Download or read book Conceiving God The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion written by David Lewis-Williams and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2010-03-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A controversial exploration of the origin of religion in the neurology of the human brain. In this book the noted cognitive archaeologist David Lewis-Williams confronts a question that troubles many people in the world today: Is there a supernatural realm that intervenes in the material world of daily life and leads to the evolution of religions? Professor Lewis-Williams first describes how science developed within the cocoon of religion and then shows how the natural functioning of the human brain creates experiences that can lead to belief in a supernatural realm, beings, and interventions. Once people have these experiences, they formulate beliefs about them, and thus creeds are born. Forty thousand years ago, people were leaving traces in the archaeological record of activities that we can label religious, and Lewis-Williams discusses in detail the evidence preserved in the Volp Caves in France. He also shows that mental imagery produced by the functioning of the human brain can be detected in widely separated religious communities such as Hildegard of Bingen’s in medieval Europe or the San hunters of southern Africa.

Download or read book We Become What we Worship written by G K Beale and published by Inter-Varsity Press. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The heart of the biblical understanding of idolatry, argues Gregory Beale, is that we take on the characteristics of what we worship. Employing Isaiah 6 as his interpretive lens, Beale demonstrates that this understanding of idolatry permeates the whole canon, from Genesis to Revelation. Beale concludes with an application of the biblical notion of idolatry to the challenges of contemporary life.

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 God written by Reza Aslan and published by Random House. This book was released on 2017-11-07 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of Zealot explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Download or read book Religion of the Gods written by Kimberley Christine Patton and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-09 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In many of the world's religions, both polytheistic and monotheistic, a seemingly enigmatic and paradoxical image is found--that of the god who worships. Various interpretations of this seeming paradox have been advanced. Some suggest that it represents sacrifice to a higher deity. Proponents of anthropomorphic projection say that the gods are just "big people" and that images of human religious action are simply projected onto the deities. However, such explanations do not do justice to the complexity and diversity of this phenomenon. In Religion of the Gods, Kimberley C. Patton uses a comparative approach to take up anew a longstanding challenge in ancient Greek religious iconography: why are the Olympian gods depicted on classical pottery making libations? The sacrificing gods in ancient Greece are compared to gods who perform rituals in six other religious traditions: the Vedic gods, the heterodox god Zurvan of early Zoroastrianism, the Old Norse god Odin, the Christian God and Christ, the God of Judaism, and Islam's Allah. Patton examines the comparative evidence from a cultural and historical perspective, uncovering deep structural resonances while also revealing crucial differences. Instead of looking for invisible recipients or lost myths, Patton proposes the new category of "divine reflexivity." Divinely performed ritual is a self-reflexive, self-expressive action that signals the origin of ritual in the divine and not the human realm. Above all, divine ritual is generative, both instigating and inspiring human religious activity. The religion practiced by the gods is both like and unlike human religious action. Seen from within the religious tradition, gods are not "big people," but other than human. Human ritual is directed outward to a divine being, but the gods practice ritual on their own behalf. "Cultic time," the symbiotic performance of ritual both in heaven and on earth, collapses the distinction between cult and theology each time ritual is performed. Offering the first comprehensive study and a new theory of this fascinating phenomenon, Religion of the Gods is a significant contribution to the fields of classics and comparative religion. Patton shows that the god who performs religious action is not an anomaly, but holds a meaningful place in the category of ritual and points to a phenomenologically universal structure within religion itself.

Download or read book WHY DO HUMANS WORSHIP GODS written by Wilberforce Reid and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2024-02-12 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to United Nations statistics, 25,000 men, women, and innocent children worldwide die from starvation each day, yet the majority of us give praises and thanks to God every day for providing us with our daily bread. We do know (or should know) that millions of people were killed, including being burned at the stakes, because they did not conform to the official doctrine of the Christian Church. In spite of this, each day we sing about how loving and merciful God is to mankind. In the creation of our conscious mind, are we more susceptible to indoctrination than to logical and objective analysis of a subject? By exposing stories swept under the rug because of our unconscious bias, this book will uncover many uncomfortable truths.

