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Product Description:
Just as with "Misquoting Jesus" where Ehrman revealed how the corruption of scripture by scribes caused him to reject his once-conservative Christian beliefs, in "God's Problem" Ehrman will discuss for the first time his personal anguish when he discovered the Bible's incoherent explanations for suffering and how that caused him to lose his faith altogether.In a fresh departure from Ehrman's recent focus on the New Testament, he expands his research to include much of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) in "God's Problem" and reveal the core responses to suffering proposed by the different biblical writers. The prophets: suffering is a punishment for sin; Job (two different answers): suffering is a test, for which you'll later be rewarded for passing; and that suffering is beyond comprehension, since we're just peons and God, after all, is GOD); "Ecclesiastes": it's just the nature of things, so suck it up; and, all apocalyptic texts ("Daniel", plus the Apostle Paul's letters and the book of "Revelation" in the New Testament): God will eventually make right all that is wrong.
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Average Rating : 
Rating :  - Nicely done, well worth the read
This is a nicely done book that I've found interesting in so many ways. While some may complain that some of the points are discussed ad nauseum, I've found a way around that -- I just skip through the stuff that seems to be repetitious by reading only the first sentences in the those paragraphs, until I get to new material. For example, being familiar with the story of Job and the issue of the two authors, I didn't feel a need to dissect the poetic part of Job and so I just skipped right on through. Very easy.
What I discovered while reading of Ehrman's own journey to agnosticism, is that while I am neither agnostic nor atheist, the god that is described in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is not a god that I care to relate to. I believe that there is a greater being, perhaps best described as the spark of "something" that allows us to know the difference between the living and the not-living, and which (not "who") may have lit the spark that became the Big Bang to get the whole universe going, but I don't believe that this greater being is actively involved in every day human (or other) affairs.
There is far too much suffering and injustice for me to ever again accept the notion of a "personal god" that answers my prayers due solely to the almost random bestowing of grace, yet ignores the far more fervent -- and righteous -- cries of others who are in much more dire straits than I.
(Some might insist that the apparent randomness of grace is just one of those mysteries that we can never understand about this god. My response to that is B.S. -- if this god so wants a personal relationship, as many believe, then it has to BE personal, and not random. Yet I see only the randomness of who lives, who dies, who is saved from disaster, who isn't, who is cured, who isn't... Nothing personal about it.)
Mr. Ehrman's book helped me to put into perspective those things about the collective Bible that always nagged, just below the surface, but I didn't have the training -- and my teachers certainly didn't have the agenda! -- to fully understand just what was wrong about what I was reading.
Highly recommend this book. It will not convert you either way, which is good since I don't think that's the intent. But it may make you think. Even better.
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