The Word of God

Eric Brownlee grew up on the Great Plains of Northeastern Colorado, where he experienced his first insights into the beauty of naturethe majestic grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, the incomprehensible power of athunderstorm, the utter indifference imposed upon the human spirit by astar-filled night sky, or in the solitude and serenity of a vast wheatfield stretching to the horizon. The formal,societal experiences that influenced his religious upbringing, the hours spentin church, the vague sermons, the rote memorization, paled in comparison.To this day, he can't understand why someone would expect to find God inside a man-made structure, or in the pages of a book written by men. He condemns Jesus' statement: "The man who loves his life will lose it, while the man who hates hislife in this world will keep it foreternal life."Passionately driven to write a book exposing the flimsy foundation uponwhich Judeo-Christian zealotry is based, Eric has, in the spirit of Joseph Daleiden's seminal work, The Final Superstition(Prometheus Books), painstakingly provided rigorous arguments establishing that sound ethics andeffective social doctrines must not be grounded in myth and falsehood.

For the first 30 years of his life, Eric Brownlee had no reason to dispute theProtestant doctrine under which he was raised. After years of observing Jewish, Muslim, and Christian struggles in the Middle East, he asked, "Why wouldvarious groups who worship the same God fight because of religious differences?" Thus, his decade-long search for the answer ends with this book.