In a few weeks I'll be sending a draft of a second book to the publisher. It will come out with ACU Press, I'm guessing this winter or spring. The book works through in a fuller, more careful and scholarly way the material I blogged about years ago in a series called Freud's Ghost and more recently in the series The Varieties and Illusions of Religious Experience.
The title of the book is called "The Authenticity of Faith" and I'm building it around this quote by Abraham Joshua Heschel:
It has long been known that need and desire play a part in the shaping of beliefs. But is it true, as modern psychology often claims, that our religious beliefs are nothing but attempts to satisfy subconscious wishes? That the conception of God is merely a projection of self-seeking emotions, an objectification of subjective needs, the self in disguise? Indeed, the tendency to question the genuineness of man’s concerns about God is a challenge no less serious than the tendency to question the existence of God. We are in greater need of a proof for the authenticity of faith than of a proof for the existence of God.
