Download or read book Practicing Atheism written by Hannah K. Scheidt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The number of people claiming no religious affiliation has skyrocketed in recent years, and that growth shows no signs of slowing down. But while the religiously unaffiliated demonstrate a variety of attitudes toward religious belief-including, in many cases, a complete lack of interest-a prominent subset of nonbelievers has claimed the mantle of "atheism." For them, atheism has become a marker of identity and a source of community. However, atheists themselves often disagree about core ideas, values, affinities, and attitudes. Contemporary atheist culture is marked by debates over deconversion, the relationship between science and religion, and the role of authority. What exactly does it mean to be an "atheist" beyond a simple lack of belief in a higher power? Hannah K. Scheidt's Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network examines the variety of cultural products, both corporate-driven and grassroots, that carry messages about atheism and its relationships to religion. Through primary source materials such as Internet communities, popular television programming, and cultural representations of the movement such as those found in atheist fan art, the book paints a portrait of a culture in unique tension with religion, and provides a unique perspective on whether or not organized atheism constitutes a belief system in itself.
Download or read book Practicing Atheism written by Hannah K. Scheidt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although many individuals identify as atheists, little is understood about the belief system beyond the simple lack of a belief in a higher power. Hannah K. Scheidt's Practicing Atheism: Culture, Media, and Ritual in the Contemporary Atheist Network unpacks the cultural products, both corporate-driven and grassroots, that carry messages about atheism to examine the complicated relationship between organized atheism and religion.
Download or read book The Way of the Heathen written by Greta Christina and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So you're an atheist. Now what? The way we deal with life -- with love and sex, pleasure and death, reality and making stuff up --can change dramatically when we stop believing in gods, souls, and afterlives. When we leave religion -- or if we never had it in the first place--where do we go? With her unique blend of compassion and humor, thoughtfulness and snark, Greta Christina most emphatically does not propose a single path to a good atheist life. She offers questions to think about, ideas that may be useful, and encouragement to choose your own way. She addresses complex issues in an accessible, down-to-earth style, including: Why we're here, Sexual transcendence, How humanism helps with depression -- except when it doesn't, Stealing stuff from religion, and much more. Aimed at new and not-so-new atheists, questioning and curious believers, Christina shines a warm, fresh light on the only life we have.
Download or read book Religion for Atheists written by Alain De Botton and published by Signal. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Architecture of Happiness, a deeply moving meditation on how we can still benefit, without believing, from the wisdom, the beauty, and the consolatory power that religion has to offer. Alain de Botton was brought up in a committedly atheistic household, and though he was powerfully swayed by his parents' views, he underwent, in his mid-twenties, a crisis of faithlessness. His feelings of doubt about atheism had their origins in listening to Bach's cantatas, were further developed in the presence of certain Bellini Madonnas, and became overwhelming with an introduction to Zen architecture. However, it was not until his father's death -- buried under a Hebrew headstone in a Jewish cemetery because he had intriguingly omitted to make more secular arrangements -- that Alain began to face the full degree of his ambivalence regarding the views of religion that he had dutifully accepted. Why are we presented with the curious choice between either committing to peculiar concepts about immaterial deities or letting go entirely of a host of consoling, subtle and effective rituals and practices for which there is no equivalent in secular society? Why do we bristle at the mention of the word "morality"? Flee from the idea that art should be uplifting, or have an ethical purpose? Why don't we build temples? What mechanisms do we have for expressing gratitude? The challenge that de Botton addresses in his book: how to separate ideas and practices from the religious institutions that have laid claim to them. In Religion for Atheists is an argument to free our soul-related needs from the particular influence of religions, even if it is, paradoxically, the study of religion that will allow us to rediscover and rearticulate those needs.
