Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Dan Barker was an evangelical minister and missionary who did everything from writing songs and skits for children to working with youth groups to preaching street sermons to adults. However, somewhere in the course of this career he began to be aware of the fact that his religious beliefs were in serious conflict from his intellectual knowledge about our scientific world.

This book brought many negative aspects of Christianity to light that had been completely ignored, conveinently explained away, or totally unknown to me in my super-religious past. I never realized the Bible was so anti-family and that the various qualities we attribute to God are so self-contradicting. It also further examined some parts of the Bible I had already wondered about, such as its blatant sexism and racism, and its inaccuracy in accordance to history, although I had been told by every preacher out there that it was correct.

If you are from a Christian religious background I can only imagine the response my little book review is illiciting, and I totally expect to receive self-righteous hate mail under the guise of loving Christianity. However, I completely understand, for if I had read a book review like this during my very devoutly religious stage, I would have felt the same way. All I can ask you to do is read the book for yourself. If you read it and disagree with my conclusions, that's great and there is no harm done. I think that if anyone can truthfully answer to themselves the questions that this book raises about religion and can still say that it is in accordance with what they feel is moral and intellectual, their faith will only be strenghtened. But if you have ever been able to sing along with good old Alanis "In the name of the father, the skeptic, and the son, I have one more stupid question..."- in other words, if you have had some doubts about religion that you would like to explore but have never known a way to do this, you will really appreciate this book. All I can say is that it totally changed my perception of religion and I was as strong a believer as anyone out there, having been in church since I was an infant and continuing it in my youth by going on many mission trips to foreign countries. I was not an atheist who picked up this book so that I could prove I was still right; I was actually a pretty strong Christian who was beginning to have some doubts, and when this book was offered to me by someone I had serious pre-conceived judgements about it and even started reading it with the desire to prove the guy totally wrong. I was sure everything he would say would be like "I don't believe in God because I want to do what I want and no one can tell me what to do." However, this book appealed to my mind as well as my sense of moral rightness, and although I started page one with a preconception that it was totally offbase, I finished it with a strong "Amen, Amen. Finally a book about religion makes totally sense!"

Don't let yourself misguided - Dan Barker isn't narrow-minded. It takes a very open-minded person to cut through this fog and to come to the conclusion that most of the things you believed to be true are wrong.