God

Rating:
Summary: God
Review: Waugh's stated purpose for this book was to paint a portrait of God using all available literary sources, not just the Bible and Christian theological writings (among the other sources are the Qur'an, Jewish writings, mystical writings, Mormon scripture, philosophical writings, etc.). Furthermore, he's using all these widely diverse sources without any kind of distinction, and he's doing this on purpose. As he says in the foreword: "While any single opinion about God can be shown to be wrong, the totality of all human opinion about him must, necessarily, be right. [...] If God principally exists in the minds of millions of people both dead and alive, then the best thing for it is to seek him out from all sides at once, to blitz him, if you like, from every conceivable angle, from the broadest range of thought, vision, opinion, sudden intuition - it really doesn't matter."
Waugh uses a rather strange system of numbered passages (each one with a short headline), these passages ranging in length from a few lines of text up to a few pages. There are 257 of these passages, making up the entire book, aside from the foreword. This system interrupts the natural flow of the text, making it feel disjointed, although the next passage usually follows the same, or a similar, subject as the preceding passage. Most of the text is made up of extensive citations from a wide variety of sources, mostly scriptural and apocryphal. Waugh's commentary on these citations is sometimes very brief or even non-existent, since he apparently feels that the cited text speaks for itself. Waugh also strays, sometimes quite significantly, from the purpose he laid out in the beginning of the book, in the sense that he on occasion loses himself in describing all the dark and juicy bits in the Bible (and other sources), and all the absurdities and insanities in religious dogma. Of course, this in itself is a good thing, since these things need to be dug up and shown to the world as often and as much as possible. The quality of his commentary varies wildly, and it sometimes appears as if there's no system or method to his writing. Some of his comments are quite funny and insightful, but other parts of the text (such as his refutations of some of the "proofs" for God's existence) are a bit unclear or lacking in essential detail.
In the end the book that just sort of fades out, without Waugh ever really saying anything about what, if anything, he has discovered about God. So, all in all, God is a bit of a strange book that didn't really satisfy. But it is interesting, and it does point out a lot of stuff that no "do-good" Christian would ever want to acknowledge, so from that point of view it is a recommended read.