Best theism religion books according to redditors
We found 22 Reddit comments discussing the best theism religion books. We ranked the 7 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
We found 22 Reddit comments discussing the best theism religion books. We ranked the 7 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.
Based on your post, I have a suspicion that you're not actually a "free thinker". Why? Because you've fallen for a marketing trick.
Back in the early 2000s, a few years after the 9/11 attacks when people were starting to use the internet much more frequently, a certain viewpoint regarding religion starting gaining popularity. This has been referred to as "new atheism". It used terms like "free thinker" and "rational" and "fallacies" and even "science" as cultural buzzwords to sell books and speaking events.
And now, over a decade later, you're looking at "A free-thinker's list of essential reads" which includes some extremely questionable books. The God Delusion is especially shit, and I say that as an atheist. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris leave a lot to be desired.
In fact, I actually recommend that people who are interested in getting into philosophy of religion read The God Delusion. But not because it's good. Quite the opposite. It's the best book ever written for the purposes of practicing identification of poor reasoning. Seriously, there are so many flaws in it that explaining them all would take me dozens of max-length reddit comments.
If you want to be a "free thinker" regarding religious questions, you need to scrap that list and read actual philosophers. One of my favorite works of all time on the atheist side is Theism and Explanation by Gregory Dawes: https://www.amazon.com/Explanation-Routledge-Studies-Philosophy-Religion/dp/0415997380; and on the theist side, The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne: https://www.amazon.com/Existence-God-Richard-Swinburne/dp/0199271682.
Now, keep in mind that these are both academic works, and getting through them might be difficult if you're not familiar with philosophy of religion. But that's ok. Even if you don't "get" everything, they'll improve your thinking a great deal. And if you want more recommendations, PM me anytime. I am extremely well-read in philosophy of religion and can give you dozens and dozens of more things to read.
Lucy, are you in the sky? (Sorry, I know you made this username because of the song, I had to, though.)
Also, How did you find this subreddit? Did you just type "/r/pagan" after "www.reddit.com", or did you search reddit for "pagan", or something else? I'm curious as to how people find this subreddit. :)
Seriously, though...
>My problem, however, is that my initial religious education of "one god" is pretty well ingrained. How would you suggest I get past this so that I can continue to grow spiritually?
While I come from what is often considered a reconstructionist tradition, I think the following things would be helpful even if you are not a reconstructionist:
It's not enough to believe things, you have to do them, too. Or else it's easy to say you think one thing, but actually do another.
For #1, I'd recommend three books off the top of my head to you:
Since you're interested in Bast (sometimes called Bastet), I'd also suggest learning about ancient Egyptian culture and religion. Even if you never ever practice Kemeticism, I think it'd be a good place to start both unlearning monotheistic habits of thought and learning more polytheistic habits. And you'd get to learn more about Bast,to boot. But even if you don't do that, I suggest doing at least the first two things.
If you can only borrow or find or buy one, I suggest one of the first two, but the third one is also good. The first two are written by polytheists, with Paper writing from his personal perspective, informed by Chinese religion and Native American religion, while Greer writes more generally. However, Kirsch's book is helpful, because it contrasts polytheism and monotheism side by side. Sometimes one can learn some what something is by learning what it is not.
Sorry for the wall of text, I hope you find it helpful. It'll likely take a long time to unlearn what you've learned, but it's possible if you study and practice.
I think the best thing to do here (especially if you enjoy reading) is to do some study into the good reasons why Christianity is believed to be correct. William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith is one of the best, most cohesive defenses of the reasonability of the Christian faith I've ever read but there are plenty of other good sources too (Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God and The Coherence of Theism, J.P. Moreland and Bill Craig's Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview, Paul Copan and Bill Craig's Come Let Us Reason, Craig Keener's Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, and Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief just to name a few).
>As if character strings like "pure actuality" have an inherent meaning
That's why I've made a vow to stop using technical terminology, even clearly explained technical terminology. :)
>If that quote from Barker is all you got, then you've got hardly any evidence for your claim: He repeats the correct argument a few sentences later.
He claims that the original argument is that everything has a cause, and that philosophers have been busy trying to patch this up ever since. The opposite is true, in fact. The "everything has a cause" version is a modern distortion.
