Confessions of a Heretic Volume 1 Philosophical Considerations

This work is written for all those who have struggled with the concept of God, with their faith in God, and how God can be at all relevant in our world today. Written in the context of a personal crisis, which frames the work, it is the first of a planned three-volume systematic theology under the title, Confessions of a Heretic. It seeks to answer the question of how can one believe in God when horrible things happen, from personal tragedy and trauma, to natural disasters and war. The answer is not a comforting one, but one that asserts that the problem is with our conception of God to begin with. We strive to make God conform to our will. But that is the very definition of idolatry, and the work argues that the established religious traditions, including Christianity, and especially Christianity in America, are idolatrous, based on idolatrous conceptions of God. Yet to see how this is so, we have to delve into philosophical arguments regarding Being, Time, Reality, and the very understanding of what a human being actually is, whereby the argument proposes a radical reconceptualization of the Western philosophical tradition on these issues.