I Am a Misanthrope: Loving God, Despising His People, and Finding the Exit - A Confession on Faith, Pride, and Church (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798903840717)

I believe in God. I cannot stand His people.

For years, Arthur Tiger sat in the back row of church and judged. The shallow sermons. The performative worship. The gap between what believers professed and how they lived. He saw it all with devastating clarity and called it honesty.

Then he discovered it was pride - the most adaptive sin, the one that learns to speak the language of faith so fluently that even the person speaking it cannot hear the accent.

I Am a Misanthrope is a brutally honest exploration of what happens when a man who loves God realizes he has been using God's standards to do God's job. It is not a guide to loving difficult people. It is the confession of a man who finds people unbearable and has stopped pretending that makes him righteous.

Weaving together theology (Paul, Augustine, Bonhoeffer), psychology (Jung, Kernberg, Bowlby), and philosophy (Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Cioran), Tiger traces the architecture of the believing misanthrope:

• How contempt disguises itself as discernment
• How isolation masquerades as integrity
• How the clearest sight in the room can belong to the blindest person in it
• Why the judge's seat doesn't belong to you - not because you're wrong, but because you don't have the information

This book does not promise transformation. It does not end with healing. It ends with a decision - made every morning, broken every afternoon, remade every evening - to step off a throne that was never yours.

For believers who are tired of church but not of God. For the person who has never said out loud: I believe - but I cannot stand these people.

"Faith is not 'I like God's people.' Faith is 'I do not like God's people, and I am still here.'"