Book Review: We Who Wrestle With God: Perceptions of the Divine

 

What a grotesque waste of ink. We Who Wrestle With God bills itself as some profound exploration of humanity’s relationship with the divine. In reality, it is an extended exercise in intellectual cowardice: a desperate attempt to prop up the rotting edifice of religion by pretending that endlessly cataloguing “perceptions of God” amounts to anything more than rearranging the furniture in a burning building. Let’s be honest: there is no wrestling with God because there is no God. The title alone is as absurd as We Who Wrestle With Unicorns or Perceptions of the Tooth Fairy. This is not serious inquiry. It is self-indulgent mythography, elevating hallucinations to the status of scholarship. The divine is not a thing to be wrestled with, it is a human invention, born of ignorance and fear, endlessly repackaged to make it sound respectable in polite society. What the authors have produced is theology in its most dishonest form: pseudo-intellectual wallpaper pasted over the fact that their central premise is false. They tiptoe through Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and assorted mysticisms, nodding sagely, pretending that contradictory nonsense somehow deserves reverence. They would rather genuflect before superstition than confront the obvious: these “perceptions of the divine” are nothing more than variations on the same delusion. Worse still, the book presents this as if it were a noble human endeavour, as if treating fantasy as fact were a marker of sophistication. In truth, it is a symptom of intellectual decay. Imagine if a physicist produced a book on the “perceptions of phlogiston” or the “many cultural interpretations of a flat Earth.” They would be laughed out of the academy. Yet when it comes to God, the rules change. Delusion becomes “mystery,” contradiction becomes “depth,” and cowardly equivocation becomes “respect.” The authors claim to “wrestle,” but in reality they grovel. Jacob at least had the decency to fight until dawn; these writers spend their nights stroking the void, hoping their readers mistake timidity for wisdom. The result is a text so drenched in relativist piety that it never dares utter the only honest conclusion: that God is a human invention, and religion is its parasite. Humanity does not need more books politely cataloguing our ancient superstitions. We need books that tear them down, root and branch, and liberate minds from the iron grip of Bronze Age fairy tales. Until then, works like We Who Wrestle With God will keep theology departments busy, but at the cost of truth, progress, and reason itself. Verdict: Not a wrestling match, not even a limp handshake, just a cowardly kiss on the ring of delusion. Burn it, and pick up Darwin instead.