intellectual interaction. Trying to connect with someone unseen messes with your reasoning faculties. To pull it off, you have to plunge deeper into your soul and engage the what if? and maybe pockets of curiosity within the human heart. Only when this curiosity ascends can a heartfelt seek dawn, leading to the heart-transforming find.

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Faith involves more than the rational mind; it also involves the heart.

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This rumors the enterprise of falling in love. Boy notices girl; girl notices boy. Eyes meet. Interest rises. There’s often an unspoken hint of excitement. Why? Because there is hiddenness in the mix. The obscure dissimilarities between the sexes elicit curiosity in the person with an open heart, and curiosity is a great motivator for pursuing a relationship. Some won’t go there—it’s too irrational, potentially painful and disappointing—so they face life alone. To be sure, relationships have an intellectual component, but they are not just intellectual. They also transcend the rational mind. By the time a man and woman decide to enter into something as serious as a marriage vow, they have shot way beyond the function of intellect. Their wills, their emotions, their imaginations, the part of them that trusts—all these aspects of who they are must weigh in. One could say that entering committed love involves the whole person. And when you give yourself totally to another person, risk emerges. You wonder: How will it change me? Will I be happy? Will I get hurt? Am I being foolish? Wagonloads of scary questions; lots of hiddenness. But the risk, the irrationality, the uncertainty, the hiddenness make love, love. Same goes for faith.

Something about the love between a man and a woman mirrors the love relationship we are to have with God. Paul claimed that the romantic relationship is a profound mystery that speaks of Christ and the church.²³ Somehow the clues of God’s existence catch our eye, and we suspect he may be real and even reaching out to us. We feel a rush of excitement and anticipation. The idea may have some rationality in it, but it is also submerged in hiddenness, uncertainty, and irrationality. We choose either to keep seeking or to drop the issue. That choice is a critical one indeed.

IN GOLDILOCKS FASHION

Though God is invisible, he leaves us clues that point to his existence. He drops hints of his activity all around us. But they are only hints. As you study the biblical record, you see that God loves to spill his life into the world through subtle, almost unperceivable ways. Unless you are actively looking for him, you will most probably miss him.

As silly as it sounds, there is a Goldilocks way in which God sneaks around our world. Let me explain. In the children’s story Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Mama, Papa, and Baby Bear came home one day only to discover that someone has been eating their porridge, sitting in their chairs, and lying on their beds. It wasn’t until the end of the story that they found out it was Goldilocks.

I think God, in Goldilocks fashion, gets involved with our lives before we notice him. As the Creator and Sustainer of all life, he metaphorically messes with our porridge, sits in our chairs, and lies on our beds. Though we can see and feel the results, we don’t get to actually see him till the end of the story. The essence of faith is the human commitment to seek the clues until they lead us to the Hiding One. We may only find him metaphysically or spiritually, but find him we do indeed. James wrote, Come near to God and he will come near to you.²⁴

NOT LEFT TO CHANCE

What’s provocative about God’s hiddenness is that God doesn’t scatter his clues in the world and then leave it to chance as to whether people will notice them. He guarantees we will. Scripture claims God has predisposed everyone to notice the clues, that on some fundamental level, God has made the clues to his existence plain to [everyone].²⁵ On some intrinsic level, God places an internal awareness within every person born into this world that there is something more, something transcendent out there. God has rigged the human heart to notice clues that cultivate a suspicion that there is something otherly to be sought and experienced. Paul said that even those who have never heard the good news about God have this inner awareness written on their hearts.²⁶ In this way God makes true his claim, I was found by those who did not seek me; I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me.²⁷

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God doesn’t scatter his clues in the world and then leave it to chance as to whether people will notice them.

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This primitive knowing, however, doesn’t mean we see the Hidden One or that everyone understands God in the way Christ revealed him in the Gospels. In fact, a story in the life of apostle Paul demonstrates how people can manifest an intrinsic knowing of the transcendent but not necessarily get the God story right.

