Abstract
[...]a loss he thought both regrettable and dangerous, precisely because the concept of sin is more accurate and morally effective than the alternatives-more accurate in its account of the actual behavior of human beings and more effective in connecting that behavior to concepts of guilt and individual moral accountability, both of which he believed were essential to living a responsible human life. [...]too do scholars such as Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman, who stress the extraordinary diversity of "Christianities" in, say, the pre-Nicene church, and thereby raise the question of whether the post-Nicene orthodoxy represented a steady clarification of Christianity's core beliefs, or was simply a matter of power politics, the triumph of one group over another, and the marginalizing thereby of valid religious experience or perspective. The author's respectful fascination with the careers of ideas, which she presents with remarkably persuasive immediacy, results in a book that is a quintessential model of creative defamiliarization, by which I mean that it has the ability to show us familiar ideas emerging in an unpredictable way from very unfamiliar sources and antecedents, amid swirling currents of innovation, heresy, and other sundry conflicts and turbulences. [...]given the anger that so many nonbelievers evince toward this non-existent God, one might be tempted to speculate whether their unconscious cry is "Lord, I do not believe: please strengthen my belief in your nonexistence!" Such was Nietzsche's genius in communicating how difficult an achievement a clean and genuine atheism is, a conundrum that he captured by asserting, not that a God does not exist, but that He is dead.