I am honored to write the Foreword to David Eller’s soon to be published book, Liberatheism: On Freedom from God(s). Here is a draft I’ve submitted:
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David Eller’s luminous works contain important perspectives you won’t find from anyone else in today’s world. We are all in his debt. You aren’t a fully informed person if you’re not reading them, and this new book is no exception.[1]
Let me highlight just a few of his perspectives, those I found to be brilliant, important, and persuasive. First, as a professor of cultural anthropology Eller has challenged me to think outside my cultural box. Rather than thinking exclusively in terms of westernized notions of faith, religion, and culture he has forced me to adopt a global perspective. This global perspective has been a game changer for me. I used to think in exclusively terms of the westernized theistic gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And while I don’t have a very deep knowledge of the other religious cultures and their gods, my consciousness has been raised to consider these other religious cultures more than ever. When that happens you will see the problem of religious diversity for what it really is.
From Eller I was forced to acknowledge it is not the case that westernized notions of religion have any superiority to them. That was a shocker to me, but then at that time I was still in my ignorance. Again, when we adopt a truly global perspective on religion none of them have anything more going for them than the others. This means for me as an atheist that when I choose to argue exclusively against one deity over the others, by that very choice I’m acting as if one particular deity has more going for it than the others. That assumption is false. The reason it’s false is because all religions are subjective, cultural, tribal, and relative. Our inherited religion is just a different cultural expression of the same kinds of hopes and fears over the problems we face with life and death, morals and society itself.
Debunking Christianity
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