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    Saving God: Religion after Idolatry
    Saving God: Religion after Idolatry
    Saving God: Religion after Idolatry
    Ebook322 pages5 hours

    Saving God: Religion after Idolatry

    By Mark Johnston

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    About this ebook

    A bold and persuasive case for abandoning old religions and still believing in God

    In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating.

    A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences.

    Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction with Johnston's forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death.

    Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJul 11, 2011
    ISBN9781400830442
    Saving God: Religion after Idolatry
    Author

    Mark Johnston

    Dr Mark Johnston is an independent scholar with over forty years experience in the greenspace industry, including working as a tree officer in local government, consultant in private practice, government adviser and university lecturer. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Foresters (Chartered Arboriculturist), Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Horticulture and Honorary Fellow of the Arboricultural Association. Although originally from London, Mark is based in Belfast where he has lived for the past twenty-five years. In 2007, he was appointed MBE in recognition of his services to trees and the urban environment. In 2009, Mark became the first British person to receive the International Society of Arboriculture’s most prestigious honour, the Award of Merit.

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