Customer Reviews

All in the Mind: A Farewell to God

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Kennedy clearly gives his view of Christianity based on his 80 years of life. I found it a good read and persuasive in places. Kennedy really gives the low down on how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely - and that religious folk are no exception. As he clearly shows, the Christian message has been so tainted, changed and corrupted that its value has become undermined. He accepts that many people believe in a God, but mainly because other people seem to do so. I found him persuasive, although at times shallow. However, Kennedy doesn't pretend that the book is anything but his personal view. It is interesting how the religious minded attack him but produce no valid arguments to sustain their own irrational beliefs. He is charitable about the majority of priests and believers, but sad that so many have been taken in by religion.

Ludovic Kennedy provides a very personal and broad view of freethought and atheism as he sees it. Starting with his own upbringing and his shock of the death of his christian father he charts christianity thru the ages and the rise of those who dare go against the grain.

Kennedy weaves a broad loom and introduces characters such as Thomas Aikenhead, Chevalier de la Barre and Baron d'Holbach to the unititiated. It's an easy read and excites the truth-seeker to delve into extensive "books consulted" list.

The point of Ludovic Kennedy's work is to promote thought and to answer some of the doubts of the waverers. In this regard it does an excellent job. After reading this book you come away with the view that christianity is a religion that has survived by stifling free expression and that established religions are there because it is useful to elites rather than their truthfulness. If Kennedy wanted to get us to question the status quo he could not have written a better book.

An extremly interesting book, the likes of which I'm sad never to have been exposed to growing up. Wouldn't it be great if we could expose our children to the many views of our existence, both religious and non-religous and then let them make up their own minds. Isn't it more than a coincidence that in general our religion is dictated to us almost uniquely by the place we are born.

Being a European currently living in the Southern US, it boggles the mind to see the unquestioning "faith" of so many. It's also eye opening to compare this to their politics and actions both in the US and internationally. There's little correlation. This book is a great read, most revealing..

Ludovic Kennedy shares an entertaining explanation of how he came to be a free-thinker, and goes on to outline the history of Western Christianity.

Everyone should read this book; not just atheists but Christians and anyone with religious leanings. Ludovic Kennedy writes in an easy fashion and never bores. He explains in detail how Christianity became what it is today and the falsehoods it is based upon: Christmas day not being Christ's birthday, Jesus not being born in Nazareth, the 'Virgin' Mary not being a virgin at all (a mistranslation of the Bible) and many, many more are dealt with at length. This book's content would indeed shock many a Christian. It's a pity that schoolchildren won't read this book BEFORE they are brainwashed with Christianity. You read the book wondering just how on earth all the myths and nonsense of religion have survived. If you are a Christian in the USA then please read this! Definitely one of those 'must have' books on your shelf. If you ever buy a book on religion (or atheism) buy this one and spread the word: God doesn't exist! It's all been made up!

This book is certainly a controversial account written by a man who found the dogma of the Christian religion burdensome and somewhat unfulfilling. However, it soon becomes apparent that the sub-title of his book, "A Farewell to God", is more a piece of wishful thinking than Kennedy would like to think.

Kennedy reveals that his experiences of Christianity were focused primarily on the empty regulations, dogmatic chains and rules of the 'religious framework' of fundamentalism, and therefore it comes as no surprise that he failed to find the deeper spiritual Heart of the Christian faith. In his first chapter, Kennedy reflects on the days when he was robotically forced to recite bible passages and to pray, and if he failed to do so, he was told that "bad things would happen". Unsurprisingly then, throughout the book Kennedy churns out words such as "oppression", "chains", "dogma", "guilt" and "bloodshed" when talking about Christianity, and it becomes clear that Kennedy is completely unaware that the heart of Christianity resides way deeper than the dogmatic chains of the religious framework itself.

It struck me that due to Kennedy's intentions (i.e. to undermine Christianity for the reason stated in his introduction: "All my life I have found myself at odds with the Christian religion"), he attempts to persuade the reader that all Christians are conforming to intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy, and that Christianity must essentially be approached from a fundamentalist perspective. This attitude is of course a narrow minded dogma all to itself.

One example is when Kennedy quotes the horrifically narrow minded views of Rev. Joseph Furniss, where Furniss describes his attitudes about hell: "The little child is in the red-hot oven. See how it screams to get out; see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. ... God was very good to this little child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse and never repent and so it would have been punished more severely in Hell. So God in his mercy called it out of the world in early childhood."