Although Christ had never been preached in Athens, Paul said the Athenians were very religious.²⁸ The city was full of idols and idol worship. Their religiosity was evidence that God has conditioned all people to believe in something transcendent, and it was an indicator that God has rigged the human heart for faith (at least the kind of faith that elicits a curiosity for spiritual matters). Paul told the Athenians that God has always been with them; that he had determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live.²⁹ Paul was saying, in essence, that God was present and working in their pagan culture before Paul got there with the gospel. But he clarified that this working was incomplete and unclear without the addition of the gospel. He then pointed to an altar, which had been built to an Unknown God, and he declared, I’m here to introduce you to this God so you can worship intelligently, know who you’re dealing with.³⁰

Paul is saying that the gospel message he preached was designed to bring clarity to who God is and to give instruction as to how God wants people to connect with him. But notice what else Paul asserts. He claims that whether or not people understand what is going on, God is always working in their lives—he is working in the life of every person, in every nation, at every moment. Many just don’t know it is the God of the Bible who is working. Hence, they co-opt the God activity that touches them into their own manmade religious stories. Paul held that the Athenians’ commitment to religious expression (as confused and false as it ended up being) demonstrated that God was working in them, prompting them so that they would seek him and find him because he was not far from each one of [them].³¹ Paul claims that all people are wrapped in God’s care, that in him we live and move and have our being.³² However, he firmly believed that until Christ is preached, people miss the point and head down false religious trails, while God’s true nature remains opaque and shadowy to them. It is the Christian gospel that brings the religious impulse to fruition and salvation. The true God is found.

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It is the Christian gospel that brings the religious impulse to fruition and salvation.

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WHERE DOES FAITH COME FROM?

If seeing God is off the table, where exactly does faith come from? Why did humans begin to believe in God in the first place? When secularists enter the discussion about the origins of faith, they suggest that the idea of God is a human construct—we made him up. Atheist Richard Dawkins writes, The proximate cause of religion might be hyperactivity in a particular node of the brain.³³ Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker suggests there may be a God module in the brain that predisposes us to believe in God.

Admittedly, both men dismiss faith as nothing more than an impulse across a nerve synapse. Okay. What if one day a scientist discovers that such a module exists? Would that prove God isn’t real? No, it would not. The discoveries of how the brain functions didn’t disprove the scriptural claim that God created humans to reason and think. Wouldn’t finding such a module actually support the biblical claim that God put a spiritual interest or bent within every person? It would not disprove the existence of God; it would simply show us how God has set eternity in the hearts of men³⁴ to begin with.

So, what becomes of the thing God set in the human heart—this possible module? That’s entirely up to each person. Paul claimed some people respond with interest and openness to that inner awareness and begin a journey of faith and discovery that is lifelong and full of mystery and surprise. He said others suppress that knowledge because they are interested, not in surrendering their lives to a creator, but in keeping themselves the center of their own universe.³⁵ Paul described this group when he claimed not everyone has faith.³⁶

When Jesus was here, he knew that people reacted differently to the clues God placed in the world about the kingdom of God. He knew that while some would respond by seeking more evidence of that kingdom, others would blow off the idea completely. Of this latter group Jesus quoted a haunting song. He said,

We played the flute for you,

and you did not dance;

we sang a dirge,

and you did not mourn.³⁷

In other words, these folks would not respond to the clues left by heaven. In this same chapter Jesus talked about the cities he visited where he did miracles. He claimed that if the same miracles had been done in some of the ancient cities that were destroyed because of their rebellion, those cities would have responded to the message of God. The point? Some respond well to the way God tries to make himself known; others do not.

WHAT’S YOUR TAKE?

You and I have to decide what to do with the evidence we see in the world. Because God is invisible, all we see are hints of his activity. Based on those hints, we choose to believe or not believe. Mathematical genius Blaise Pascal, who lived in the 1600s, wrote, If [God] had wished to overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, he could have done so by revealing himself to them so plainly that they could not doubt the truth of his essence…. There is enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.³⁸

Pascal was saying that people either see or don’t see God, based on the direction of their hearts. So, if you are open to the idea of God, you will notice evidence that will encourage you to continue investigating the possibility of his existence. On the other hand, if you are of a contrary disposition, you will only see evidence that satisfies your penchant not to believe in God. This means your view of the world—your way of interpreting the world and making sense of all its varied elements—inclines you toward a particular way of interpreting the evidence about God’s existence. We all operate from a particular worldview. Let me illustrate.

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Your view of the world inclines you toward a particular way of interpreting the evidence about God’s existence.

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Imagine coming across a man giving an outdoor speech one day in 1863. If you were a Martian, you would probably place little significance on what was going on. You’d likely assume that humans occasionally like to stand on big boxes and make sounds. If you were a child on the scene, you would hope the speech would be brief. After all, adults’ words are always Charlie Brownesque, Mwa, mwa, mwa, mwa, mwa. You wouldn’t have gotten much out of it. But let’s say you were a historian from the future. Listening to this speech by Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, would have definitely carried special significance for you.

