Joel: That Hedges piece you linked to is drivel. I’m surprised you recommend it (or at least seem to): methinks I detect some Hegel-inspired liberal triumphalism in Hedge’s “apologetic” for “faith” (for what his “faith” is, is nothing but sentiment).

What does this mean?

God is a human concept. God is the name we give to our belief that life has meaning, one that transcends the world’s chaos, randomness and cruelty…God is not an asserted existence but a process accomplishing itself. And God is inescapable. It is the life force that sustains, transforms and defines all existence.

This doesn’t sound anything like the Nicene Creed, or any of the Psalms. Can you imagine David writing a Hedges-esque Psalm? “The belief that life has meaning is my sheperd; I shall not want / it maketh me feel warm and fuzzy inside / it leadeth me beside the walls of liberal Utopia.”

God is a belief? That seems to be the wrong category of being entirely for anything worthy of the name “God.” But Hedges isn’t even consistent here: in one place, “God” refers to a belief, in another a concept, and in yet another a “life force” (hasn’t evolutionary biology dispensed with the élan vital anyway?). Gee, I’ve always thought “God” referred to a person…

This is another gem:

Faith allows us to trust, rather, in human compassion, even in a cruel and morally neutral universe. This is not faith in magic, not faith in church doctrine or church hierarchy, but faith in simple human kindness.

WTF? If we judge things by their fruits, we shouldn’t put too much faith in “simple human kindness.” My bets are on the real God, the one made flesh in Jesus Christ. Because Hedges’s God is really no different from Harris’s God: no God at all.

Hedges engages in something that I hate more than anything: he separates the message of Jesus from the person of Jesus. The instant you do that, you cease being Christian. Jesus’s message wasn’t merely an expression of mealy-mouthed liberal platitudes (in fact, it wasn’t the expression of mealy-mouthed liberal platitudes at all); His message was Himself. He is the Word of God, God’s message of hope to a broken humanity. Without Him, there is no hope. This Bultmannian, liberal Protestant trick has got to be put down once and for all.

Sorry for this furious fisking, but that Hedge piece is just plain bad. It figures, coming from a student of that arch-Unitarian, James Luther Adams.