There will always be irrational, narrow minded Christians - just as there will always be irrational, narrow minded Atheists, Buddhists, and Muslims etc. But contrary to what Kennedy has portrayed about Christians, I feel that most Christians who know anything about spirituality happily accept that all religions are in touch with the same thing - the Word - or whatever other label we may choose to call Him. Christians (such as myself) believe that God made the ultimate divine revelation through Jesus Christ, even though many Christians do not believe that Christianity is the ONLY path to God. Rather, they believe that the WORD is the only way. (There's a difference, which doesn't contradict Jesus' message in John 14.6).

Kennedy failed to realise that the broader perspective of theism and Christian faith actually makes good sense of reality, and there are far deeper implications than the narrow minded scope of fundamentalism. In his chapter 'Darwin and After', Kennedy conveys the message that science's discovery of evolution has revealed that we live in a blindly indifferent Universe, that our existence is an 'accident', and that any appeals for 'God' are intellectually bankrupt. He concludes: "God has no place in the new equation of the history of species that Darwin was offering." However, this is indeed wishful thinking, for when viewed from the greater perspective of cosmic evolution, the epic story of an unfolding Universe and the arrival of 'mind' exhibits great depth and meaning. A mathematically ordered Universe which happened to become aware of itself, and which gave rise to friendship, love and spiritual creativity is not a good sign that the Universe is purposeless and that our existence was not intentional. The fact that something exists, rather than nothing at all, is also not a good sign that the Infinite is inherently meaningless.

Moreover, Kennedy seems unaware of the fact that the theory of natural selection (i.e. that we evolved 'accidentally') is facing MASSIVE problems when used to explain the existence of nervous systems, brains and consciousness. (Additionally - why would inanimate atoms "accidentally" experience friendship, joy, tears, and intrinsic value? Why would bundles of physical particles be 'consciously aware' of their own existence or of their own environment - all 'accidentally'? As is happens, such issues have stumped scientists, and the personal conclusions of absolute materialists like Richard Dawkins are ideological notions which are grounded in faith).

In his chapter 'Touching the Transcendent', Kennedy claims: "To say that God created this immensity out of nothing insults the imagination and adds nothing to the store of human knowledge." Kennedy doesn't seem to realise that exactly the same could be said about his 'faith'. To claim that this wonderful mathematically ordered cosmos came from 'nothing' is logically absurd, and to say that the Universe just 'is', begs too many questions. In truth, the theistic hypothesis is better than the materialistic hypothesis, because the theistic hypothesis makes the existence of a cosmos such as ours far more probable than the materialistic one.

When Kennedy refers to the story of Adam and Eve, he approaches it as if it were a scientific, literal account. He refuses to comment on the fact that the majority of Christians hold that Holy Books such as the Bible ought not be approached in the same way a scientist would approach a literal account of the make up of a plant cell, for instance. Rather, many Bible passages are approached as metaphors which contain deep, spiritual truths. Christians who are not restricted to the narrow scope and chains of fundamentalism view the story of Adam and Eve is a pictorial which contains deep insights which highlights the distinctiveness of human life and its relationship to God.

At the end of the day, it strikes me that Kennedy's belief that the Ultimate Source and the Infinite Reality of God is "all in mind" - is all in mind itself.

In Kennedy we have yet another non-expert (a newscaster, bnot a Biblical scholar), who had yet another life of "suffering" (a mother too uneducated to answer his questions about God correctly, and a father that was killed in war), who is offended by the idea that sin, especially sexual sin, is bad and that God will judge him, telling us that arguments for the existence of God are "futile" because God is entirely a creature of our imaginations, and we need to get over it. And he brags about there now being 50,000 Humanists in Norway, with "hopes" for 100,000 by that year -- in a country of 4 1/2 million. Joining the ranks in droves, are they not?

From masticating gleefully over Europe's near-empty churches and ignorant clergy (he needs to check out Philip Jenkins' recent study of the growth of Christianity in the Third World) to weeping about the Dark Ages (a term real historians are starting to disdain, knowing that era to have been one in which advances exceeded Greece and Rome), from assuming the JEDP theory true just because some outdated scholar said so, to following the line about anonymity to the Gospels (the evidence for their authorship is just as good as it is for, i.e., Tacitus' Annals -- a credit at the beginning of the work); from hinting that Jesus was homosexual to quoting Thomas Paine as an authority, All in the Mind is little more than a catalog of the most common Skeptical arguments molded into sound bites, placed like cubes of meat and vegetables on a skewer and cooked until burnt to a crisp. Kennedy offers not a single original thought here; even his merely historical portions of the book, consisting of a very, very brief and simplistic look at the evolution of religious thought and the growth of atheism are done far better, and in a far more interesting and complete way, in a variety of sources.

Kennedy thinks we're all deluded for believing in any God, especially the Biblical one. That estimation, coming as it does from someone who clearly used no more sources than he was able to find at the closest library, calls for no more than extended bout of laughter. Give it a pass.