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With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe by Gretta Vosper
pidgevorg's review against another edition
2.0
I admit I didn't read this in its entirety. I got her main point pretty early on--Christians should abandon their commitment to ideas she sees as outdated and harmful, among them the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, original sin, the need for redemption through Christ and the Church, and the monotheistic God in general. In short, dump the core ideas of Christianity. Instead, replace them with belief in the spirit of goodness in people, or some such, and focus on doing good works. Well, this message is not new--atheist thinkers have been calling for this for over a hundred years. It seems that the logical outcome of this message is to abandon the idea of Church entirely and join/create some secular organization. After all, if ideas like "God" or "sin" are harmful because of their association with oppression, colonialism, etc., then how much more harmful the idea of the Church itself must be, seeing how it was the Church which actually perpetuated these injustices? So why not just quit the Church, as many people have done, and join some secular or humanist organization?
So I kept flipping through the pages, skimming, skipping around... searching for any coherent explanation as to why the core principles of the Christian Church need to go, but the Church itself needs to stay. And it just wasn't there. But you know what WAS there? Complaints about how ministers who rejected Church principles got fired by their congregations or voted out by the Church hierarchy, horror of horrors, oh the horrible injustice of it. But why does Vosper even see it as a problem? If the Church is to abandon its claim to divine authority, as she demands, then ministers in the Church are nothing more than fancified motivational speakers. If their audience or their sponsors don't like their spiel, why shouldn't they simply stop paying them? After all, people like Dr. Phil and Theresa Caputo the Psychic Medium don't expect corporate sponsors to pay them for telling people things they DON'T want to hear. And they certainly would not expect their audience, no matter how gullible, to still keep shelling out cash after being told that pop psychology is in fact pseudoscience, or that their deceased loved ones are in fact just dead meat rotting underground.
So where does Vosper's sense of entitlement come from? Well, I don't know, actually. All I know is that she is completely disillusioned with every single core principle of the organization she works for. Yet she refuses to simply leave and join one of the many secular organizations whose principles are a perfect fit. But I do have my suspicions about what's going on, and what I suspect is that she simply doesn't have the moral strength to do the hard work of standing by her convictions. Because she, and ministers like her, are actually not qualified to be leaders in an organization (secular OR religious) that does "good works". These actually require concrete skills that accomplish things, like management, accounting, marketing analysis, logistics planning, or, god forbid, even scientific and technological knowledge. Whereas Vosper is only qualified in lecturing other people on how THEY ought to do something good. Her chances of landing a similarly cushy job at, say, the Red Cross or Greenpeace are slim. And that's why she just won't quit the Church, no matter how harmful and oppressive it supposedly is. She feels entitled, for no discernible reason, to have her cake and bite the hand that feeds her, too. Maybe it's supposed to be a religious article of faith. You know, to replace the ones that are such oppressive reminders of colonialist/patriarchal entitlement.
TL;RD: Vosper's book is a very detailed explanation of how she doesn't just want to get paid for telling people some bullshit that they want to hear, no sir--she wants to get paid for telling them some bullshit that SHE wants to hear. And TBH, her BSing skills are not bad, so she gets points for style. But I've been spoiled by BS with exciting things like plot and characters (heck, even the Bible has them!), and her self-serving exposition just doesn't meet my inflated BS standards.
So I kept flipping through the pages, skimming, skipping around... searching for any coherent explanation as to why the core principles of the Christian Church need to go, but the Church itself needs to stay. And it just wasn't there. But you know what WAS there? Complaints about how ministers who rejected Church principles got fired by their congregations or voted out by the Church hierarchy, horror of horrors, oh the horrible injustice of it. But why does Vosper even see it as a problem? If the Church is to abandon its claim to divine authority, as she demands, then ministers in the Church are nothing more than fancified motivational speakers. If their audience or their sponsors don't like their spiel, why shouldn't they simply stop paying them? After all, people like Dr. Phil and Theresa Caputo the Psychic Medium don't expect corporate sponsors to pay them for telling people things they DON'T want to hear. And they certainly would not expect their audience, no matter how gullible, to still keep shelling out cash after being told that pop psychology is in fact pseudoscience, or that their deceased loved ones are in fact just dead meat rotting underground.
So where does Vosper's sense of entitlement come from? Well, I don't know, actually. All I know is that she is completely disillusioned with every single core principle of the organization she works for. Yet she refuses to simply leave and join one of the many secular organizations whose principles are a perfect fit. But I do have my suspicions about what's going on, and what I suspect is that she simply doesn't have the moral strength to do the hard work of standing by her convictions. Because she, and ministers like her, are actually not qualified to be leaders in an organization (secular OR religious) that does "good works". These actually require concrete skills that accomplish things, like management, accounting, marketing analysis, logistics planning, or, god forbid, even scientific and technological knowledge. Whereas Vosper is only qualified in lecturing other people on how THEY ought to do something good. Her chances of landing a similarly cushy job at, say, the Red Cross or Greenpeace are slim. And that's why she just won't quit the Church, no matter how harmful and oppressive it supposedly is. She feels entitled, for no discernible reason, to have her cake and bite the hand that feeds her, too. Maybe it's supposed to be a religious article of faith. You know, to replace the ones that are such oppressive reminders of colonialist/patriarchal entitlement.
TL;RD: Vosper's book is a very detailed explanation of how she doesn't just want to get paid for telling people some bullshit that they want to hear, no sir--she wants to get paid for telling them some bullshit that SHE wants to hear. And TBH, her BSing skills are not bad, so she gets points for style. But I've been spoiled by BS with exciting things like plot and characters (heck, even the Bible has them!), and her self-serving exposition just doesn't meet my inflated BS standards.
wlotus's review
5.0
While I am happy to leave church to the fundamentalists (as Vosper warned would happen, if progressive Christians do not re-imagine church) and find a better way to live in community with others, I am also moved by her vision of how church can be re-imagined to truly benefit society and provide community. I strongly recommend this book to any Christian who is looking for ways to live and talk about their faith without being bogged down by fundamentalist dogma and the exclusivity therein.
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