The book is divided up into three parts: The Coming of the Gods, the Departure of the Gods and Religion After the Gods. This review will first summarise the book then discuss the issues it raises.

The Coming of the Gods deals with how God and the supernatural world were originally experienced. Soul was the principle of life, usually associated with blood and therefore usually embodied. Spirit on the other hand was usually not embodied, it was an active free-ranging power, sometimes helping sometimes tormenting. Spirits are sometimes called powers or energies. They are semi-personified, they are many of them (they are sometimes members of a "host" or "legion"), and they rarely have names. Angels and Demons are a little more personified - a few of the angels are given names, scarcely any devils. Spirits have five types of relationship with humans: humans can be filled with a spirit, a spirit may be a guardian, may inspire, indwell or possess you.

A "god" a symbol of a group. Cupitt argues that the earliest Old Testament traditions identify God as the "bull of Jacob" (Gen 49:24) (the NIV translates it as "Mighty One of Jacob" but Cupitt argues that this is because the translators find it too embarrassing find the God of the Old Testament as a tribal deity). Gods are different to Spirits because they are lords, who sit enthroned and who lay down the law. Cupitt explains that originally Ancient Egypt had 700 gods, but as the political system united the different tribes, the one group, the nation of Egypt, needed a single God. So as cities replaced nomads, so gods replaced spirits.

Cupitt cites another reason for the change from spirits to gods. Spirits swarm, cluster, rustle and whisper in our heads. As an anonymous legion they are fearsome. But when we start to name them we demythologise them and they lose their power. So this supernatural world of religion turns out to be a myth of the origin of language, and the process of naming is part of the development of consciousness.

As cities and nations begin to develop, so the need to law and authority arises, and so the concept of a "god" develops. Spirits wander freely in the wilderness and know nothing of the law, by contrast the god is the origin and authority of the law, of regulation: of space and time, private property and an ordered, regular calendar. Cupitt explains the reality of these gods as being similar to the reality of Donald Duck today. There is no superior original Donald Duck - all the Donald Ducks produced by Disney are "real", so the god wasn't something over and beyond the statue or image, the god was the image.

According to Cupitt god arose when someone asked the system to justify itself. God arose as part of critical thinking, questioning god was part of the very first experience of god. Think of the stories in the Old Testament where God is argued with. Abraham is the father of the Jews, but also someone who does not hesitate to argue with God.

Greek philosophy, argues Cupitt, far from being a new way of thinking, was just a secularised version of this religious outlook. Metaphysical laws replace the authority of the god, but the outlook is still looking outside and beyond, Objective knowledge of the Real.

So to conclude the first part, The Coming of the Gods, the gods turn out to be named, ordered, structured reality - language. They were needed to help humanity develop consciousness (worshipping the god of deer was just another way of keeping the concept of "deer" in the mind when the hunter went to hunt them). They were needed to justify the new order of kings and priests in towns, cities and nations. Hence the religious concern for language: holy books, creeds, blasphemy ("bad" language), the names of god, even the Logos.

The Departure of the Gods begins with a chapter called "Mysticism" in which Cupitt notes how god has always been seen as a mysterious part of reality. Look at other words which seem to overlap with the word "God": fate, luck, chance, history, things, it, it all, the throw of the dice, destiny, time, how it does, and so on. God becomes part of reality. Even the classic definition of God, as infinite and so on, seems to dissolve God into everything and nothing, so the idea of God seems to contain within it the mystical idea of God dissolving into the world, or the self blending into God (the "spiritual marriage"), but those mystics who went too far with this idea were punished by the religious authorities who rightly understood that this meant the death of a realist God.

Cupitt noted earlier how philosophy began as a secular form of religion. In this section he notes how this tradition, philosophy as footnotes to Plato, the philosophy of metaphysical entities, is now passing. Critical philosophy is destroying the idea that our world is mere appearance, beneath which lies the world of God, Truth and Happiness. This distinction itself has now become unintelligible.

If you imagine yourself walking down a corridor, you imagine a view outside of yourself. It is natural to think objectivity, not subjectivity, and for much of history, the subjective viewpoint has been unimaginable. Only relatively recently, and with great difficulty, has culture been able to discover the subjective.

Cupitt concludes the section on The Departure of the Gods by noting that the "nomad", whom the gods originally replaced with the city dweller, is now returning. With the departure of the gods, law, order and tradition are crumbling, to be replaced by the nomad:

"Instead of marriage, a series of relationships; instead of home, a series of addresses; instead of a career, freelancing; instead of a church, the irregularly mushrooming politics of protest; instead of a faith, whatever one is currently "into"; instead of stable identities, pluralism and flux; instead of society, the market and one's own circle" (p. 74).

In the final section, Religion After the Gods, Cupitt asks what religion might be like in this new age. It follows from the analysis of part two that for Cupitt all the major religious traditions are now coming to an end. All they are now good for is taking whatever may be of use to us in the future. Cupitt believes there are three concepts worth stealing: the Eye of God, the Blissful Void and Solar Living.

These doctrines are not, of course, true in themselves. "In the future we will see our religion not as supernatural doctrine but as an experiment in selfhood" (p. 82). They are simply useful techniques, useful stories.

