Why does God Allow war?

     Is there reincarnation?

     These are the questions which dominate this exhaustive survey of religious experience, politics, psychology, philosophy, legend and anything else that could possible shed light on these issues.

War is as perennial as the grass in the meadows or the leaves on the trees. Every generation is blighted by war and it seems that humanity never learns. Generals and politicians study the history of warfare but only to learn tactics and the skills of warfare, taking little or no heed of the endless lessons of futility and waste. If there is a God why does he allow this to happen?

     War leads to multiple deaths but everyone dies so does it matter? And what happens when we die? Western religions offer heaven or hell. The Eastern religions all offer some form of reincarnation. The atheist option is simply nothing, oblivion and extinction.

     There are no definitive answers, but we can look at the options and weigh the probabilities.

GOD FAITH AND TERROR

BY ROBERT LEADER

          In God, God, Faith and Reason Robert Leader argued from a new working of the free will argument and a study of all the related fields of philosophy that in all probability God does exist. That book continued to argue that if God does exist then all faith must lead to God.

          In God, Faith and Terror these themes are continued in a study of the all-too-often hostile relationship between Christianity and Islam. It covers the crusades, the trade wars in the Mediterranean, the creation of Israel, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of al-Queda and ISIS and the modern blight of international terrorism. It is a story of a conflict between faiths and civilizations.

          At its heart is the question, can all this hatred, the murders and atrocities committed in the name of religion, really be what God wants?

  God, Faith and Reason is a readable survey of philosophy which examines the whole metaphysical jig-saw and explains why belief in God is rational and reasonable, and why all faith must lead to God.  

   What are the relationships between God, faith and Reason?

   Can God still exist in a world dominated by Science, materialism and skepticism?

   The author is a prolific novelist who studied philosophy at the University of East Anglia as a mature student, after traveling extensively through the heartlands of all the world’s great religions. His answers to these questions are therefore based upon both a formal study of the great philosophers and practical human experience.

   This book argues that God probably does exist, and that the uncertainties and cultural differences which cloud the true understanding of His nature are a positive factor which cry out for a greater tolerance between religions.

   In our modern world, as religious faiths collide, this timely book offers a new perspective for all believers to co-exist in peace and harmony, and points a clear way forward for religious belief into the third millennium.

   God, Faith and Reason is still offered here as a free book download. You can now also buy it as an Amazon paperback for £14. 93. Or read it on your Kindle for £2.08. The choice is yours.

GOD, FAITH AND REASON

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

          When I was a schoolboy I also attended a Baptist Sunday School and there I learned all the Bible stories and did passably well at the annual scripture examinations, although on a sliding scale. In my first exam I gained an honors certificate, in my second year a first, and in year three I was only second class. Perhaps I was already thinking outside the book, for by the time I reached teenage I had decided that although I believed in God I no longer believed in religion.

          In the sixties I twice traveled the overland trail to India and the Far East where the living faiths of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism all came vibrantly alive. I was also traveling with an ever-changing cast of long-haired free thinkers who were advocating everything from the Baha’i faith to the Moonies, and free love to communism. I read the Koran, the Upanishads and some of the Buddhist scriptures. Then, on a dusty pavement in Delhi I found an old bookseller squatting over a tattered range of equally dusty, thumb-battered books. One of them was a copy of Will Durrant’s Story of Philosophy. I realized that I was reading a lot of eastern philosophy but that I had never actually read any western philosophy. I bought the book and read it many times over. I was especially interested in Spinoza, whose thinking seemed like an intellectual bridge between western and eastern philosophical thought.

          When the opportunity came to go to university as a mature student I naturally choose to study philosophy. When I got to the Philosophy of Religion I unleashed all my own ideas into my first essay, and saw it brutally down-graded from my usual B-plus to a C-minus. It was an important lesson. As an undergraduate no free thinking was required, top marks were for regurgitation of what had been taught in lectures. I regurgitated and eventually graduated with an upper second degree.

          I wrote my book of philosophy after I left university. Initially it was called God against philosophy, because it seemed to me that almost all mainstream modern philosophy was atheistic. I sent a copy to one of my former tutors but he was unimpressed. His polite but brief reply to the point that he was pleased that I was “still doing some philosophy” seemed the epitome of Damnation with faint praise.

          All the publishers I approached were equally unenthusiastic. The most heartening/disheartening rejection I received was from a publisher who said that if I had held a teaching position at a university then he would have published it. However, without that endorsement nobody would buy it because nobody read philosophy outside the universities. It was a two-edged rejection that takes pride of place in my voluminous collection.

          As the year 2000 went by I circulated the MS again under the new title of Beyond the Millennium, again without success. Now it has a third title, God, Faith and Reason, and is offered here as a free read.

          I have recently been reading the autobiography of John Hick, the celebrated philosopher and theologian. It was interesting to see that Hick’s first book of philosophy, written as a church minister soon after he left university, was also rejected by all the mainstream UK publishers. It was not until Hick gained a US university teaching post that his book, now the first of many, was published by the Cornell University Press.

          Sadly I was not aware of Hick’s work until I read his obituary. Now I find that he was a passionate advocate of religious plurality and what has become known as the Perennial Philosophy, the idea that there is one and the same God at the core of all religious faith. This is very much in line with my own understanding and now I feel a little bit short-changed by my university lecturers who never introduced me to this stream of thought.

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