A.B.D.

Outstanding in Every Aspect

Revisado: 11-16-24

This is probably the best single book to pull the honest skeptic back from the brink of the atheistic/skeptical intellectual abyss. This book was instrumental in saving my life & marriage when I first read & struggled with it as a proud/stubborn atheist several years ago. The audio version is excellent & and welcome addition.

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Fatally flawed because it relies heavily on Protestant errors

Revisado: 04-25-24

The premise of the book is simple and compelling: truth is real and objective, and Jesus Christ is Truth itself. Sadly the author somehow tries to square this with “sola scriptura” Protestantism which is inherently subjectivist and relativistic, making each person his own subjective interpreter of Scripture.

There are good stories about amazing things that followers of Christ have done to bear witness to the Truth (however much in his stories about Protestants are tainted with ridiculous boomer-meme tier false history such as the idea that John Wycliffe was “persecuted for translating the Bible into English”).

So overall this was a disappointing read/listen, but Protestantism in any form is disappointing. At least it was free with Audible Plus.

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Excellent Reading of a Classic

Revisado: 02-16-24

Very pleasant to listen to; great translation and performance of one of the most beautiful and important books in history.

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Good but hopelessly incomplete

Revisado: 01-16-23

Making the “secular saint” the apex of this course is like writing a history of science and putting Scientology as the apex. But it is useful, I very much appreciated that Ernest Becker was included because he does not get nearly the recognition he deserves from secularists.

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Okay as far as it goes

Revisado: 12-26-22

Good as an overview, but it is far too Protestant with many unjustifiable Modernist assumptions baked in. I suspect this is because it is aimed at an American audience; i.e. primarily an evangelical/“born again”/Protestant audience. The whole course is primarily just begging American Protestants to stop buying into idiotic fundamentalist notions of Revelation so they can be more palatable to New York Times readers. Of course this ignores that Catholic and Orthodox remain far more numerous and prominent denominations of Christianity with far more interesting (and correct) theology compared to American Protestants. The course is still worth the listen as long as it’s a free AudiblePlus title.

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Atheism is inherently left wing

Revisado: 12-10-22

There are a lot of angry reviews from readers seething about the author’s advocacy of Christianity as essential for conservatives. But he’s right, look at the social rot that has been progressing unabated since the 1960s while the intellectual cowards on the right retreat constantly behind bromides and refuse to take any moral stand whatsoever. If you abandon the millennia of philosophical and moral traditions that built the West, what are you even conserving? If you don’t understand the tradition from Plato, Aristotle, through St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante, Milton, etc. how can you possibly understand what is valuable in our culture, let alone conserve it?

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An Inversion of Dante

Revisado: 09-24-22

This book is definitely interesting, and you will learn a lot about the Divine Comedy and appreciate new details & insights that probably haven’t stood out to you in past readings of the Comedy or in other commentary works. However, it is difficult to separate authentic new insights from the perversion of Dante wrought by Mr. Vernon repeatedly shoehorning in his own modern prejudices into the mouth of Dante.

Vernon’s thesis is that Dante is **really** saying that (1) everyone is saved, (2) sodomy is good actually, and (3) Christianity & the Catholic Church are actually bad & need to be destroyed (or completely “evolved” into something completely different). You can believe all these things without lying about what Dante says. What Vernon does in this book is a complete inversion of the truth and a perversion of something beautiful to cram it into the universalist modernist world view we should expect from a modern Anglican “priest.”

The most tragic part of this work is that, like all evil things, it comes from the perversion of something good and contains some truth. It wouldn’t be so insidious if it didn’t.

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Had to Read for School, It's Just Pop Garbage

Revisado: 08-14-20

This is quintessential airport gift shop reading material. It is hyped-up story telling that spends a lot of verbiage to tell you a bunch of obvious, oversimplified, or mundane ideas that are dressed up as profound. e,g, "good leaders actually care about their subordinates' well-being!" F*cking riveting. Sinek comes off like your typical corporate "consultant" type, lots of fluff and no substance.

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