Choices & Challenges: Lessons in Faith, Hope, and Love

By Alan G. Greer

Book Overview

Choices & Challenges is a fresh way of looking at humanity's relationships with God and each other.

Based on the concept that while God loves us He does not exist to serve humanity but that we exist to serve God, Alan Greer confronts and debunks the atheistic notion that since our world and its multitude of religions are demonstrably imperfect with each and every one of us not being protected from all harm, God can not exist because if He did He would have prevented all such imperfections.

Greer likewise challenges the other extreme that two to four thousand years ago God laid down a series of laws and rules that can not under any circumstances be changed or broken. Instead Greer shows how God has taught us how and when to break those rules in favor of new and better ones.

Choices & Challenges demonstrates that God has an ongoing purpose for each of us and for humanity as a whole that stretches into the far distant future.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1600375510
• ISBN13: 9781600375514
• Release Date: May 2009
• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Throwing down the gauntlet for the faithful and the faithless

Alan Greer is an accomplished professional, humanitarian and civic leader. His book Choices and Challenges brings a much needed analysis to both "warring factions" on the questions of the existence of God, God's role in our lives and our place as human beings in the universe of God's Creation. This book achieves at least three unique and important goals. First, it gives a powerful and timely retort to those who conflate flawed religious organizations, religious adherents, and religious leaders with God. Second, he lays bare the logical flaws in the postulates of modern rationality which deny the existence of God. Finally, Greer reaffirms the rationality of belief in God and the need for us all to honor certain basic principles in service to God and each other. Most importantly, Greer uses his discussion of historical and contemporary events and his own personal experiences, to reveal a construct with which readers may challenge their own unbelief or strengthen their understanding and commitment to their faith. A wonderful, unique and much needed book in this day and age when atheism is on the rise and belief in God is all too frequently derided as something less than intelligent.

A layman's reflection

Once a lawyer asked me how any intelligent person could believe in God. Alan Greer, an outstanding lawyer himself, has attempted,in this astute volume of reflections, to answer this question. Greer recognizes a central tenent of this problem. We have two diametrically opposed and loud factions in our midst. We have on one hand a form of quasi-rational atheism that postulates science itself as its primary argument. That group is composed of bright secularists who cannot escape the limitations of their own rationality. On the other hand we have a loud group of believers whose theology is fundamentalist, and often non-rational (as opposed to irrational), This group postulates that every thing in the Bible is literally true and that is all we need to know. "God said it. I believe it. That settles it" was a popular bumper sticker in the South years ago that sums up this approach. The Christian religion is neither purely intellectual or purely emotional, but both emotion and reason can play a large part in its meaning to its adherents . Greer reflects deeply on the life and example of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who was imprisoned and hanged by the Nazis in the last days of World War II. In Bonhoeffer Green sees the answer to the problem. As Karl Barth admonished, a Christian should read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. In these two contemporary models, one or the other hand is usually empty. The simplistic answers of atheism and fundamentalism have limited utility in a complex world. As the late Bill Baggs, editor of the Miami News, used to stamp on letters proposing certain solutions to world conditions, "This is not a simple life, my friend, and there are no simple answers." Alan Greer does a great job in reminding us of that basic truism.