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 Grace Walk written by Steve McVey and published by Harvest House Publishers. This book was released on 2005-05-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a fresh cover! The nearly 200,000-selling Grace Walk has helped thousands of believers leave behind the "manic–depressive" Christian walk: either running around trying to perform to be acceptable to God—or thinking they've failed Him again and wondering if they'll ever measure up. Living the grace walk gets Christians off this religious roller coaster. Using his own journey from legalism into grace, Steve McVey illustrates the foundational, biblical truths of who believers are in Jesus Christ and how they can let Him live His life through them each day. As they experience their identity in Jesus Christ, Christians will come to know "Amazing Grace" as not just a song but as their true way of life.

Download or read book Jesus Religion written by Jefferson Bethke and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-14 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abandon dead, dry, religious rule-keeping and embrace the promise of being truly known and deeply loved. Jefferson Bethke burst into the cultural conversation with a passionate, provocative poem titled "Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus." The 4-minute video became an overnight sensation, with 7 million YouTube views in its first 48 hours (and 23+ million in a year). Bethke's message clearly struck a chord with believers and nonbelievers alike, triggering an avalanche of responses running the gamut from encouraged to enraged. In his New York Times bestseller Jesus > Religion, Bethke unpacks similar contrasts that he drew in the poem--highlighting the difference between teeth gritting and grace, law and love, performance and peace, despair, and hope. With refreshing candor, he delves into the motivation behind his message, beginning with the unvarnished tale of his own plunge from the pinnacle of a works-based, fake-smile existence that sapped his strength and led him down a path of destructive behavior. Along the way, Bethke gives you the tools you need to: Humbly and prayerfully open your mind Understand Jesus for all that he is View the church from a brand-new perspective Bethke is quick to acknowledge that he's not a pastor or theologian, but simply an ordinary, twenty-something who cried out for a life greater than the one for which he had settled. On this journey, Bethke discovered the real Jesus, who beckoned him with love beyond the props of false religion. Praise for Jesus > Religion: "Jeff's book will make you stop and listen to a voice in your heart that may have been drowned out by the noise of religion. Listen to that voice, then follow it--right to the feet of Jesus." --Bob Goff, author of New York Times bestsellers Love Does and Everybody, Always "The book you hold in your hands is Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz meets C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity meets Augustine's Confessions. This book is going to awaken an entire generation to Jesus and His grace." --Derwin L. Gray, lead pastor of Transformation Church, author of Limitless Life: Breaking Free from the Labels That Hold You Back

Download or read book Your Brain on Food written by Gary L. Wenk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An internationally renowned neuroscientist, Dr. Wenk has been educating college and medical students about the brain and lecturing around the world for more than forty years. He has published over three hundred publications on the effects of drugs upon the brain. This essential book vividly demonstrates how a little knowledge about the foods and drugs we eat can teach us a lot about how our brain functions. The information is presented in an irreverent and non-judgmental manner that makes it highly accessible to high school teenagers, inquisitive college students and worried parents. Dr. Wenk has skillfully blended the highest scholarly standards with illuminating insights, gentle humor and welcome simplicity. The intersection between brain science, drugs, food and our cultural and religious traditions is plainly illustrated in an entirely new light. Wenk tackles fundamental questions, including: · Why do you wake up tired from a good long sleep and why does your sleepy brain crave coffee and donuts? · How can understanding a voodoo curse explain why it is so hard to stop smoking? · Why is a vegetarian or gluten-free diet not always the healthier option for the brain? · How can liposuction improve brain function? · What is the connection between nature's hallucinogens and religiosity? · Why does marijuana impair your memory now but protect your memory later in life? · Why do some foods produce nightmares? · What are the effects of diet and obesity upon the brains of infants and children? · Are some foods better to eat after traumatic brain injury?

