Saving God
Subtitle: religion after idolatry
By: Mark Johnston.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 198
ISBN-13: 9780691143941
Subjects: Religion -- Philosophy; Supernatural; Natural theology; Idolatry
Description: "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."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Is your God really God?; title: Believing in God; title: On the "names" of God; title: The meaning of "God" and the common conception of God; title: What is salvation?; title: Salvation versus spiritual materialism; title: The idolatrous religions; title: The ban on idolatry; title: Idolatry as perverse worship; title: Graven images and the highest one; title: Idolatry as servility; title: The rhetoric of idolatrousness; title: The same God; title: The Pharisees' problem with Jesus; title: Could we be idolaters?; title: Supernaturalism and scientism; title: Scientism and superstition; title: Supernaturalism; title: Legitimate naturalism; title: Scientism versus science; title: The argument for naturalism from true religion; title: The phenomenological approach; title: The method and the question; title: Yahweh's use of the method; title: A criterion or an enclosed circle; title: Yahweh's criterion applied to himself; title: Forgiving the God; title: A reply to yahweh's answer to job; title: Is there an internal criterion of religious falsehood?; title: The pope's criterion of religious falsehood; title: A consequence of the pope's criterion; title: Religious and scientific fallibilism; title: Why God?; title: Doesn't substantive reasonableness suffice?; title: The fall; title: Homo incurvatus in se; title: The redeemer?; title: After monotheism; title: The highest one; title: The tetragrammaton; title: The paradox of the highest one; title: Speaking of the highest one; title: Existents as dependent aspects of existence itself; title: An alternative to the thomistic interpretation of the highest one; title: Process panentheism; title: The goodness of the highest one; title: The analogy of logos; title: Process panentheism; title: The self-disclosure of existence itself; title: The problem is with the pantheon; title: Panentheism not pantheism; title: Distinguishing panentheism and pantheism; title: Presence; title: Presence as disclosure; title: Is being almost entirely wasted?; title: Ubiquitous presence; title: Against natural representation; title: Representation and "carrying information"; title: Can causation account for aboutness?; title: What could replace the representationalist tradition?; title: A diagnosis of the representationalist's mistake; title: A transformed picture of "consciousness" and reality; title: Confirming the surprising hypothesis; title: The mind of God; title: The objectivity of the realm of sense; title: How the structure of presence might impose evolutionary constraints; title: Objective mind and the mind of the highest one; title: The doubly donatory character of reality; title: Does God exist?; title: The highest one; title: Christianity without spiritual materialism; title: Religion and violence; title: The Gospel according to Girard; title: Where is original sinfulness?; title: Original sinfulness as self-will and false righteousness; title: Christ destroys the kingdom of self-will and false righteousness; title: The afterlife as an idolatrous conceit; title: Against "man's quest for meaning"; title: The afterlife as resistance to Christ; title: Naturalism's gift : resurrection without the afterlife.