Download or read book Everybody Is Wrong About God written by James A. Lindsay and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call to action to address people's psychological and social motives for a belief in God, rather than debate the existence of God With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided—and often dangerous—belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in "God," they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action. Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called "God."

Download or read book Everybody is Wrong about God written by James A. Lindsay and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call to action to address people's psychological and social motives for a belief in God, rather than debate the existence of God With every argument for theism long since discredited, the result is that atheism has become little more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. Thus, engaging in interminable debate with religious believers about the existence of God has become exactly the wrong way for nonbelievers to try to deal with misguided--and often dangerous--belief in a higher power. The key, author James Lindsay argues, is to stop that particular conversation. He demonstrates that whenever people say they believe in "God," they are really telling us that they have certain psychological and social needs that they do not know how to meet. Lindsay then provides more productive avenues of discussion and action. Once nonbelievers understand this simple point, and drop the very label of atheist, will they be able to change the way we all think about, talk about, and act upon the troublesome notion called "God."

Download or read book Everything You Know About God Is Wrong written by Russ Kick and published by Red Wheel Weiser. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 778 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the new mega-anthology from best-selling editor Russ Kick, more than fifty writers, reporters, and researchers invade the inner sanctum for an unrestrained look at the wild and wooly world of organized belief. Richard Dawkins shows us the strange, scary properties of religion; Neil Gaiman turns a biblical atrocity story into a comic (that almost sent a publisher to prison); Erik Davis looks at what happens when religion and California collide; Mike Dash eyes stigmatics; Douglas Rushkoff exposes the trouble with Judaism; Paul Krassner reveals his “Confessions of an Atheist”; and best-selling lexicographer Jonathon Green interprets the language of religious prejudice. Among the dozens of other articles and essays, you’ll find: a sweeping look at classical composers and Great American Songbook writers who were unbelievers, such as Irving Berlin, creator of “God Bless America”; the definitive explanation of why America is not a Christian nation; the bizarre, Catholic-fundamentalist books by Mel Gibson’s father; eye-popping photos of bizarre religious objects and ceremonies, including snake-handlers and pot-smoking children; the thinly veiled anti-Semitism in the Left Behind novels; an extract from the rare, suppressed book The Sex Life of Brigham Young; and rarely seen anti-religious writings from Mark Twain and H.G. Wells. Further topics include exorcisms, religious curses, Wicca, the Church of John Coltrane, crimes by clergy, death without God, Christian sex manuals, the “ex-gay” movement, failed prophecies, bizarre theology, religious bowling, atheist rock and roll, “how to be a good Christian,” an entertaining look at the best (and worst) books on religion, and much more.

Download or read book Give Me an Answer written by Cliffe Knechtle and published by InterVarsity Press. This book was released on 1986-03-31 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cliffe Knechtle offers clear, reasoned and compassionate responses to the tough questions skeptics ask.

Download or read book How God Becomes Real written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The hard work required to make God real, how it changes the people who do it, and why it helps explain the enduring power of faith How do gods and spirits come to feel vividly real to people—as if they were standing right next to them? Humans tend to see supernatural agents everywhere, as the cognitive science of religion has shown. But it isn’t easy to maintain a sense that there are invisible spirits who care about you. In How God Becomes Real, acclaimed anthropologist and scholar of religion T. M. Luhrmann argues that people must work incredibly hard to make gods real and that this effort—by changing the people who do it and giving them the benefits they seek from invisible others—helps to explain the enduring power of faith. Drawing on ethnographic studies of evangelical Christians, pagans, magicians, Zoroastrians, Black Catholics, Santeria initiates, and newly orthodox Jews, Luhrmann notes that none of these people behave as if gods and spirits are simply there. Rather, these worshippers make strenuous efforts to create a world in which invisible others matter and can become intensely present and real. The faithful accomplish this through detailed stories, absorption, the cultivation of inner senses, belief in a porous mind, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and other practices. Along the way, Luhrmann shows why faith is harder than belief, why prayer is a metacognitive activity like therapy, why becoming religious is like getting engrossed in a book, and much more. A fascinating account of why religious practices are more powerful than religious beliefs, How God Becomes Real suggests that faith is resilient not because it provides intuitions about gods and spirits—but because it changes the faithful in profound ways.

Download or read book Reasonable Faith written by William Lane Craig and published by Crossway. This book was released on 2008 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.

