The Challenge of religion Book

I finished this book.

That in itself was an achievement.

I decided to read this book after reading C.S. Lewis' collection of letters. He recommended it to one of the people that he was corresponding with and I thought if C.S. Lewis recommended it, it had to be good. Off I went to read it.

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Let's just say that I lack the philosophical grounding and training in logic to understand this book.

You probably need to have a classical education in German, Greek, and Latin to understand half of what this guy talks about. A healthy smattering of knowledge of 19th century literary criticism and familiarity with the Greek philosophers and Church fathers would also be very helpful.

I didn't understand half of what he was talking about, and of the part that I did comprehend couldn't understand why on earth anyone would want to talk about it. I will never understand why so many intellectuals think that the ancient Jews or any other ancient people group believed in an actual human who lived up in the sky...I don't get why people seem to think that people in the past were somehow more primitive than us today. I mean, yeah, they didn't have computers and stuff, but they were hardly incapable of abstract thought. It was like, have you actually read Aristotle?!?! The dude was by no means a simpleton. Philosophy hasn't particularly advanced beyond him all that much. We keep going back to him. Or we can just go with Job that was written sometime in the 6-7 century BC. It's a great piece of philosophical literature, even if you don't think it's inspired scripture, and it hardly a simplistic view of God as a human living in the sky. So why on earth do modern intelligentsia people keep going back to this idea that people were primitive and believed in a primitive anthropomorphic god up in the sky? It's like people want to view themselves as somehow better than the people of the past, but our brains haven't changed all that much in the 5000 years of written history, so why on earth would you think that we modern humans are capable of metaphor and the ones of the measly 5000 year past weren't? I just don't get that.

I was reading this journal article on games and they talked about this sheep trading game the ancient Hittites played, and that the pieces could only represent sheep because that's the only thing the Hittites would have understood as they were incapable of abstracting. I was like...huh? Obviously they were capable of abstraction, they had a game...with round pieces...like checkers, that represented sheep for this one particular game...obviously they could abstract. Also, why on earth would you assume that just because only this sheep game survived to be dug up today that it was the only game that ever existed??! Or that other variations of the game where the pieces represented gourds didn't exist!? That's like saying that some archaeologist finds a chess game 400 years in the future and assumes that we all only played chess. You only have to glance around for half a second to see humanity's creativity and then realize that there is no way an entire culture played only one game for its whole existence.

Anyway, I did quite like the chapter on time. It made me consider what time is in a whole new way. Time is such a matter-of-course part of our existence that I just assumed it was simple...It's not. This book made me realize that and made me reconsider what I mean when I say 'eternity', so I suppose that reading this was not a total loss.