Download or read book In Good Faith written by Scott A. Shay and published by Post Hill Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prominent atheists claim the Bible is a racist text. Yet Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. read it daily. Then again, so did many ardent segregationists. Some atheists claim religion serves to oppress the masses. Yet the classic text of the French Revolution, What is the Third Estate?, was written by a priest. On the other hand, the revolutionaries ended up banning religion. What do we make of religion’s confusing role in history? And what of religion’s relationship to science? Some scientists claim that we have no free will. Others argue that advances in neurobiology and physics disprove determinism. As for whispering to the universe, an absurd habit say the skeptics. Yet prayer is a transformative practice for millions. This book explores the most common atheist critiques of the Bible and religion, incorporating Jewish, Christian, and Muslim voices. The result is a fresh, modern re-evaluation of religion and of atheism. Scott A. Shay is a Co-Founder and Chairman of Signature Bank and a longstanding Jewish community activist. Shay started a Hebrew school, an adult educational program, and chaired several Jewish educational programs. He is the author of Getting our Groove Back: How to Energize American Jewry and has been thinking about religion, reason, and modernity since wondering why his parents sent him to Hebrew school.
Download or read book When Atheism Becomes Religion written by Chris Hedges and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-10 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of American Fascists and the NBCC finalist for War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning comes this timely and compelling work about new atheists: those who attack religion to advance the worst of global capitalism, intolerance and imperial projects. Chris Hedges, who graduated from seminary at Harvard Divinity School, has long been a courageous voice in a world where there are too few. He observes that there are two radical, polarized and dangerous sides to the debate on faith and religion in America: the fundamentalists who see religious faith as their prerogative, and the new atheists who brand all religious belief as irrational and dangerous. Both sides use faith to promote a radical agenda, while the religious majority, those with a commitment to tolerance and compassion as well as to their faith, are caught in the middle. The new atheists, led by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, do not make moral arguments about religion. Rather, they have created a new form of fundamentalism that attempts to permeate society with ideas about our own moral superiority and the omnipotence of human reason. I Don't Believe in Atheists critiques the radical mindset that rages against religion and faith. Hedges identifies the pillars of the new atheist belief system, revealing that the stringent rules and rigid traditions in place are as strict as those of any religious practice. Hedges claims that those who have placed blind faith in the morally neutral disciplines of reason and science create idols in their own image -- a sin for either side of the spectrum. He makes an impassioned, intelligent case against religious and secular fundamentalism, which seeks to divide the world into those worthy of moral and intellectual consideration and those who should be condemned, silenced and eradicated. Hedges shatters the new atheists' assault against religion in America, and in doing so, makes way for new, moderate voices to join the debate. This is a book that must be read to understand the state of the battle about faith.
Download or read book The Great Agnostic written by Susan Jacoby and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography that restores America's foremost 19th-century champion of reason and secularism to the still contested 21st-century public square.
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 306 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 Varieties of Atheism in Science written by Elaine Howard Ecklund and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why study atheism among scientists? -- "Tried and found wanting" : how atheist scientists explain religious transitions -- "I am not like Richard:" modernist atheist scientists -- Ties that bind : culturally religious atheists -- Spiritual atheist scientists -- What atheist scientists think about science -- How atheist scientists approach meaning and morality -- From rhetoric to reality : why religious believers should give atheist scientists a chance.
Download or read book Atheism For Dummies written by Dale McGowan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-03-18 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The easy way to understand atheism and secular philosophy For people seeking a non-religious philosophy of life, as well as believers with atheist friends, Atheism For Dummies offers an intelligent exploration of the historical and moral case for atheism. Often wildly misunderstood, atheism is a secular approach to life based on the understanding that reality is an arrangement of physical matter, with no consideration of unverifiable spiritual forces. Atheism For Dummies offers a brief history of atheist philosophy and its evolution, explores it as a historical and cultural movement, covers important historical writings on the subject, and discusses the nature of ethics and morality in the absence of religion. A simple, yet intelligent exploration of an often misunderstood philosophy Explores the differences between explicit and implicit atheism A comprehensive, readable, and thoroughly unbiased resource As the number of atheists worldwide continues to grow, this book offers a broad understanding of the subject for those exploring atheism as an approach to living.
Download or read book Atheism A Very Short Introduction written by Julian Baggini and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-06-26 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you think of atheists as immoral pessimists who live their lives without meaning, purpose, or values? Think again! Atheism: A Very Short Introduction sets out to dispel the myths that surround atheism and show how a life without religious belief can be positive, meaningful, and moral.
