Saving God : : Religion after Idolatry / / Mark Johnston.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Johnston, Mark,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2011]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2011
• Edition: Course Book
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (216 p.) :; 1 halftone.

In this book, Mark Johnston argues that God needs to be saved not only from the distortions of the "undergraduate atheists" (Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris) but, more importantly, from the idolatrous tendencies of religion itself. Each monotheistic religion has its characteristic ways of domesticating True Divinity, of taming God's demands so that they do not radically threaten our self-love and false righteousness. Turning the monotheistic critique of idolatry on the monotheisms themselves, Johnston shows that much in these traditions must be condemned as false and spiritually debilitating. A central claim of the book is that supernaturalism is idolatry. If this is right, everything changes; we cannot place our salvation in jeopardy by tying it essentially to the supernatural cosmologies of the ancient Near East. Remarkably, Johnston rehabilitates the ideas of the Fall and of salvation within a naturalistic framework; he then presents a conception of God that both resists idolatry and is wholly consistent with the deliverances of the natural sciences. Princeton University Press is publishing Saving God in conjunction with Johnston's forthcoming book Surviving Death, which takes up the crux of supernaturalist belief, namely, the belief in life after death.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Chapter 1. Is Your God Really God? -- Chapter 2. The Idolatrous Religions -- Chapter 3. Supernaturalism and Scientism -- Chapter 4. The Phenomenological Approach -- Chapter 5. Is There an Internal Criterion of Religious Falsehood? -- Chapter 6. Why God? -- Chapter 7. After Monotheism -- Chapter 8. Process Panentheism -- Chapter 9. Panentheism, Not Pantheism -- Chapter 10. The Mind of God -- Chapter 11. Christianity without Spiritual Materialism -- Postscript -- Index