You don't have to look far to find plenty of examples like this. Here is another one. He thinks Aquinas is saying that the prime mover started the universe off in the past.
This level of distortion of an opposing viewpoint is a sign of ideology, not rational thought. The conclusion is already firmly in place, and now lets see whats wrong with the argument because we already know the conclusion is false. I put this into the box right along with the Disco 'Tute's distortions of evolution.
>Almost anyone seems vulnerable to misunderstanding
Sure. Craig makes all kinds of crap statements (defending genocide), which doesn't in the least affect his other arguments. In comparison, though, his discussions on cosmology are pretty accurate, and he even collaborated with the aforementioned Quentin Smith on a book on cosmology.. My point is not that infidels makes some mistakes here and there, but that much of their discussion of theistic arguments get the arguments wrong.
I hope you’ll excuse me for thinking that I’m a better judge of my intended meanings (and the extent to which I manage to express them in language). After all, I have more experience of my own intentions, attempts at linguistic communication, and success and failures, than you do (having known myself for just a bit longer than you have). But nice try playing Freud or Skinner there.
If I’ve been getting the logic backwards, it’s because that’s how you presented it. You said, and I quote, that “religion is bogus [metaphysical claim] because it talks about things we have no experiential connection to (that’s an epistemological angle, not psychological).” At first you clearly based your metaphysical claim on your epistemological claim. But then you almost immediately went and reversed the logical priority, basing your epistemological claim on the very same metaphysical claim it was meant to support, saying that “no one will ever experience the elements, because they don’t exist.” Curiously, you added a parenthetical in which you expressed your original logical priority (metaphysical claim based on epistemological claim) negatively, saying, “there’s absolutely no reason to assume that something exists for which we have no epistemological connection to.” If you don’t want me to get the logic of your claims backwards, then don’t waffle back and forth so much, eh?
And no, I have not been speaking directly of religion/God, as that has not been my present interest (there you go again, Mr. Psychoanalyst). I’ve been speaking of the kind of prima facie warrant that religious experiences confer. These experiences do not give philosophers reason to assume theism. It gives them warrant to explore theism and debate theism. Examples of this can be found in volumes such as J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane’s book, Atheism and Theism. We find a similar example in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith’s exchange in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.
See, the psychologist of religion asks, “What psychological mechanisms are involved in the production of religious belief?” Whereas the philosopher of religion asks, “What purported grounds are offered for religious belief? What is the logical status of these grounds?”
I would hardly call an interest in a philosopher an “obsession” (and there you go being dramatic again). I’m not interested exclusively in Kierkegaard, though he is a strong interest of mine. I’ve also read works by numerous thinkers spanning the history of philosophy: Thales, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plotinus, Saadia, Augustine, Boethius, Avicenna, Anselm, al-Ghazali, Abelard, Averroës, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, the Conimbricenses, Poinsot, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, James, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Sartre, MacIntyre, Searle, Derrida, and many others. (If there are any you wish to seriously discuss, I’m more than happy.)
Yes, I can see outside the Kierkegaardian perspective (and if I couldn’t, I’d be a pretty poor Kierkegaardian, as his perspective requires serious engagement with numerous other perspectives, including Socratic, Hegelian, Kantian, and so on).
Please note that my use of Kierkegaard is not all positive. You should already know this, as I’ve mentioned before that I do not accept his negative attitude toward natural theology.
In any case, I’m sorry to see you feel that strong philosophical interests are a sign of sickness. Why are you even here, exactly?
Yeah there is certainly no good defense for what they believe.
> This is seriously one of the weakest objection I've ever heard against the PSR. What does this even mean? Of course God is not obligated to create our universe or any anything for that matter. How does this affect the PSR? There is no explanation other than the 'because'.
It shows that the PSR is self refuting because even a god cannot satisfy it. To put it into a more logical form:
r/https://bit.ly/2wJRxaL
Please feel free to refute that.
> Next: the brute fact response. This still leaves our most basic thirst about understanding reality unquenched. The universe is contingent; there is no way around even when involving science, math, etc--whatever. If it is possible for it to not exist, it is contingent.
