Pagans & Christians: The Personal Spiritual Experience

Rating:
Summary: Does his baloney have a first name?
Review: The book should really be titled "Christians and NEOPagans", because it doesn't deal with the abandoned Pagan religions of the past, it deals with modern day self-deluded types who play witch. The number of nuts with PhD at the end of their name doesn't seem to be decreasing from the looks of things. The book is at first presented as a way to help bridge the differences between Christianity and Wicca...which is impossible...and likewise the book fails to do so.
Rather than offer an olive branch of peace, it deliberately fans the flames by listing many Bible "contradictions"...all of which have been dispelled in many books over the years. The author starts this diatribe against the Bible with the classic line "I will use the King James Bible because it's the most popular..." which is a line all of these types use. Everyone knows the New International Version is now the most widely read. The reason they do this is because the KJV has some things lost in translation and it's written in an antiquated style. It's a favorite trick of Bible scoffers. The author especially likes to harp on the a verse from Leviticus claiming "beetles have four legs". In reality it is describing animals that crawl, (i.e., going on all fours) rather than the number of legs. Another example is when he mentions the so-called "contradiction" between David killing Goliath and 1Ch 20:5 that says Elhanan killed Goliath. The NIV corrects this mistranslation and states that the BROTHER of Goliath was killed by Elhanan. For someone with a PhD he certainly did poor research! But of course, he wasn't interested in the truth, he just wanted to slam Christianity.
Interestingly, He forgets (or is ignorant of) the fact that the Gardnerian "Book of Shadows" is plagarized from the writings of self proclaimed Anti-Christ Aleister Crowley (refer to Triumph of the Moon by Ronald Hutton), that Gardner created the whole thing in 1939 (Crafting The Art of Magic by Adian Kelly) or things that put Wicca in a bad light.
Why does "Doctor" Gus do this? It's because he has contempt for Christians, which all Neopagans do, and hides it behind a veneer of psudeo-schollarly bunk and romanticism. He never intended to build understanding between Christians and Wiccans, he wanted to convert people to his way of thinking (which hopefully he also failed to do).
The book deals a lot with the author's personal experiences, rather than concrete facts. Read any book by Ronald Hutton for a better perspective and "136 Bible Contradictions...Answered". Of course, for those who believe they have magical powers and think they are "witches", facts may not be their thing.