It is in response to this suggestion that we ask whether the true God was ever involved in this religious confusion in the first place. Was the true God ever involved in this religious confusion in the first place? Or is the god some seem so eager to kill off merely an empty human construct? If we are to create a vibrant new faith for the twenty-first century, we should, perhaps, ponder the history of God for some lessons and warnings” ( A History of God, p. 457, emphasis added). Wilson, author of God’s Funeral, commends Armstrong’s A History of God: “This is the most fascinating and learned survey of the biggest wild goose chase in history-the quest for God.” Armstrong herself concludes: “Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation they will fill the vacuum by creating a new focus of meaning. . . Indeed, Kennedy’s All in the Mind eagerly anticipates the further demise and destruction of what he sees as an outworn faith. In different ways, these three books trace the dynamic forces and profound changes that have shaped the confused world of modern Christianity and its counterbuffs, agnostic and atheistic humanism. Since those days, we have put away childish things and have discarded the God of our first years” (p. 3). People without my peculiarly religious background may also find that their notion of God was formed in infancy. Yet my early, confused ideas about God had not been modified or developed. I had revised simplistic childhood views of Father Christmas I had come to a more mature understanding of the complexities of the human predicament than had been possible in the kindergarten. My ideas about God were formed in childhood and did not keep abreast of my growing knowledge in other disciplines. As an epileptic, I had flashes of vision that I knew to be a mere neurological defect: had the visions and raptures of the saints also been a mere mental quirk? Increasingly, God seemed an aberration, something that the human race had outgrown.”Īrmstrong continues, “Despite my years as a nun, I do not believe that my experience of God is unusual. Science seemed to have disposed of the Creator God and biblical scholars had proved that Jesus had never claimed to be divine. The doctrines that I had accepted without question as a child were indeed man-made, constructed over a long period of time. “The more I learned about the history of religion,” she says, “the more my earlier misgivings were justified. Karen Armstrong’s A History of God (Vintage Books, London, 1999) approaches the issue of God’s “death” from her religious and personal background. Why then do Christians continue to pray?” (p. 12). If it were otherwise, every non-believer in the land would convert to Christianity tomorrow. He commented, “Intelligent Christians must know that prayers go unanswered. When his aging father-a man who prayed twice daily-lost his life early in World War II, Kennedy’s doubts and unanswered questions were painfully focused. In his partly autobiographical work, All in the Mind: A Farewell to God (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1999), Ludovic Kennedy, British broadcaster and writer, spells out why he is a confirmed atheist. Wilson contrasts the relative religious certainty of the earlier part of the 19 th century with the subsequent decline of the Anglican Church in England and the Catholic Church in Europe. What they did for much of the rest of the English-speaking world was to shatter what had once been the absolutes of God’s existence and the certainties of religious dogma. Wilson’s erudite and scholarly work is about the rejection of a belief in God by many philosophers and thinkers in Victorian England, and how they “killed off” God-at least to their own satisfaction. Norton & Company, New York, 1999) by the influential British biographer, journalist and novelist A.N. One of the books fueling the Deity’s funeral pyre is God’s Funeral(W.W. As if to reemphasize Nietzsche’s well-known words, “ God is dead,” several books about the Deity’s death and funeral have been published as the millennium draws to a close.Ĭan God-should God-finally be laid to rest as we head into the new millennium? After all, the funeral wake has been going on for an inordinate time-over three centuries by some calculations.
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