Dear God, Who Made you?: How the supernatural beliefs of the RCC transformed God the Creator into God the Created.

So you are afraid of fundamentalism. Have you ever asked yourself what causes this terrifying phenomenon? Have you ever considered a course of action that might mitigate its worst outcomes? A fundamentalist is someone who changes his beliefs in the supernatural into certainties. As such any believer in the supernatural has the potential to become a fundamentalist. In “Dear God, Who Made You?” Mr. Ellul re-examines one set of supernatural beliefs, those of the Roman Catholic Church, one by one, and he illustrates how those beliefs are not only unwarranted but they actually transform the Creator into a man-made god, with distinctly man-made characteristics, a very limited god indeed. The tremendous harm that beliefs in the supernatural have caused in the past should open our eyes to their potential for mischief in the future, for as the author put it, once you have god in your pocket, “there is no saintly height to which you will not aspire and no bottom of any depraved pit to which you will not descend.” This book is not against religion as such. In fact the “good deeds” of the Catholic Church are often mentioned and praised. But it is the supernatural parts of so many religions that turn ordinary people into enthusiastic killers. As the writer insists, that which is bad about religions appertains to religions, that which is good belongs to humanity. In this book we have an appeal to change the culture of religion into a culture of wisdom. There is a very strong recommendation to make the acquisition of wisdom as one of the main aims of education in the 21st Century, an appeal often made in the past but equally often unheeded. An equally forceful argument is made for the replacing of religious commandments by an International Code of Behavior, which will be established after a longitudinal study on the nature of man to be carried out by renowned scholars, under the auspices of the United Nations. There is enough material in this book to form the basis of a good discussion on the diminution, if not elimination, of this phenomenon of fundamentalism. No overnight solution is proposed but considering the causes of an illness, as well as some fairly radical remedies is surely a good start.