Download or read book Hating God written by Bernard Schweizer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While atheists such as Richard Dawkins have now become public figures, there is another and perhaps darker strain of religious rebellion that has remained out of sight--people who hate God. In this revealing book, Bernard Schweizer looks at men and women who do not question God's existence, but deny that He is merciful, competent, or good. Sifting through a wide range of literary and historical works, Schweizer finds that people hate God for a variety of reasons. Some are motivated by social injustice, human suffering, or natural catastrophes that God does not prevent. Some blame God for their personal tragedies. Schweizer concludes that, despite their blasphemous thoughts, these people tend to be creative and moral individuals, and include such literary lights as Friedrich Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Zora Neale Hurston, Rebecca West, Elie Wiesel, and Philip Pullman. Schweizer shows that literature is a fertile ground for God haters. Many authors, who dare not voice their negative attitude to God openly, turn to fiction to give vent to it. Indeed, Schweizer provides many new and startling readings of literary masterpieces, highlighting the undercurrent of hatred for God. Moreover, by probing the deeper mainsprings that cause sensible, rational, and moral beings to turn against God, Schweizer offers answers to some of the most vexing questions that beset human relationships with the divine.

Download or read book Man Seeks God written by Eric Weiner and published by Twelve. This book was released on 2011-12-05 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author of Geography of Bliss returns with this funny, illuminating chronicle of a globe-spanning spiritual quest to find a faith that fits. When a health scare puts him in the hospital, Eric Weiner-an agnostic by default-finds himself tangling with an unexpected question, posed to him by a well-meaning nurse. "Have you found your God yet?" The thought of it nags him, and prods him-and ultimately launches him on a far-flung journey to do just that. Weiner, a longtime "spiritual voyeur" and inveterate traveler, realizes that while he has been privy to a wide range of religious practices, he's never seriously considered these concepts in his own life. Face to face with his own mortality, and spurred on by the question of what spiritual principles to impart to his young daughter, he decides to correct this omission, undertaking a worldwide exploration of religions and hoping to come, if he can, to a personal understanding of the divine. The journey that results is rich in insight, humor, and heart. Willing to do anything to better understand faith, and to find the god or gods that speak to him, he travels to Nepal, where he meditates with Tibetan lamas and a guy named Wayne. He sojourns to Turkey, where he whirls (not so well, as it turns out) with Sufi dervishes. He heads to China, where he attempts to unblock his chi; to Israel, where he studies Kabbalah, sans Madonna; and to Las Vegas, where he has a close encounter with Raelians (followers of the world's largest UFO-based religion). At each stop along the way, Weiner tackles our most pressing spiritual questions: Where do we come from? What happens when we die? How should we live our lives? Where do all the missing socks go? With his trademark wit and warmth, he leaves no stone unturned. At a time when more Americans than ever are choosing a new faith, and when spiritual questions loom large in the modern age, Man Seeks God presents a perspective on religion that is sure to delight, inspire, and entertain.

Download or read book Does God Love Everyone written by Jerry L. Walls and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-07-29 with total page 102 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God truly love all persons? Most Christians think the obvious answer to this question is, "Yes, of course he does!" Indeed, many Christians would agree that the very heart of the gospel is that God so loved the whole world that he gave his Son to make salvation available for every single person. This book shows that one of the most popular and resurgent theological movements in the contemporary evangelical church--namely, Calvinism--cannot coherently and consistently affirm this vital claim about the love of God. While some Calvinists forthrightly deny that God loves everyone, more commonly Calvinists attempt to affirm the love of God for all persons in terms that are compatible with their doctrines that Christ died only for the elect--those persons God has unconditionally chosen to save. This book shows that the Calvinist attempts to affirm God's love for all persons are fraught with severe philosophical and theological difficulties. Calvinism, then, should be rejected in favor of a theology that can forthrightly and consistently affirm the love of God for all persons. Nothing less is at stake than the very heart of the gospel.

Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

Download or read book Is that Really You God written by Loren Cunningham and published by YWAM Publishing. This book was released on 2001-08 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a time before youth were welcomed in short-term missions, Loren Cunningham founded Youth With A Mission to unlock the world for millions. He called young and old, women and men, and every ethnicity to go. Loren Cunningham's dream began with a vision - waves of young people from every nation going to every nation, telling everyone, everywhere about Jesus. How did God move Loren's dream from vision to reality and take him to every country on earth? Loren and his wife, Darlene, grew through tough lessons on hearing and obeying the Lord. This exciting story of Youth With A Mission shows how hearing God's voice is for every believer. Translated into 150+ languages, Is That Really You, God? is a practical guide to hearing God's voice and following His direction to change our hearts and our world. In this legacy edition, read a special new chapter On to Eternity, on "the biggest vision I can imagine" where Loren unveils his final call, to rally this generation to translate the Bible orally into every mother tongue on earth. In addition, see a special tribute called 'Grateful Reflections" on Loren's life from dear friend and senior YWAM leader David Joel Hamilton from his up close and personal experience serving Loren over the decades.