The Eye of God means living as if God is watching us. Living from the standpoint of eternity. This obviously makes our life more serious, more ethical. Meister Eckhart says that the eye with which we look at God is the same eye as the eye with which God looks at us. The fact that we take the place of God simply means we heighten our consciousness ("a serious postmodern definition of true religion: religion which makes you smarter than your god" (p. 85)). Indeed the fact that God is absent means for Cupitt that he loves him all the more: "I actually think I love God more now that I know God is voluntary. I still pray and love God, even though I fully acknowledge that no God actually exists. Perhaps God had to die in order to purify our love for him... Kierkegaard says the love we feel for our dead is the most faithful and the most purely unselfish of all our loves" (pp. 85-86).

The Blissful Void Cupitt takes from Buddhism, in which the subject is emptied out into void bliss. Cupitt says the Blissful Void can also be called the cool sublime, and contrasts it with Kant's sublime. For Kant the sublime (the mathematical sublime and the dynamical sublime) is out experience of the vastness of nature, and our response in feeling exaltation at our mastery of such forces through mathematics and reason. Instead Cupitt argues we respond to such forces by seeing ourselves as infinitely unimportant, we disappear into nothingness. The sublime is now, we are swallowed up into the void.

Solar Living means thinking of our lives as burning up like the sun. As we live we burn, our life is just a pouring out of energy until we are burnt up. We pour ourselves out, and this is our existence. Our truth isn't something deep within our unconscious, it is our actions, our creation. Cupitt calls this "postsainthood", we live by dying all the time.

Cupitt then goes back to address the obvious objection made his claim that all the main religious traditions are coming to an end. How can he say this? Are not the main traditions still a major part of millions of people's lives? Cupitt replies that as he pointed out, religion came about to reaffirm our identity. The fact that the world is now becoming globalised means that those traditional identities are eroding. One response to this is to applaud such destruction - this is obviously Cupitt's response. However others will respond to this attack by holding those beliefs more strongly to resist the erosion. But, says Cupitt, such people must know that willing the beliefs to be true won't make them true. What will result is a more violent, fundamentalist form of the belief. Unable to produce a rational defence of their religion, believers will adopt increasingly irrational forms of the belief. All this does, says Cupitt, is accelerate the loss of religion by turning such beliefs into bizarre spectacles of modernity. They lose organisation and fragment, to become one amongst many weird beliefs ("no longer a faith but a fad").

Cupitt then turns to defend his view that this globalisation is a good thing. He argues that our "identities" in the past have always required an "Other", the enemy. Globalisation means the end of the Other, we can exist without believing in the threatening Other, the heretic, the apostate, the infidel, the dirty foreigner. "We no longer actually need roots, identity, stability. We can do without all those things. Me, I don't want them anymore. I prefer to be without identity. I'd like to belong to no ethnic group, and to have no Other" (p. 99).

Cupitt then reviews his history of religion. At last, he says, religion can become innocent - free of illusion and power worship. Cupitt finishes the book with two chapters on the future direction of what he calls "ecstatic immanence" - religion of the "now", after the death of God. The first is The Poetical Theology, here Cupitt shows how art teaches us many of the lessons of solar living. William Blake writes "cleanse the doors of perception and see everything as it is, infinite". In particular, it is art which has demonstrated itself most capable of following Cupitt's advice on how to treat religious tradition: "they are all available to be looted of whatever they possess that may be useful to us in the future" (p.120).

The book concludes with a chapter entitled World Religion. It begins with Cupitt re-stating his view that globalisation is a good thing and is breaking down the boundaries that divide us. "It is very curious that God and Mammon should have changed places ethically. Mammon is an internationalist. He wants people to be healthy and well educated. He wants peace and stability, progress and universal prosperity. By contrast, God... appears to have become a Moloch who demands ignorance, poverty, and war" (p.122). Yet in the last few pages Cupitt suddenly changes direction. He describes the future as an anarchy of thousands of New Age movements, where there is no right or wrong, no objective truth. Suddenly Cupitt seems to think this is what is happening, a new tribalism, and only a new World Religion based on similar values to those described in his book can stop it. His final sentence is a terrified warning:

"Unless something new is launched quickly, I fear that the process of postmodernisation will have gone so far, and will have become so destructive, that it will be too late" (p. 128).

I would make three points in response to Cupitt's book.

Firstly, his "history" of the world. These generalisations make good reading, but things are never as simple as this. At each stage it is possible to point out that the opposite of what Cupitt claims is equally true. Nomads are devout Muslims and city dwellers polytheists. Language is not an explanation in itself, words have meanings outside of language as much as within it, and so on. Mysticism polices the soul as well as frees it. The Roman god Roma could be argued as having created an anarchy of religions within her "law". Globalisation is able poverty and oppression as well as wealth creation. So things are not as simple as Cupitt describes them.

Secondly the non-objectivity of religion still leaves the origins of consciousness and the mystery of the universe unanswered. If religion never had the answers to those questions, it does not mean we do not want the answers, and when we get them will that not have a religious significance? In the meantime, perhaps religion isn't about experiments in selfhood, but experiments in consciousness.

Thirdly the anarchy of subjectivity seems less dependant on Globalisation than on education and the existence of a caring community/society. New Age movements won't be stopped by the launch of a World Religion but by giving people a decent life in a society they feel a part of. The danger isn't Globalisation, but Globalisation at the expense of the rights of the individual and the community.