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The God who hides takes the risk of being ignored by a race governed by free will.

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Your point of view, what you think is really going on around you, impacts how you interpret events, what you make of life, and ultimately how you respond to it. So, what in the world is going on? What’s your take? Is there a

Reviews for What Bothers Me Most about Christianity

[branadain · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I did not receive my Early-Reviewer copy from the publisher for over a year. I was starting to think that maybe I'd received it and then misplaced it or given it to someone who might appreciate it more. Then I got it, and wished one of those were true.The author does not seem to be the "open-minded Christ follower" mentioned in the subtitle. He's more of a Christian apologist, but a poor one. What he writes is not a work of serious scholarship, nor does it grapple with the difficulty of the issues involved--instead it seems more like one of those inspirational Christian-cheerleading books that have gotten so popular. In short, this book is a sheep in intellectual's clothing.

[krepitch · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This book wasn't quite what I expected. Most of what I would say about this book has already been stated in other reviews, but I would encourage people looking for a book about "honest reflections" to look elsewhere.

[islanddave · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Like many others who received this as part of the Early Reviewers, I thought I was going to receive a book with an honest, open discussion of the serious issues surrounding Christianity. Faith, the problem of evil and suffering, incompatibility with science: these are all areas the author tackles. However, what I got was an apologetic for the Purpose Driven Life era. Another shallow repetition of nonsensical rationalization which isn't even interesting to a non-believer. Not only is there no serious exploration of any of these 'bothers', the author repeatedly sums up each item with (paraphrasing) 'well, I don't know why, I just know God is good/exists/knows/etc'. Throw in an unscientific and very shallow discussion of evolution and sprinkle in a few references to those mean, angry atheists, and you've got yourself a pointless waste of a couple of hours.

[bluedream_1 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I received this book about a year after I was supposed to, so I felt no particular rush in actually getting a review of it finished. Finally I started to feel a little guilty, and decided to dig in before it was far too late, instead of merely too late.But it turned out to not be an issues, as I blazed through this book at a very high clip. That might seem like a recommendation, but it isn't; let me explain: when reading a good book, I'll have to pause periodically, maybe every few pages, to reflect upon what I've read, and let it sink in. This goes double or triple for a particularly dense of philosophical book, which I suppose is what I was expecting out of this. On the other hand, this book is so devoid of content that the pages simply flew by, making little to no impression on me. The only times I had to take a break were the times when my patience with the author completely ran out.He seems to want very badly to think of himself as open-minded. It's right there in the title! And yet the answers to all of his hard questions comes down, more or less, to "but nevermind that, because we know [our particular brand of] Christianity is right." To be honest, I don't think anything actually bothers him about Christianity. At least not seriously. He isn't grappling with these issues. He merely seems to be acknowledging that some people find them to be issues, and then dismissing them because of FAITH. As if it were a good thing.I don't even think this is a matter of my not being the target audience for the book, because the book is so pitifully insubstantial that I'm not even sure it has an audience. Maybe other Christians who want to fancy themselves open-minded? They certainly ought to enjoy the book's reading level. It seems to be right about at their intellectual level. Oh, damn, I almost made it the entire review without a snarky comment.

[kaelirenee · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I should start by saying that I am not the target market for this book. I suppose the publishers thought I was, because I won this book through the Early Reviewer program, but they were wrong.Here is what I was hoping for from this book: I was hoping for an honest reflection of a Christian on the serious problems of his faith--from issues of theodicy to discussions of rifts in the church. Maybe I was hoping for some solutions. I've read some excellent works that have done this for me, including anything by Jim Wallis, Bart Ehrman, and the book unChristian. What I got instead wasn't even Christian apologetics. An apologist, by definition, will present a rational basis for the Christian faith, defend the faith against objections, and expose the perceived flaws of other world views. This author unfortunately boils down to the notion that "Anyone who doesn't believe in Christianity the exact way I do is giving Christianity a bad name. You must follow my interpretations to be a REAL Christian." When I got to the section on science and faith, I had to hurl the book and remind myself that there are still men like Francis Collins in this world.This book was a real let-down. Too bad he took such a great title from someone who really is an open minded Christ follower.

