Download or read book Is God talk Nonsense written by Robert Hyman Ayers and published by . This book was released on 1966 with total page 11 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophy of Religion written by Brian Davies and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2000 with total page 754 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Comprehensive, representative, good guidance and advice', Dr Andrew Dawson, Chester College'The selection of articles is exceptionally good for an introductory course in the subject. The questions are also useful for discussion in class and writing projects', Dr Victoria S Harrison, Birkbeck CollegePhilosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible overview of the philosophy of religion. Under the careful editorship of Brian Davies, the book contains a selection of the best classical and contemporary writings on the philosophy of religion together with substantial commentary, introductory material, discussion questions, and detailed guides to further reading. The editorial material sets the extracts in context and guides the reader through them. Taken as a whole, the book offers the ideal, self-contained introduction to the questions which have most preoccupied Western philosophers when thinking about religion. The selection is both very comprehensive and very generous. 65 sizeable extracts map out the full range of topics most commonly encountered in courses on the philosophy of religion. Part I looks at the relation between philosophy and religious belief; Parts II-IV consider the existence and nature of God; Part V addresses the 'problem of evil'; and Parts VI and VII are devoted to the relationship between morality and religion and to the question of life after death.
Download or read book Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot written by Seth Andrews and published by Outskirts Press. This book was released on 2022-01-24 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seth Andrews wasn't an idiot during his thirty years as an evangelical Christian. He wasn't unintelligent, nor did his IQ shift when he ultimately left religion entirely. He considered himself thoughtful, moral, reasonable, and at least as smart as the average person. In other words, he wasn't an idiot. Yet strangely, he often sounded like one. In any other context, Christians would likely smirk, scoff, or recoil at many of their "normal" beliefs and practices: reenacted Easter crucifixions, eating monthly communion "flesh," singing hymns about being washed in blood, and the embrace of a Bible containing scripture verses about golden hemorrhoids, apocalypse dragons, and human sacrifice, So what gives? Are these notions embraced only because they're familiar? Do they make any sense? And do they cause otherwise reasonable people to sound like idiots? Seth Andrews admits that, for himself, the answer was a definite yes. For everyone else? Read the book and decide.
Download or read book God and the Gay Christian written by Matthew Vines and published by Convergent. This book was released on 2014 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reinterpretations of key Bible texts related to sexual orientation, written by a Harvard student, present an accessible case for a modern Christian conservative acceptance of sexual diversity.
Download or read book God talk written by Kurian Kachappilly and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Articles presented at the International Seminar, God-Talk: Contemporary Trends and Trials held on November 4-7, 2005 at the Faculty of Philosophy, Dharmaram Vidya Kshetram in collaboration with Christ College, Bangalore.
Download or read book God Revelation and Authority God Who Speaks and Shows Vol 1 written by Carl F. H. Henry and published by Crossway. This book was released on 1999-01-25 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part 1 in a monumental six-volume set that presents an undeniable case for the revealed authority of God to a generation that has forgotten who he is and what he has done.
Download or read book The Edge of Words written by Rowan Williams and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Edge of Words is Rowan Williams' first book since standing down as Archbishop of Canterbury. Invited to give the prestigious 2014 Gifford Lectures, Dr Williams has produced a scholarly but eminently accessible account of the possibilities of speaking about God – taking as his point of departure the project of natural theology. Dr Williams enters into dialogue with thinkers as diverse as Augustine and Simone Weil and authors such as Joyce, Hardy, Burgess and Hoban in what is a compelling essay about the possibility of language about God.
Download or read book Sense and Nonsense in Talking about God written by Wim A. de Pater and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book God Matters written by Herbert McCabe and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2005-01-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seldom have God matters been treated with such verve, sense, rigour and humour as in this collection of writings by Herbert McCabe. The book demonstrates the depth and clarity of his theology and philosophy of God, his appetite for controversy, both political and theological, as well as a traditional Catholic concern for prayer, liturgy, Mary and St Dominic. The articles, which range widely, and represent over twenty years of characterstically dominican enterprise, reveal a personality that is itslef clear evidence that God matters.
