GroshLink

Lots of interest in Cut God Some Slack. I came across the post through the Chronicle's Who Buys Anti-Religion Books?. Yes, it's a hot topic and a lot of people read these books for a complex set of reasons.  If I would say something like Steven D. Levitt, maybe I'd get more comments:

Let me put the argument another way: I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that bird watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend $20 in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird watcher books would be.

Well, maybe you have to be known first.  No thank-you to both of those, I'll just keep press on in the truth that God calls us to himself so decisively that everything we are, everything we do, and everything we have is invested with a special devotion and dynamism lived out as a response to his summons and service . . . those who know that their source of purpose must rise above the highest of self-help humanist hopes and who long for their faith to have integrity and effectiveness in the face of all the challenges of the modern world (Os Guinness. The Call: Finding and Fulfilling the Central Purpose of Your Life.  (Nashville, TN:  W Publishing Group, 1998, p.4-5).

For those with interest in reading further, I'd recommend The Dawkins Confusion: Naturalism 'ad absurdum by Alvin Plantinga.  Also, Chuck Colson recently wrote Overheated Rhetoric: What should we make of bestselling books blasting Christians? (note: related pieces given at the bottom of the article).