Help me understand this critique of St. Augustine

[njlisa]

I was looking to buy St. Augustine’s “City of God.” While looking through the reviews, I came across this strange post, which I have condensed considerably. Follow the link above to read the entire critique.

“A liberal political book disguised as a religious diatribe. … What Augustine does is ask the populace to forget the traditional function and form of the very core prehistoric religious structure that was the source of the concept of ‘god’ in the first place, and instead disembody ‘god’ and focus on an ideal of a Kingdom (in Heaven) while ignoring what is in front of their eyes. He asks them to ignore the dysfunction that they see and experience every day in substitution for an imaginary ideal. An ideal that was traditionally designed to facilitate function on Earth, not replace it.”

Can anyone help me understand what’s going on in this post?

 

[stpurl]

Any time you have some random poster describing a book written in the 4th century AD as ‘liberal political’ you can pretty much discard anything that comes after. If a person is so clueless about the culture of the time that the book is written that he or she has to superimpose today’s culture and definitions onto it and then try to argue back what the book ‘means’ according to that, then that person is no more fit to review that book than any ‘person off the street’ who has never even read the book.

Don’t waste your time trying to understand somebody who clearly has an agenda and not a ‘critique.’ There’s an old saying we used to have, “GIGO” which is 'Garbage in, garbage out."

 

[njlisa]

Thanks. And God bless you.