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Both of Longman Templeton's books are available now. Start with The Common Man Guide for the Perplexed for the foundational argument against inherited religious authority, or dive into In Search of God in Fact and the Divine Equation for the fuller historical account of where the Western idea of god came from — and what the author proposes in its place.

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The Common man guide for the perplexed

This book opens with the sixteenth-century critics Jan Hus and Martin Luther, who accused the Catholic Church of their day of corruption and betraying its own scripture — and argues that neither writer went far enough, because both still assumed the Gospels themselves held ultimate truth.
From there, Templeton widens the lens: to the two different creation accounts in Genesis (a first god who creates man and woman as equals, and a second who subordinates the woman as an afterthought); to the ideals of the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence as a kind of “quasi-theology” built on human equality rather than divine kingship; and to a broader argument that Western civilization's inherited doctrines have drifted from those founding ideals of liberty and equality.

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IN SEARCH OF GOD IN FACT AND THE DIVINE EQUATION

A follow-up to The Common Man Guide for the Perplexed (2020), this book asks where the idea of god actually came from — and answers with a history rather than a doctrine.
It begins with the oldest known creator gods of Genesis 1, likely inherited from Egyptian and Mesopotamian sources, and contrasts them with the more punitive, control-oriented god introduced in Genesis 2. It follows the tribal god of early Israel through exile in Babylon, restoration under Persia, and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD — and argues that the Gospels were written in the aftermath of that trauma, by a displaced and devastated people reimagining their god in a new form.

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