How to Believe in God
Chapter One
Introduction: A Buddhist Returns to the Bible
Tell me about the God you don’t believe in. Is it the God who separates the saved from the damned, reserving bliss for the blessed, and brimstone for the nonbeliever? Or perhaps the narrow-minded God who resists new ways of thinking, the God who will brook no question and no discourse, the one who prefers the world the way it was before feminism or civil rights, before the discovery of evolution and quantum physics or the creation and collapse of stars? Is it the God who sponsors crusades, jihads,
and pogroms? Or maybe the one who tells a twenty-four-year-old man with a wife and three children to blow himself up in a crowded public square?
The list could go on and on. There’s the God who created the world in six days.And then there’s the one who puts a beautiful fruit tree within reach of his children, forbids them on pain of death to eat from it, then promptly disappears to some other part of the garden, keeping an eye peeled behind the bushes to see what they will do. There’s the one with a rule for everything from menstruation to shellfish, who str ... read full excerpt from: How to Believe in God ebook