[taphophile13 · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

It took over a year to receive this Early Reviewer book. I wish I could say that it was worth the wait but this is an odd book. Ed Gungor is a lead pastor of a church in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The book seems to be written on the junior-senior high school student level; there are lots of pop culture references and on one occasion Gungor even address the reader as Dude. He also mentions several times how "cool" faith is.He begins with the reason God intentionally hides. "Maybe this conspiracy of hiddenness is like the hide-and-seek game children play." He then compares God to Goldilocks, leaving clues to his presence. He goes on to say that all famous atheists had difficult relationships with their fathers or their fathers abandoned them or died when they were young. Gungor then tells us that believing in God is similar to believing that the British graffiti artist Banksky exists.As to the question of why there is evil in the world, there is no answer. You must simply trust that everything will work out according to plan. We are then told that the gospel is a "kind of decoder ring" to help people understand. He suggests that "the job of Jesus followers would be to hunt for the activity of God in the lives of others (that would add some mystery and suspense to faith -- like being spies for God!)."As for the faith vs. science problem: "people saw no conflict between faith and science, at least not until the second half of the nineteenth century." "Science is a subversive activity. Scientists must go into the lab with an open mind." And it was the professional scientists who created the conflict as they struggled for social acceptance.Gungor explains why the God of the Old Testament seems so war-like. He was fighting evil "toe-to-toe in the boxing ring". This also explains why God destroyed so many people in the Old Testament (even though he didn't want to): he had to destroy the people who were committing evil in order to destroy the evil. (During the Vietnam war there was a saying: we had to destroy the village in order to save the village.)Misinterpretations of the Bible are likened to the distortions you experience when wearing BluBlocker sunglasses and Christian life is like Bilbo Baggins' quest.I really cannot recommend this book as a serious discussion of the difficult questions that may bother believers or those who have other beliefs.

[bragan_8 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ed Gungor, a Christian pastor, raises a number of issues that often disturb believers and non-believers alike about Christianity -- such as the question of why, if God exists, he provides no direct evidence for that existence, or the infamous problem of why a benevolent god would permit the existence of evil -- and attempts to answer them from a Christian perspective.I'm finding this something of a difficult book to review, but I'll give it my best shot. The first thing that needs to be said is: I am an atheist. I am, however, an atheist who is interested in understanding others' worldviews and in productive, honest dialog between people of differencing beliefs and mindsets. Which is why I requested this book from the Early Reviewers program in the first place; it looked like it might be an interesting attempt to open such a dialog.Now, Gungor strikes me as an honest, thoughtful, well-meaning guy. He's willing to put some thought into these disturbing issues, and he is often willing to admit when he doesn't fully understand something or doesn't have an answer, both of which are things that I respect. He has a few reasonable things to say, and I even found myself agreeing with him on a surprising number of practical and philosophical points. And I do believe that if more Christians held some of his attitudes, the world would probably be a much better place. Moreover, the questions that he's addressing here are good, real questions. These are, indeed, some of the reasons why I personally do not believe in Christianity, in either the factual or the moral sense of the phrase. These are not straw men he's setting up here.All that having been said, though, I find most of his answers to these questions to be deeply unsatisfying. Some of his assertions are impossible to argue with, because they are based on emotions, or on faith (which by definition does not involve reasoning and proof), or on Christian scriptures and doctrines, which of course have no value as evidence for anything unless you believe in them already. When he does use logic and argument, though, his reasoning is often greatly flawed, or even completely illogical. Much of it, for instance, seems to buy into the the maddening (and maddeningly common) fallacious assumption that as long as elements of Christianity cannot be proven false, the only natural and reasonable response is to accept all of it as true.Gungor also displays a painful, even cringe-inducing mischaracterization and misunderstanding of atheists and their beliefs, attitudes, personal characteristics, and feelings. I will admit, however, that atheists themselves likely bear some degree of fault on this point. I fear that we are are not, as a group, all that good at self-presentation.In the end... Well, I guess I don't entirely mind agreeing to disagree with a guy like Gungor, and if nothing else it's good once in a while to get a little look into the mind of someone who thinks very differently than you do, so I can't exactly call reading this book a complete waste of my time. It seems quite clear to me, however, that whatever the great Early Reviewers algorithm might have thought, I was not part of the target audience for this. I can imagine Christian believers wrestling with these bothersome questions might take some comfort in Gungor's answers, whatever my own opinions of them might be, or even just find reassurance in the fact that other believers have wrestled with them too. But there's really not much here that speaks to non-Christian readers at all.

[06nwingert · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was slated to recieve this book in May 2009 as part of LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program; however, I recieved the book in July 2010. Most of the criticisms of Christainity on this book are ones that prominent  athesists such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins address in their respective works: a vile and cruel God. I will praise Mr. Gungor for being one of the few Christian's who acknowledges and address these issues headon.