Download or read book Why Does God Allow Evil written by Clay Jones and published by Harvest House Publishers. This book was released on 2017-08-01 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "If you are looking for one book to make sense of the problem of evil, this book is for you." Sean McDowell Grasping This Truth Will Change Your View of God Forever If God is good and all-powerful, why doesn't He put a stop to the evil in this world? Christians and non-Christians alike struggle with the concept of a loving God who allows widespread suffering in this life and never-ending punishment in hell. We wrestle with questions such as... Why do bad things happen to good people? Why should we have to pay for Adam's sin? How can eternal judgment be fair? But what if the real problem doesn't start with God...but with us? Clay Jones, an associate professor of Christian apologetics at Biola University, examines what Scripture truly says about the nature of evil and why God allows it. Along the way, he'll help you discover the contrasting abundance of God's grace, the overwhelming joy of heaven, and the extraordinary destiny of believers.

Download or read book Why We Believe in God s written by J. Anderson Thomson and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 89 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this groundbreaking volume, J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD, with Clare Aukofer, offers a succinct yet comprehensive study of how and why the human mind generates religious belief. Dr. Thomson, a highly respected practicing psychiatrist with credentials in forensic psychiatry and evolutionary psychology, methodically investigates the components and causes of religious belief in the same way any scientist would investigate the movement of astronomical bodies or the evolution of life over time—that is, as a purely natural phenomenon. Providing compelling evidence from psychology, the cognitive neurosciences, and related fields, he, with Ms. Aukofer, presents an easily accessible and exceptionally convincing case that god(s) were created by man—not vice versa. With this slim volume, Dr. Thomson establishes himself as a must-read thinker and leading voice on the primacy of reason and science over superstition and religion.

Download or read book God Doesn t We Do written by James A. Lindsay and published by James Lindsay. This book was released on 2012-09-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Does God exist? Does He do anything in this world? Famous authors like Richard Dawkins suggest strongly that it is very unlikely, but how unlikely is it? God Doesn't; We Do brings James A. Lindsay's mathematical expertise to the question and is able to put the matter under a microscope only available through an understanding of abstract mathematics, which he makes accessible to any reader. Because of that, this book will change the conversation about the existence of God. The central theme of this book, though, points out that even if there were a God, we have no reason to believe He does anything at all in this world. Thus the responsibility is on us, as it always has been, to make our world what it will be. From the back cover: Our world is one that is full of difficult challenges, and many people still turn to God for solutions or credit Him with ones that they find. The time for that kind of superstition is long passed. God Doesn't; We Do seeks to address the topic on philosophical grounds, making appeals to a scientific mindset and evidence-based decision making in fields where religion has dominated for centuries, including morality, politics, and even spirituality. The title really says it all-God Doesn't; We Do: Only Humans Can Solve Human Challenges.

Download or read book God Is Not Great written by Christopher Hitchens and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2008-11-19 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

Download or read book Everybody Always written by Bob Goff and published by Thomas Nelson. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if we stopped avoiding the difficult people in our lives and committed to simply loving everybody? What happens when we give away love like we're made of it? In Everybody, Always, Bob Goff's joyful New York Times bestselling follow-up to Love Does, you'll discover the secret to living without fear, constraint, or worry. Bob teaches us that the path toward the outsized, unfettered, liberated existence we all long for is found in one simple truth: love people, even the difficult ones, without distinction and without limits. In Everybody, Always, Bob shows us the simple truths about life that have the power to shift our mindset forever: Jesus uses our blind spots to reveal himself to us It's easy to love kind, lovely, humble people, but you have to tackle fear in order to love people who are difficult What we do with our love will become the conversations we have with God Dark and scary places are filled with beautiful people who need our unconditional love Extravagant love has extraordinary power to change lives, including our own Driven by Bob's trademark storytelling, this book reveals the wisdom Bob learned--often the hard way--about what it means to love without inhibition, insecurity, or restriction. From finding the right friends to discovering the upside of failure, Everybody, Always points the way to embodying love by doing the unexpected, the intimidating, the seemingly impossible. Whether losing his shoes while skydiving solo or befriending a Ugandan witch doctor, Bob steps into life with a no-limits embrace of others that is as infectious as it is extraordinarily ordinary. Everybody, Always reveals how we can do the same.

Download or read book A Manual for Creating Atheists written by Peter Boghossian and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith—and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, A Manual for Creating Atheists offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith—but for talking them out of it. Peter Boghossian draws on the tools he has developed and used for more than 20 years as a philosopher and educator to teach how to engage the faithful in conversations that will help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their religious beliefs, mistrust their faith, abandon superstition and irrationality, and ultimately embrace reason.