Our thirst is technically irrelevant, since we can thirst for things like the color of jealousy, which obviously has no answer. What matters is part of logic. Regarding the possibility of the universe not existing, that assumes it is logically possible that the universe not exist. But so too is god. It is not logically necessary that the god theists believe in exist because other conceptions of god are possible. Why does god timelessly and eternally exist with desire X rather than desire Y, when neither desire X or Y are logically necessary or logically impossible?
Logical necessity cannot explain this scenario. There is no way to show in principle why god had to timelessly and eternally exist with the desire to create our particular universe, and not one just slightly different, or even radically different, or no universe at all. The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to desire to create our universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact. He can try and say "It's because god wanted a relationship with us," but that wouldn't answer the question at all. Why did god want a relationship with us? Is that logically necessary? Could god exist without wanting a relationship with anyone? And still, even if god wanted a relationship, why did he have to desire this particular universe? There are an infinitude of logically possible universes god could have desired that would allow him to have a relationship with someone else that for no reason god didn't timelessly and eternally exist with the desire to create. A theist can also try to argue that "our universe is the best of all possible worlds, and therefore god had to desire it." But this claim is absurd on its face. I can think of a world with just one more instance of goodness or happiness, and I've easily just thought of a world that's better.
The theist is going to have to eventually come to a brute fact when seriously entertaining answers to these questions. Once he acknowledges that there is no logically necessary reason god had to timelessly and eternally exist with the desire to create our particular universe, and that god could have timelessly and eternally existed with a different desire, he's in exactly the same problem he claims the atheist is in when he says the universe is contingent and could have been otherwise, and therefore cannot explain itself. Hence, even positing a god doesn't allow you to avoid brute facts. There is no way to answer these questions, even in principle, with something logically necessary.
> God, on the other hand, is an entirely different kettle of fish; if God exists, he must exist necessarily. Merely saying it is a brute fact does not get around this; it's getting at that the universe is not contingent. Some think that there could be an infinite chain of causes to get us here. Maybe so. But how does this help? The chain is still contingent.
Nope. If god with eternal contingent (non-necessary) desire X exists, there cannot in principle be a logically necessary reason why that god exists, since a god with another non-necessary desire is just as possible. Hence god is just as contingent as the universe, lest you want to resort to special pleading.
>This is more of the New Atheism that is pure sophistry. 'Simple Logic'. Yikes. There are good objections to the PSR; this is obviously not one of them.
Not at all. This is serious logic showing how even you cannot answer the basic questions of why does god timelessly and eternally exist with desire X rather than desire Y, when neither desire X or Y are logically necessary or logically impossible? The only possible answer must be contingent, since a necessary one is off the table.
>I am not a Catholic but here is a very sophisticated defense of the PSR. Pruss is a Catholic. Pruss is brilliant here as well.
>
>Timothy O'Connor has my favorite book on the topic here
It is impossible to defend the PSR and all attempts to claim otherwise depend on false arguments from consequence.
I am fascinated with both topics as well.
Recommendations on anthropology of religion:
Recommendations on philosophy of religion:
I'd say one difference between Mein Kampf and Leviticus is that Hitler did write Mein Kampf while Moses didn't write Leviticus, so it isn't a first-hand account of his life, but rather a mythologizing of his lfe by others. Though the Pentateuch, which includes Leviticus, is attributed to Moses, much of the Pentateuch was likely written by other authors. Leviticus was probably written by the Priestly Source.
>The entire book of Leviticus is probably composed of Priestly literature. Most scholars see chapters 1-16 (the Priestly code) and chapters 17-26 (the Holiness code) as the work of two related schools, but while the Holiness material employs the same technical terms as the Priestly code, it broadens their meaning from pure ritual to the theological and moral, turning the ritual of the Priestly code into a model for the relationship of Israel to God: as the tabernacle is made holy by the presence of Yahweh and kept apart from uncleanliness, so Yahweh will dwell among Israel when Israel is purified (made holy) and separated from other peoples.
