What Is God? Book

Needleman is one of the few people writing on religion who gets it right: most of the religious traditions of the world have precious insights about what really matters in life, what human beings are capable of, and practices to help us do the kind of self-work that brings spiritual growth. But those insights are often obscured by dogmatic creeds and hubristic mythology, and those practices are often misconstrued as magical rituals for removing suffering and fulfilling unexamined desire.

This book is largely autobiographical: an account of how Needleman moved from staunch atheism to a kind of spirituality that isn't quite a theism.

One sure way of telling if a religious or spiritual person has integrity is to get their reaction to the "new atheists." Here too, Needlemen is exactly right: Believers and non-believers alike owe the new atheists a debt of gratitude for their function of "the purgation of illusion and fantasy from our concept of God; the exposure of the superficiality of our so-called beliefs; the masks our minds put over our inability to be what we are meant to be.... That bittersweet absence of illusion and self-deception, that empty space swept clean by astringent skepticism and purgatorial self-honesty: here perhaps is a truly sacred space in our otherwise self-deceived, chaotic world." (223)