Saturday 16 June 2007

Thoughts on Winston's The Story of God

A superficial wipe over the world's 'great religions.' Winston regurgitates the standard politically correct propaganda about various religions, pretending to know the core attributes of each one but failing miserabely to properly or fairly represent them. His essentialist historical perspective is particularly poor and uninformed.

Even further, he imposes a fashionable-but-absurd theological pluralism on every religion he analyses, thereby destroying them with the wrecking ball of oversimplification. He also feels at liberty to critique mainstream Christian doctrine (even though he himself is not a Christian), while leaving the doctrines of other religions alone. This habit is perhaps the most ridiculous and hypocritical activity of contemporary western thinkers. There is a ubiquitous belief that it is alright to criticize Christianity, but not acceptable to criticize any other theological or cosmological framework.

All Robert Winston does with this book is perpetuate the bigotry and thoughtlessness of political correctness and theological pluralism.