Reference: Book of Leviticus
But that's an aside. In regards to your point regarding Hitler and Mein Kampf, unfortunately, there isn't much biographical regarding Hitler's religious views as a child aside from his own writings. Granted, political leaders may embellish or alter details of their life for political purposes in an autobiography and in that respect Hitler might be little different than current political leaders who make a great show of their piety to gain the support and contributions of religious voters.
Even in regards to his later life, his actual views are debatable. Many do suggest he only pretended to be a Christian, but a German general relates a statement indicating his support for Catholicism even when he was chancellor of Germany.
>Although, as it turned out, the Nazi Party did not have a good relationship with the Catholic hierarchy, this, per se, is not strong circumstantial evidence that Hitler renounced Catholicism. And there is no evidence that he left the Catholic church during his life. Indeed, we know from German general Engel (Engel's 1974 book At the Heart of the Reich: The Secret Diary of Hitler's Army Adjutant) that as late as the fall of 1941, less than four years before his death, and after his Final Solution decision to exterminate the Jews of Europe, Hitler said, "I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so."
Reference: Divinity of Doubt: The God Question by Vincent Bugliosi, page 227
One can always argue that he concealed his true feelings from subordinates as well, of course.
Though it may have been motivated by political reasons, he expressed a need to maintain the churches to Albert Speer while he was chancellor:
>Speer recalled that when in 1937 Hitler heard that many of his followers had dropped their church membership upon the urging of party and SS leaders, he forbade his close collaborators, including Goring and Goebbels, to do so; and that in 1942 he insisted upon the absolute necessity to maintain the churches. He "condemned sharply the struggle against the churches: a crime against the future of the people: to substitute a 'Party-ideology' is an impossibility."
I think the need for many Christians to insist Hitler wasn't a Christian stems from the view that he represents the embodiment of evil and so it would be unacceptable to them that he might share their religious beliefs. As the historian Richard Steigmann-Gall put it:
>What we suppose Nazism must surely have been about usually tells us as much about contemporary societies as about the past purportedly under review. The insistence that Nazism was an anti-Christian movement has been one of the most enduring truisms of the past fifty years.... Exploring the possibility that many Nazis regarded themselves as Christian would have decisively undermined the myths of the Cold War and the regeneration of the German nation ... Nearly all Western societies retain a sense of Christian identity to this day.... That Nazism as the world-historical metaphor for human evil and wickedness should in some way have been related to Christianity can therefore be regarded by many only as unthinkable.
Reference: Religion in Nazi Germany
Here's a book on agnosticism, in case that's what you're looking for:
http://www.amazon.ca/Divinity-Doubt-The-God-Question/dp/1593156294
Sorry, for some reason I didn't notice your reply.
In your blog, you don't make a combined argument. You only vaguely reference other arguments in answer to criticisms, but the criticisms aren't adequately addressed in the arguments you refer to.
Making one argument at a time should make things easier for you. If you can't even make one argument, why should I believe that you can make many? What's the point in coming to a debate forum if you just point to your website?
> What do you mean by 'natural processes that lean towards complexity'? Can you give me an example? The second law of thermodynamics would seem to suggest otherwise.
Universal processes forming in some way need not contradict the second law, even within our universe. If you consider natural forces outside our current universe, then that isn't even a concern. An example might be the discovery of more fundamental physical forces that act to constrain the other emergent laws in such a way as to lead to complexity. The more fundamental physics might be relatively free of specific universal constants, or "fine tuning".
It's easy to imagine that there is a more fundamental physics yet to be uncovered, that will unify the current forces of physics.
> Let's say that you walk into a casino, and somebody bets you that you cannot guess the number that an unknown number of dice will add up to, for a million dollars. You randomly guess 120...
But you have no reason to equate complexity with a very specific value like 120.
Let me put it this way. It seems like you're speaking about philosophical possibilities, rather than actual possibilities (or plausible differences that might have actually happened in our current reality).
If that's the case, then you have no reason to only assume the physical laws and universal constants that currently exist. It's possible that there are any number of physical laws for a possible universe, which include any number of possible universal constants. You should also take into account possible steady-state universes, and so on and so on.
You can only say that complexity is improbable by making these unfounded assumptions about known physics, and discarding other possibilities.
