First I want to acknowledge that I am deeply saddened and even more frustrated that people who bear the name Christian, do so in vain, and cause the kind of trauma that this woman and many others experience. This is what it means to “bear God’s name in vain”. Yes, we actually bear the Name, and we bear it in vain. It’s akin to how Jesus rightly accused the Pharisees of being hypocrites. I agree and sadly admit that many Christians (including myself) who may truly have accepted Jesus’ love and forgiveness in faith have also religiously abused others. This is a mark on Christians that must be dealt with. However, it must also be acknowledged that this abuse is not true Christianity! This is not what is taught by Jesus, Peter, Paul, James, John, or any of the writers of the New Testament! Finch acknowledges that the abuse she experienced is not Biblical: “…very little of what you’ll find in this work involves the actual Bible, or even the historical figure of Jesus…” (15) But she goes on to strongly advise against Christianity as a whole, attacking multiple times the sacrifice of Christ on the cross as a picture of God “murdering” his son, as if to satisfy his maniacal thirst for blood. This is just a poor poor representation of what the Bible teaches, and of Christian doctrine. Christ’s sacrifice of atonement was done as an ultimate expression of his own love for all humanity. Being that Christ is in God, this is God sacrificing himself! He bore the suffering and death!The traditional view of hell (which I agree with Finch is very hard to stomach if you think about it in any depth) is not taught in Scripture. To see a wealth of arguments related to this, see rethinkinghell.com. Like Finch, my wife was very traumatized as a kid by the idea of eternal conscious torment (ECT) in hell. But it is not necessary! I am bothered by the fact that Finch characterized it as a core doctrine of Christianity. It’s not! No serious student thinks that ECT is an essential doctrine of Christianity!Sexual repression and treatment of women: From reading this book instead of the Bible, one might completely miss the fact that there is a whole book dedicated to sexual expression and romance in the Old Testament (Song of Solomon). Jesus himself lifted the status of women up during his ministry and clearly showed them respect and treated them with dignity. Paul had women *leading* in his ministry which was unheard of in that time! The writers of the Gospels acknowledged women to be the first believers in Jesus’ resurrection even while the men doubted! It is *perversion* of sex—not sex itself—that the Bible speaks against, and statistics bear this out to be true today.Finch enters the writing of this book with a multitude of false assumptions, including that the Bible teaches us to abuse and mistreat our bodies and encourages “authoritarian” behavior (I don’t know what she means by that word because she doesn’t say, but it obviously carries a negative connotation), that it teaches us to stuff emotions, that it espouses the gnostic belief that our literal flesh is evil (whereas it is obvious when you read the Bible that “flesh” is often metaphorical). The largest assumption is that it is better to walk away from the Christian faith as a whole than to work through misconceptions.Even if all the complaints brought about the human behavior reported in this book are true, this does not warrant throwing out the whole of Christianity as Finch would have us do. When dealing with Scripture, which was written in mostly Hebrew and Greek, not English, and in a culture that has a different understanding of the meanings and use of terms, it is imperative that we study hard to understand what the authors meant and how the readers of their time understood them. If we are not careful or are led by someone we trust to be careful, we will inevitably end up with a wrong interpretation of Scripture such as I have pointed out above, and then being disappointed or worse. While I appreciate the experiences Finch mentioned in this book, her solution to walk away from Christ is entirely unwarranted. It would have been so much better if she was more supportive of those Christians that do not engage in the kind of abuse wrought on by culture. But I would guess by her writing that instead of engaging in Scripture and wise counsel, she instead ended up interpreting it through those around her. This would explain the naïvety of this casual remark: “…the true roots of Christianity—the teachings of Jesus Christ—are not so different from spiritual traditions such as Buddhism.” (115) Anyone who says this needs to re-examine the fact that Buddhism says there is no creator of the universe. This is fundamentally different from Christianity, and any attempt to reconcile this difference is futile.There were several other egregious problems in this book, but I feel I’ve mentioned enough of them to make it clear to beware of falsehoods.So I don’t recommend Finch’s book as an end in search for answers, even though we can acknowledge Christianity has a problem to deal with.