Download or read book How God Becomes Real written by T.M. Luhrmann and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-27 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 Speaking of God written by William Hordern and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2002-05-28 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antiquated language now makes most theological statements sound irrelevant, but precise thinking on questions of ultimate meaning is as important as ever. Recent gains here come from the challenge of a school of philosophy that presses questions of usage, function, and meaning of language. William Hordern's book, a ÒconversationÓ between theology and analytical philosophy, begins by presenting the clearest study available for the intelligent general reader of this important philosophical tool. He goes on to use it to explore the language of theology, seeking ways of making it more effective for the purposes of communication. In tracing the development of this interest in language, Mr. Hordern explains why, in its more conservative phase, analytical philosophy declared that only verifiable statements were valid and that, since theology did not lend itself to verification, it dealt with nonsense. He demonstrates how this attitude failed to allow for ÒconvictionalÓ language, which is more akin to the language of poetry. Theological language, the author says, is rooted in the church and the community of faith. It is deeply concerned with mystery and worship, and can be discussed ÒanalyticallyÓ only in terms of its special functions, which are similar to those of language used in speaking of personal relations. The author's treatment of these similarities is particularly useful and illuminating.
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 Leaves of Healing written by and published by . This book was released on 1897 with total page 864 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Rocks of Ages written by Stephen Jay Gould and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-07-20 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "People of good will wish to see science and religion at peace. . . . I do not see how science and religion could be unified, or even synthesized, under any common scheme of explanation or analysis; but I also do not understand why the two enterprises should experience any conflict." So states internationally renowned evolutionist and bestselling author Stephen Jay Gould in the simple yet profound thesis of his brilliant new book. Writing with bracing intelligence and elegant clarity, Gould sheds new light on a dilemma that has plagued thinking people since the Renaissance. Instead of choosing between science and religion, Gould asks, why not opt for a golden mean that accords dignity and distinction to each realm? At the heart of Gould's penetrating argument is a lucid, contemporary principle he calls NOMA (for nonoverlapping magisteria)--a "blessedly simple and entirely conventional resolution" that allows science and religion to coexist peacefully in a position of respectful noninterference. Science defines the natural world; religion, our moral world, in recognition of their separate spheres of influence. In elaborating and exploring this thought-provoking concept, Gould delves into the history of science, sketching affecting portraits of scientists and moral leaders wrestling with matters of faith and reason. Stories of seminal figures such as Galileo, Darwin, and Thomas Henry Huxley make vivid his argument that individuals and cultures must cultivate both a life of the spirit and a life of rational inquiry in order to experience the fullness of being human. In his bestselling books Wonderful Life, The Mismeasure of Man, and Questioning the Millennium, Gould has written on the abundance of marvels in human history and the natural world. In Rocks of Ages, Gould's passionate humanism, ethical discernment, and erudition are fused to create a dazzling gem of contemporary cultural philosophy. As the world's preeminent Darwinian theorist writes, "I believe, with all my heart, in a respectful, even loving concordat between . . . science and religion."
Download or read book Letters to a Young Contrarian written by Christopher Hitchens and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-28 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From bestselling author and provocateur Christopher Hitchens, the classic guide to the art of principled dissent and disagreement In Letters to a Young Contrarian, bestselling author and world-class provocateur Christopher Hitchens inspires the radicals, gadflies, mavericks, rebels, and angry young (wo)men of tomorrow. Exploring the entire range of "contrary positions"—from noble dissident to gratuitous nag—Hitchens introduces the next generation to the minds and the misfits who influenced him, invoking such mentors as Emile Zola, Rosa Parks, and George Orwell. As is his trademark, Hitchens pointedly pitches himself in contrast to stagnant attitudes across the ideological spectrum. No other writer has matched Hitchens's understanding of the importance of disagreement—to personal integrity, to informed discussion, to true progress, to democracy itself.
Download or read book The God Who Is There written by D. A. Carson and published by Baker Books. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It can no longer be assumed that most people--or even most Christians--have a basic understanding of the Bible. Many don't know the difference between the Old and New Testament, and even the more well-known biblical figures are often misunderstood. It is getting harder to talk about Jesus accurately and compellingly because listeners have no proper context with which to understand God's story of redemption. In this basic introduction to faith, D. A. Carson takes seekers, new Christians, and small groups through the big story of Scripture. He helps readers to know what they believe and why they believe it. The companion leader's guide helps evangelistic study groups, small groups, and Sunday school classes make the best use of this book in group settings.
