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God Without God
Western Spirituality without the wrathful king
by Michael Hampson
Published by O Books
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Introduction
The Christian faith stands accused of arrogance, hypocrisy, abuse of power, imperialism, dictatorship and genocide, discredited variously by science, rationalism, pluralism, Vatican politics and protestant fundamentalism, and finally rendered obsolete by democracy, wealth, technology, and even the church’s own liberal wing. Once the monopoly player in the western spiritual marketplace, it looks increasingly like a bankrupt corporation destroyed by the weight of its own history.
God without God has no argument with science or atheism or pluralism – indeed it takes these as its premises, then sets out to explore what remains of the western spiritual tradition. It finds right at the heart of that tradition a concept of the divine far more complex and mysterious than that which the atheist rightly rejects. We move beyond theism and atheism to consider the mystery of existence itself, discovering a tradition full of contemporary resonance, with a profound and timeless integrity for body, mind and spirit.