Book review -The Reason for God

The Reason for God. Belief in an age of scepticism
By Timothy Keller

This book was given to us from some rather well meaning        religous friends

Religion is a very personal emotionally charged subject for some, so I’m well aware of possibly offending someone, somewhere.

Been a live at let live sort of person, I have no strong beliefs about religion -simply put, if it works for you, so be it.

The book itself has a series of common questions that come up about beliefs in God, as noted by the author who is the head of a popular Christian church in the USA.

The book starts off lightly and helpfully corrects some misconceptions about religion that I’ve held for years

• If you believe in God, you are doing this as an act of faith, because you cant prove God exists. If you don’t believe in God, you are also doing this as an act of faith, because you cannot prove God doesn’t exist.
• Those annoying, fanatical, overbearing, self-rightous religious people, you run into occassionally, aren’t ‘super religious’ at all. They haven’t learned to be humble, sensitive, empathetic, and forgiving as christ was, and therefore aren’t religous enough. (P57)
• Religious people aren’t perfect, churches are like help centres for those finding their way, rather than for people who are already there. Expecting  ‘perfect’ christians at a church is a bit like expecting only healthy people at a hospital.

The book gets deeper and deeper after that and starts to lose me because I’m not that clued up on the bible.

For example, It mentions ‘The Da Vinci code’ which while it’s fictional, it has started a flood of bible revisionism.
I’m not up with the play on that topic, and I don’t think I need to be.

To sum it up another way, I don’t need to be a qualified chef to fry an egg, I can do it just fine thank you very much.

It’s probably therefore a book that I need to read from cover to cover several times to ‘get’ it, but I probably need to read the bible first.

It’s like the book tries to pull you into a certain way of looking at things, and you are either on that bus, or not.

Overall it feels like the book nudges you to think about God in a certain way, and ‘join the club’, I dont think it sets out to do this intentionally, but thats where I ended up.

Perhaps my attitude will change as I read the book a few more times, but thats how it feels to me at the moment