Download or read book Spirit Soul and Body written by Andrew Wommack and published by Destiny Image Publishers. This book was released on 2018-12-18 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Have you ever asked yourself what changed when you were "born again?" You look in the mirror and see the same reflection - your body hasn't changed. You find yourself acting the same and yielding to those same old temptations - that didn't seem to change either. So you wonder, Has anything really changed? The correct...

Download or read book Mark Twain and the Brazen Serpent written by Doug Aldridge and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the overarching theme of religious satire in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, this study reveals the novel's hidden motive, moral and plot. The author considers generations of criticism spanning the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, along with new textual evidence showing how Twain's richly evocative style dissects Huck's conscience to propose humane amorality as a corrective to moral absolutes. Jim and Huck emerge as archetypal twins--biracial brothers who prefigure America's color-blind ideals.

Download or read book The Pleasures of God written by John Piper and published by Multnomah. This book was released on 2012-01-17 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Desiring God reveals the biblical evidence to help us see and savor what the pleasures of God show us about Him. Includes a study guide for individual and small-group use. Isn’t it true—we really don’t know someone until we understand what makes that person happy? And so it is with God! What does bring delight to the happiest Being in the universe? John Piper writes, that it’s only when we know what makes God glad that we’ll know the greatness of His glory. Therefore, we must comprehend “the pleasures of God.” Unlike so much of what is written today, this is not a book about us. It is about the One we were made for—God Himself. In this theological masterpiece—chosen by World Magazine as one of the 20th Century’s top 100 books, John Piper reveals the biblical evidence to help us see and savor what the pleasures of God show us about Him. Then we will be able to drink deeply—and satisfyingly—from the only well that offers living water. What followers of Jesus need now, more than anything else, is to know and love—behold and embrace—the great, glorious, sovereign, happy God of the Bible. “This is a unique and precious book that everybody should read more than once.” —J.I. PACKER, Regent College, Vancouver, British Columbia

Download or read book European Paganism written by Ken Dowden and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: European Paganism provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of ancient pagan religions throughout the European continent. Before there where Christians, the peoples of Europe were pagans. Were they bloodthirsty savages hanging human offerings from trees? Were they happy ecologists, valuing the unpolluted rivers and mountains? In European Paganism Ken Dowden outlines and analyses the diverse aspects of pagan ritual and culture from human sacrifice to pilgrimage lunar festivals and tree worship. It includes: a 'timelines' chart to aid with chronology many quotations from ancient and modern sources translated from the original language where necessary, to make them accessible a comprehensive bibliography and guide to further reading

Download or read book The Evolution of Religions written by Everard Bierer and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 257 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 My Jamaican Experience written by Wilberforce Reid and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fairest land ever eyes beheld . . . the mountains touch the sky. This is what Christopher Columbus wrote in his log when he landed on the north coast of Jamaica on May 5, 1494. This statement has been affirmed over the years, resulting in up to two million tourists visiting Jamaica each year. Since then, Jamaica has gone on to become a record producer of sugar, banana, and bauxite (aluminum ore). Jamaica was the first country in the Western Hemisphere to have a postal system, a piped domestic water system, and a golf course. In the nineteen sixties and early seventies, Jamaica had one of the highest growth rates among the developing countries. Jamaica won more Olympic track-and-field medals, as a ratio of its population, than any other country in the world, and only the United States has a larger aggregate. In spite of this early sterling performance, Jamaica has been through a turbulent political uprising and is still trying to navigate through a crippling economic malaise. In the nineteen seventies and early eighties, Jamaica was ground zero for the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The author will take you through the good old days of the natural simplicity of growing up in rural Jamaica. He will recount the past and present great achievements that have been accredited to Jamaica. You will also visit with him the days of wrath when Jamaica was the staging ground for the proxy war between the Soviet/Cuban axis versus the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).