Download or read book Total Atheism written by Stefan Binder and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into India’s rapidly transforming multi-religious society. It explores the social, cultural, and aesthetic challenges faced by a movement of secular activists in their endeavors to establish atheism as a practical and comprehensive way of life. On the basis of original ethnographic material and engaged conceptual analysis, Total Atheism develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asian scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.
Download or read book Why I Do Not Believe in God written by Annie Besant and published by Good Press. This book was released on 2020-12-08 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why I Do Not Believe in God is a book by Annie Besant. It delves into the paths of secularism, most notably the ideas of agnosticism and atheism having built-in moral compasses that don't require the guidance of religion.
Download or read book Atheism The Basics written by Graham Oppy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-03 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atheism: The Basics is a concise and engaging introduction to belief in the non-existence of deities. Atheism has long fascinated people but debate around this controversial position may seem daunting. In this lively and lucid book, Graham Oppy addresses the following important questions: • What does it mean to be an atheist? • What is the difference between atheism, agnosticism, theism and innocence? • How has atheism been distributed over time and place? • What does science tell us about atheism? • Are there good reasons to be an atheist? • Are there good reasons not to be an atheist? • What do we mean by ‘new atheism'? With a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading throughout, the book considers key philosophical arguments around atheism, making this an ideal starting point for anyone seeking a full introduction to the arguments between those who hold atheistic beliefs and those who do not.
Download or read book I Don t Believe in Atheists written by Chris Hedges and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No Marketing Blurb
Download or read book The Meaning of Belief written by Tim Crane and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “[A] lucid and thoughtful book... In a spirit of reconciliation, Crane proposes to paint a more accurate picture of religion for his fellow unbelievers.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review Contemporary debate about religion seems to be going nowhere. Atheists persist with their arguments, many plausible and some unanswerable, but these make no impact on religious believers. Defenders of religion find atheists equally unwilling to cede ground. The Meaning of Belief offers a way out of this stalemate. An atheist himself, Tim Crane writes that there is a fundamental flaw with most atheists’ basic approach: religion is not what they think it is. Atheists tend to treat religion as a kind of primitive cosmology, as the sort of explanation of the universe that science offers. They conclude that religious believers are irrational, superstitious, and bigoted. But this view of religion is almost entirely inaccurate. Crane offers an alternative account based on two ideas. The first is the idea of a religious impulse: the sense people have of something transcending the world of ordinary experience, even if it cannot be explicitly articulated. The second is the idea of identification: the fact that religion involves belonging to a specific social group and participating in practices that reinforce the bonds of belonging. Once these ideas are properly understood, the inadequacy of atheists’ conventional conception of religion emerges. The Meaning of Belief does not assess the truth or falsehood of religion. Rather, it looks at the meaning of religious belief and offers a way of understanding it that both makes sense of current debate and also suggests what more intellectually responsible and practically effective attitudes atheists might take to the phenomenon of religion.
Download or read book Women Beyond Belief written by Karen L. Garst and published by Pitchstone Publishing (US&CA). This book was released on 2016-10-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women have made great strides toward equal rights over the past hundred years, especially in the West. But when considering the ongoing fight over reproductive rights and equal pay—and the prevalence of sexual violence and domestic abuse—it is clear that a significant gap still exists. With scripture often cited as justification for the marginalization of women, it is time to acknowledge that one of the final barriers to full equality for women is religion. Much has been written about the great strides humankind has made in knocking down many long-held religious beliefs, whether related to the age of the earth or the origin of the species. But religion's negative impact on women has been less studied and discussed. This book is a step toward changing that. Twenty-two women from a variety of backgrounds and Judeo-Christian traditions share their personal stories about how they came to abandon organized religion, and how they discovered life after moving away from religious and supernatural beliefs. Their words serve both as a celebration of all who have taken similar steps under the weight of thousands of years of religious history—and as a source of inspiration for those individuals, especially women, who have deep doubts about their own belief traditions but who don't yet know how to embrace life without falling back on religion.
