Welcome to Three Paradigms of Reality!
Today’s champions of reason and faith continue a battle that has been waged for thousands of years. On the one hand, Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life and Anne Lamott’s trilogy on faith offer contemporary society examples of hope inspired by faith. On the other hand, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great argue that faith is a dangerous and empty superstition. But has the competition between faith and reason always been mutually exclusive?
“This book is a superb addition to literature that examines reality. The author employs philosophy, history and theology to draw a powerful conclusion on faith and reason. Dudum combines scholarship and faith in an effective and valuable contribution to the exploration of truth.”
Jamal R. Nassar,Dean
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
California State University, San Bernardino
About the Author : Ron Dudum
Ron Dudum lives at the intersection of American confusion on race. His father emigrated to the United States from Palestine in 1947, and his mother was born in Pennsylvania soon after her parents arrived in this country from Palestine. Ever since Ron was born in San Francisco in 1956, there has never been a time when the United States has not been at war with his ancestry.
Legally, the federal government identifies people from the Middle East and North Africa as "white." This means that black Egyptians are technically white, despite the color of their skin! But, as former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown once told Ron, "White people know you're not white." In other words, Middle Easterners are an unrecognized minority for whom there are no discrimination protections and no affirmative action advantages. For this reason, Ron identifies with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
By religion, Ron is an Eastern Orthodox Christian in a country that defines Christianity as Western and recognizes Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, and Taoism as Eastern. So, once again, Ron falls between the cracks.
In the political arena, Ron has to some extent beaten the odds. In 2006, when he ran for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for the third time, he was defeated by only 53 votes out of more than 20,000 cast, even though his neighbors are primarily Asian-Irish Americans, and there is no Arab-American vote of any consequence in his district.
Ron's life has been an unending struggle to reconcile such contradictions, and this book represents the culmination of that struggle, bringing together his thoughts on how rational people can completely interpret “reality” in mutually exclusive ways. All readers will see some aspect of themselves in this book. All readers will follow the logic, and still some will accept and others will reject the conclusions.
Welcome to Ron's reality.