Peter

“For many, losing god feels like losing a parent, and that loss has the potential to be devastating (Winell 4). The loss of god is an extremely complicated grief. People feel shame for their grief, believing they should be able to get over the loss of god quickly or they should not feel so devastated. They may feel that their devotion was simply a set of cognitive beliefs, when in reality their belief had deep emotional and relational impact.”
― Jamie Lee Finch, You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical Christianity

“It is now increasingly agreed that the Old Testament in its final form is a product of and response to the Babylonian Exile. This premise needs to be stated more precisely. The Torah (Pentateuch) was likely completed in response to the exile, and the subsequent formation of the prophetic corpus and the “writings” [poetic and wisdom texts] as bodies of religious literature (canon) is to be understood as a product of Second Temple Judaism [postexilic period]. This suggests that by their intention, these materials are . . . an intentional and coherent response to a particular circumstance of crisis. . . . Whatever older materials may have been utilized (and the use of old materials can hardly be doubted), the exilic and/ or postexilic location of the final form of the text suggests that the Old Testament materials, understood normatively, are to be taken [understood] precisely in an acute crisis of displacement, when old certitudes—sociopolitical as well as theological—had failed.[”
― Peter Enns, The Evolution of Adam: What the Bible Does and Doesn't Say about Human Origins

“This is a well-thought, well-written and well-researched book by an author whose voice is a very welcome and much-needed one in today’s theological climate. Read it and prepare to be amazed. Simply put, this book is freaking awesome.” K E I T H G I L E S Author of the Jesus Unbound and Jesus Undefeated and Co-host of the Heretic Happy Hour podcast”
― Matthew J Korpman, Saying No to God: A Radical Approach to Reading the Bible Faithfully

“C.S. Lewis puts it well in The Screwtape Letters. The veteran demon describes a Christian at prayer: If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many … ingredients. There will be [e.g.] images derived from pictures of [Christ] as He appeared during … the Incarnation…. I have known cases where what the [person] called his “God” was actually located … inside his own head…. [Such a Christian will be] praying to it—to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him.17 This, I think, is the unintended truth of the slogan of Jesus as one’s “personal savior.” He is a different savior in the eye of every beholder. Your personal savior is customized a bit differently from mine. He doesn’t have all the same options.”
― Robert M. Price, Jesus Christ Superstition