My argument about God not being a good explanation hasn't been addressed in your responses or your website. If I'm wrong, please show me where.
With regards to the multiverse, there are many different models, some are philosophical and some are based on actual physics. They all aim to explain reality as simply as possible. They could be considered plausible (but as yet unproven). The plausibility of some of these ideas are easily as independently supported as any conception of God is. Some of them can even be empirically tested.
 
I don't know if I can recommend these books, as I haven't read them myself yet. So take them or leave them I guess, but they are generally considered to be pretty good works of philosophy and they are on my reading list.
You might be familiar with some of this already, but I'm going to explain it as though you have no familiarity with this subject.
Philosophy of religion explores topics such as the existence of God, concepts of God, religious language, religious belief, miracles, and so on. Philosophyofreligion.info presents a good primer for the subject.
It seems like your primary interest is in the existence of God. Natural theology, although the approach of doing theology without the assistance of special, divine revelation, in philosophical circles is basically synonymous with arguments for the existence of God. Natural atheological arguments, as some have put it (i.e. Plantinga), are arguments for atheism.
Popular arguments for the existence of God would be the various cosmological, teleological, ontological, and axiological arguments. There's almost too many of them to keep track. Popular arguments against the existence of God would be the various kinds of the problem of evil, divine hiddenness, and attacks on the coherence of theism.
"The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology" is perhaps the best single resource on arguments for and against the existence of God, although it is highly advanced. "The Cambridge Companion to Atheism" is also a very solid resource. "The Existence of God" by Swinburne is classic, as is his "Coherence of Theism." Again, all of those are fairly advanced. Swinburne has a shorter, more popular level version of "The Existence of God" titled "Is There a God?" Stephen Davis also has a similar book titled "God, Reason and Theistic Proofs." If you're going to be reading Oppy and Sobel, I recommend reading their counterparts in any of these books above (barring the "Cambridge Companion to Atheism," of course), that way you have a good balance of perspectives.
With regards to the philosophy of religion a bit more broadly, William Rowe, C. Stephen Evans, and Brian Davies each have solid, brief introduction books. Michael Murray and Eleonore Stump have a more thorough introduction; Louis Pojman and Michael Rea have a great anthology; and William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, and Michael Rea have perhaps the greatest single resource on this subject.
Moreover, William Lane Craig has dozens of debates on topics concerning the existence of God (and other topics) available on YouTube. Here is a fantastic list of his debates with links available in the table. You'll see some popular figures in the list that aren't good philosophers (i.e. Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, etc.), but there are quite a few very high caliber philosophers on that list too (i.e. Michael Tooley, Quentin Smith, Peter Millican, Stephen Law, etc.).
Let me know if you have any other questions.
Good luck!
> Life began because of a creator. That creator needs a creator
I'm not making that argument. I'm also purposely trying to limit the scope of the discussion for the sake of clarity/simplicity, but you seem determined to overcomplicate things.
I'm focused on two things:
(1) The concept of eternal/uncaused existence is not logically incoherent, however, we know (through evidence) that this is not the case for our universe.
(2) It's possible to formulate a rule whereby one things requires a cause/explanation, but the thing which causes or explains it does not (and in, fact may be a logical necessity).
Note that even taken together, this still falls well short of establishing the existence of god.
The rest goes beyond what I have any interest in proving or defending. If you want to explore this in greater depth, here's a book on it.
I think the main thing to understand is that while people often attack Craig's argument by denying that physics shows the universe began to exist. However, if you read his written versions of the argument (or listen very attentively to his debate speeches), his approach is multidisciplinary; the empirical findings of cosmology are not his main or only reason for holding that the universe began to exist.
His main argument is that an actual infinity of temporal moments cannot exist, and that to say otherwise entails contradictions. One well-known thought experiment to draw out the paradoxes involved in the idea of an actual infinite is known as Hilbert's Hotel: imagine a hotel with infinite rooms occupied by infinite guests. An infinite number of new guests arrive. Even though the hotel is full, the manager may simply move everyone in room n into room 2n to accommodate them. Infinitely many guests have moved into the hotel when it was already full—and yet there are no more guests in the hotel than there were before.