[kurvanas · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Well, finally, after waiting and waiting and waiting a nice year-- it arrived and lo! this book was indeed a surprise, but not in the way I hoped. I hoped it was going to be a hard-hitting serious look at the quirks, crooks, kooks, problems, contradictions, and general craziness of Christianity, but alas, it is not. Kind of a masquerade in apologetics, though thinkers like C.S. Lewis have done it much better.Don't get me wrong, this book has a bold title and starts out with a great stated purpose, and purports to be a no-holds-barred knockout fight for the truth, so hooray! at last! our prayers are answered with a serious debate and fierce introspection -- but in fact it is a preacher's enraptured praiseology of Christianity. I was particularly disappointed with the pseudo-scientific non-debate and evangelical sort of dismissal of evolution and all things more complex than angels (dancing on a pinhead?) or the ironic fact that LeHaye-Jenkins's End Times at Left Behind High book of the imminent Rapture has morphed now into an endless(ly profitable) series of books approaching 20 years in print. Reminds one of the looming fifty year anniversary of the Late Great Planet Earth, but why dither.What Bothers Me Most could and should have been so much more. Maybe I expected too much honesty and deep thought. I guess I should be happy that the author even risked a probable backlash/condemnation from some Christian quarters by even using this title. But, I figure, if you state it, you should really mean it and do it. Perhaps someday in a sequel titled Still Hot and Bothered, he will probe deeper and longer and harder. Until then, we'll just lie here, unsatisfied, waiting for someone with real know how to finish the job.

[yapete · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Gungor starts out with a great idea: As a Christian, he will come clean that some things bother him about his religion, and he will have an open-minded discussion about these issues. I think he does an admirable job (although I don't share his convictions), when the questions can be answered within the realm of religious faith and Christianity. For example, I can understand that "faith" does not necessarily need to be justified by reason to create a genuine feeling of connectedness to "God", the "universe" or whatever. However, where Gungor fails quite miserably is in his engagement of people who do not share his faith. As much as he tries to be open-minded and temper his language, he falls back on the same old capers that make the dialogue between believers and skeptics so difficult. On page 34/35 for example, he uses the example of killing and dissecting a frog when he was a kid as being equivalent of the mindset of "rational people". He states "The rational mind is uncomfortable with wonder and mystery". As a scientist, who has made rational thinking my job, I find such talk offensive. As the famous physicist Richard Feynman said:"I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe." Mystery is what drives science, what keeps us going. As Feynman put it, "the pleasure is in finding things out", not in necessarily in already knowing them. As a matter of fact, having a deep understanding of the universe, only adds to the awe and mystery of it. This is the "cosmic feeling" that Einstein used to talk about. Naturally, the chapter I was most curious about was the chapter on science and religion. He starts out good enough, stating that much of the science/religion conflicts in the past occurred because of rigid, unwarranted interpretations of scripture. However, then it all goes down the deep end when he starts discussing evolution. He starts out with the micro- versus macroevolution caper. To claim that "microevolution" happens, but not "macroevolution" (terms used by antievolution people, which I don't see much in the scientific literature), is like saying a person can walk 1 mile, but not 20 miles. If "microevolution" can make a chihuahua out of a wolf in a 1000 years, "macroevolution" can make a horse out of a ancestral form over millions of years. It gets worse: Soon enough he starts talking about evolution as occurring "by chance". While he attacks Richard Dawkins earlier for his anti-religion books, he should have read some of Dawkins' other books, those on evolution, to see that evolution does not occur "by chance". Chance is a part of it (as in creating variation), but natural selection is not based on "chance". He even drags out the un-dead (and obviously deeply flawed) tornado through the junkyard analogy. These are a straw-man arguments, that may please (some) Christians, but certainly not people who know much about science. Evolution does not necessarily contradict any religion. However, Gungor here does exactly what he said he wouldn't: He is being narrow-minded and ill-informed about an important issue in science. He does exactly what he chastises the pope for when discussing Copernicus and Galileo. He is already biased towards believing that evolution does not square with his religion. Instead of making an honest effort of really understanding evolution, he parrots the Intelligent Design party line. This will certainly not make him look as an honest broker in the science-religion debate.In the end, the book is just a clever packaged piece of the same old Christian apologetics. It will please the "choir", but it is not enlightening to any honest seeker of the truth.