“Don’t you get tired of losers who promote their own books on their blogs? Dude, that is really pathetic.”
Yeah I know, it is pathetic. However, I’ve got no dignity so I don’t mind. Gimme a mic and an audience and I’ll start prattling off on myself shamelessly like a mallard preening or a peacock strutting, oblivious all the while to how ridiculous peacocks actually look.
Now that I’ve addressed the elephant in the room and put everyone at ease, I just want to note a couple things about, ahem, my new book.
First, it is now in stock at Amazon. Yah!
Second, I just got some feedback from John Loftus on the book. He emailed me and, having read the first few chapters, observes:
“You seem to hit Christians just as hard as atheists. I really like your attitude in risking having a conversation with the ‘other.’ Really great stuff here.”
And you know if John Loftus says it’s great then it must be great. But on a more serious note, that comment did catch my attention for another reason. Why would it be surprising to find a person being as hard on one’s own belief community as on the “outsider”? This surprise is especially disconcerting given that it is Christians we’re talking about. After all, the Christian’s preeminent model for critical engagement is presumably Jesus. And yet Jesus didn’t spend his time locking horns with Roman Gentiles, or Samaritans, or any other marginalized outsider group. Rather, he went right for the most elite, respected authorities within his own belief community and let go with two smoking barrels (rhetorical ones of course). Read the gospels anew and see how many times Jesus calls respected religious leaders things like “hypocrites” and “white-washed tombs”.
So why don’t Christians do more of that? Rather than spending all our time critiquing atheists, agnostics, naturalists, humanists, materialists, Mormons, Muslims, and the rest, why don’t we spend more time critically engaging those from within our own tradition? Maybe its time for a rethink on the ole’ “WWJD?”.
Of course there is the downside that people who, like Jesus, are too effective at critiquing the hypocrisy in their own belief traditions tend to get crucified. Aww, there’s always a catch…
