The Skeptical Believer Lives!

I am happy to announce that the book I have been using as an excuse for not doing any profitable work the last few years is now available. The Skeptical Believer: Telling Stories to Your Inner Atheist is available on Amazon. To give you an idea of what it’s about, here is the material from the back cover:

Can someone be both skeptical and a believer? In what sense is having faith like living in a story? And what, for heaven’s sake, is an Inner Atheist?

These are just a few of the many questions addressed in The Skeptical Believer, a book that is all about questions and answers, and about working out useful responses to questions that have no definitive answers. It steers a middle course between the modernist conviction that faith is agreement with a set of statements about God and the postmodernist assertion that religious faith is just one story among many, no more or less true than any other.

Written in dozens of short reflections, laced with stories and sometimes irreverent asides, The Skeptical Believer is by a person who tried for decades to kill his Inner Atheist, but discovered that it was better to let him have his say—and then go on living in the story of faith.

This book doesn’t prove anything, but then little of great value can be proved. Instead it explores the notion that one can live a rich and meaningful life of faith without proof (and despite the weaknesses of the church) by seeing oneself as a character within an ancient story. As believers, skeptical or otherwise, always have.

You can also read an excerpt under the title in the list of “Books” on the “Writer” page of the website (http://www.wordtaylor.com/writer/books)–once the book is listed. (That same excerpt can now be found at http://www.wordtaylor.com/writer/in-progress.)

To help find the book quickly on Amazon, here is the ISBN: 978-0-9706511-5-0. I’ve asked Amazon to allow “Search Inside” so that viewers can get a better sense of the book before deciding whether to buy it, but that will take a while to come about.

If you do read the book, I would appreciate you putting a review of it on its book page on Amazon—whether you like it or not.Apparently no one, including my mother, will buy the book if there are no reviews at all! Modesty forbids me doing it myself, not least because an author is often the last person to know whether what they’ve written is actually of any use or not.

I would be happy to engage responses on the website, or privately through the website contact page (http://www.wordtaylor.com/contact). When you spend all your days inside at a computer, you start to wonder if anyone is out there in the world beyond the window. So evidence of such is welcomed.