Or consider a thought experiment devised by Craig himself which has become well-known: imagine a library with infinite books. In the library there are infinite red books and infinite black books, so that for every red book, there is a black one. It follows that the library contains as many red books as the total number of books in its collection, as many red books as black books, and as many red books as red and black books combined.
According to Craig, these absurd implications show that an actual infinite cannot even in principle exist in reality. Atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy and the late Howard Sobel have generally been willing, if necessary, to bite the bullet and say that the difficulties in building such a hotel or library are purely physical and practical; if these were overcome, the supposedly absurd situations imagined by Craig could indeed occur in reality. (See page 53 of Oppy's Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, which was originally going to be the second part of one volume together with his well-known Arguing About Gods, as well as page 187 of Sobel's Logic and Theism.) Quentin Smith argues that Craig wrongly assumes that intuitive relations which hold between finite sets and their proper subsets must also hold for infinite sets. (See page 85 of Craig and Smith's Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.)
The "man counting backwards from infinity" scenario represents an independent argument: Craig holds that even if an actual infinite can exist, an actual infinite cannot be formed by adding one member after another. That is, while it is true that 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + … equals ℵ₀, the numbers are not added one after another, but simultaneously or timelessly. You could not start with any finite number and get to infinity by addition, and it isn't a matter of there not being enough time; you don't "reach infinity" just because you never stop counting. But if we can't count to infinity, how can we count down from infinity? Craig holds that we cannot traverse the infinite in either direction. If the universe has no beginning, then temporal existence has traversed an infinite succession of past events. But this is impossible; for us to have arrived at today, there is an earlier event that needs to have occurred, and one before that, and one before that, ad infinitum, so that we are pushed continually back into the infinite past, making it impossible for any event to occur.
Another thought experiment illustrating this is one originally devised by Al-Ghazali involving the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter completes 2.5 orbits for each orbit completed by Saturn. Suppose they have both been orbiting eternally. Which planet has completed more orbits? The longer they revolve, the further Jupiter gets ahead of Saturn—and yet the mathematically correct answer is that they have each completed the same number of orbits, equal and unchanged since eternity past though it appears to grow; there has never been a time when they have not completed an infinite number of orbits. Moreover, Ghazali asks, is the number of orbits odd or even? Either answer seems absurd, but according to post-Cantorian transfinite arithmetic, it is both.
Dawkins is to philosophy of religion what Camus is to existentialism: there's some interesting shit in there, but most of it is simplistic, and it's popular because the stupid masses can understand them. If you want to be spoonfed ideas -- often incomplete and fallacious ideas -- then by all means stick with Dawkins and Hitchens. If you want some good arguments, and not just some bullshit rhetoric, then check out the following books:
Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology
The Cambridge Companion to Atheism
Philosophy for Understanding Theology
First of all, I'm not a Mormon. The fact that I'm having to deal with that accusation really doesn't speak well for your reasoning ability. I frankly couldn't be less impressed with the "if you don't agree with me then you must be a Mormon" mentality.
So, moving on from that, the claim that you are someone who has studied western culture, especially theology, is pretty doubtful considering all of the mistakes you are making.
Someone who has studied this wouldn't define Christianity by a belief in the Trinity. The amount of nontrinitarian contemporary (as well as historical) Christian churches is not insignificant. A person who studied this wouldn't define it by polytheism either, since Christianity came from early Abrahamic religions of which some were, in fact, polytheistic. Not only that, but some theologians would define the veneration of saints or idols (which is rampant in Christian history) as polytheistic. It's kind of a weird thing to think of it that way, but it's not uncommon.
Also, defining God as truth, beauty, and love doesn't really fit a theological argument either, and very few of the people you mention would have defined the concept in that way in any of their writings.
Yes, Mormons are Christians. The only people who disagree are Mormons in the mid 20th century and people with an axe to grind.
About the whole Bacchus thing, or the idea that to Mormons God is not the fabric of reality, I can't really comment on. I don't understand where you are coming from with that. I also don't get the rant about "figures," but maybe you define that in a different way than I do.
Edit: Sorry, my link was crappy. The book does talk about Christianity and polytheism, but it might be useful also to google the author, Jordan Paper, to get his take on things.