Avesta people. The term "Avesta" is from the 9th/10th-century works of Zoroastrian tradition in which the word appears as Zoroastrian Middle Persian "abestāg", Book Pahlavi "ʾp(y)stʾkʼ". In that context, "abestāg" texts are portrayed as received knowledge, and are distinguished from the exegetical commentaries (the "zand") thereof. The literal meaning of the word "abestāg" is uncertain; it is generally acknowledged to be a learned borrowing from Avestan, but none of the suggested etymologies have been universally accepted. The widely repeated derivation from *"upa-stavaka" is from Christian Bartholomae ("Altiranisches Wörterbuch", 1904), who interpreted "abestāg" as a contraction of a hypothetical reconstructed Old Iranian
The Religion of the Future stated that he considered the book, alongside Ronald Dworkin’s "Religion Without God", to be an example of “religious atheism,” that is, a “new attitude to God” that “presents a new horizon for Christianity.” While strongly criticizing the book from a theistic standpoint, Chapman allows that this new religious atheism may represent a “maturing of the infantile atheism offered by the scientific naturalism perspective: it looks at the world and finds moral truth, objective value, and goodness.” Reviewing "The Religion of the Future" in "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews", Jeremy David Bendik-Keymer considered the book as the second part of the project