Download or read book Cicero on the Philosophy of Religion written by J. P. F. Wynne and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do the gods love you? Cicero gives deep and surprising answers in two philosophical dialogues on traditional Roman religion.

Download or read book Nature s God The Heretical Origins of the American Republic written by Matthew Stewart and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 502 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the National Book Award. Where did the ideas come from that became the cornerstone of American democracy? America’s founders intended to liberate us not just from one king but from the ghostly tyranny of supernatural religion. Drawing deeply on the study of European philosophy, Matthew Stewart brilliantly tracks the ancient, pagan, and continental ideas from which America’s revolutionaries drew their inspiration. In the writings of Spinoza, Lucretius, and other great philosophers, Stewart recovers the true meanings of “Nature’s God,” “the pursuit of happiness,” and the radical political theory with which the American experiment in self-government began.

Download or read book You Are Gods written by David Bentley Hart and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2022-04-01 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David Bentley Hart offers an intense and thorough reflection upon the issue of the supernatural in Christian theology and doctrine. In recent years, the theological—and, more specifically, Roman Catholic—question of the supernatural has made an astonishing return from seeming oblivion. David Bentley Hart’s You Are Gods presents a series of meditations on the vexed theological question of the relation of nature and supernature. In its merely controversial aspect, the book is intended most directly as a rejection of a certain Thomistic construal of that relation, as well as an argument in favor of a model of nature and supernature at once more Eastern and patristic, and also more in keeping with the healthier currents of mediaeval and modern Catholic thought. In its more constructive and confessedly radical aspects, the book makes a vigorous case for the all-but-complete eradication of every qualitative, ontological, or logical distinction between the natural and the supernatural in the life of spiritual creatures. It advances a radically monistic vision of Christian metaphysics but does so wholly on the basis of credal orthodoxy. Hart, one of the most widely read theologians in America today, presents a bold gesture of resistance to the recent revival of what used to be called “two-tier Thomism,” especially in the Anglophone theological world. In this astute exercise in classical Christian orthodoxy, Hart takes the metaphysics of participation, high Trinitarianism, Christology, and the soteriological language of theosis to their inevitable logical conclusions. You Are Gods will provoke many readers interested in theological metaphysics. The book also offers a vision of Christian thought that draws on traditions (such as Vedanta) from which Christian philosophers and theologians, biblical scholars, and religious studies scholars still have a great deal to learn.

Download or read book The Nature of Gods written by D.J. Torres and published by Creative Locks Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The True Nature of God written by Andrew Wommack and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often, human perspective and the mechanics of Christianity eclipse the true nature of God -- the God Who wants nothing more than to share an intimate friendship with His children. If you're wondering who God is, or if He cares, let Andrew Wommack show you The True Nature of God.

Download or read book How to Think about God written by Marcus Tullius Cicero and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vivid and accessible new translation of Cicero’s influential writings on the Stoic idea of the divine Most ancient Romans were deeply religious and their world was overflowing with gods—from Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars to countless local divinities, household gods, and ancestral spirits. One of the most influential Roman perspectives on religion came from a nonreligious belief system that is finding new adherents even today: Stoicism. How did the Stoics think about religion? In How to Think about God, Philip Freeman presents vivid new translations of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods and The Dream of Scipio. In these brief works, Cicero offers a Stoic view of belief, divinity, and human immortality, giving eloquent expression to the religious ideas of one of the most popular schools of Roman and Greek philosophy. On the Nature of the Gods and The Dream of Scipio are Cicero's best-known and most important writings on religion, and they have profoundly shaped Christian and non-Christian thought for more than two thousand years, influencing such luminaries as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, and Thomas Jefferson. These works reveal many of the religious aspects of Stoicism, including an understanding of the universe as a materialistic yet continuous and living whole in which both the gods and a supreme God are essential elements. Featuring an introduction, suggestions for further reading, and the original Latin on facing pages, How to Think about God is a compelling guide to the Stoic view of the divine.

Download or read book Gods and Humans in the Ancient Near East written by Tyson L. Putthoff and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-05 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gods have always lived among humans. But long ago, they also lived inside us, sharing their nature with mere mortals.

Download or read book Nature and Divinity in Plato s Timaeus written by Sarah Broadie and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-10 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Timaeus is one of the most influential and challenging works of ancient philosophy to have come down to us. Sarah Broadie's rich and compelling study proposes new interpretations of major elements of the Timaeus, including the separate Demiurge, the cosmic 'beginning', the 'second mixing', the Receptacle and the Atlantis story. Broadie shows how Plato deploys the mythic themes of the Timaeus to convey fundamental philosophical insights and examines the profoundly differing methods of interpretation which have been brought to bear on the work. Her book is for everyone interested in Ancient Greek philosophy, cosmology and mythology, whether classicists, philosophers, historians of ideas or historians of science. It offers new findings to scholars familiar with the material, but it is also a clear and reliable resource for anyone coming to it for the first time.

Download or read book The Gods of Man Gods of Nature God of War written by Gary R. Varner and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2007-10-14 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today the majority of humankind worships a single God. Although this God is said to be all loving and wanting peace for his worshippers there is very little peace among the three religions based on common theology. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all foster hatred for one another, causing millions of deaths and untold suffering for hundreds of years.This book explores the mythic, historical, and archaeological record to illustrate the history of these conflicts. The Gods of Man also looks at how monotheism eventually dominated and destroyed the ancient and peaceful goddess traditions that had existed for thousands of years before. Is the God of today simply used to enforce government edicts, justify war and to control society?Gary R. Varner has written several articles and books on ancient religions, folklore and mythology. He is a member of the American Folklore Society and the Foundation for Mythological Studies.

Download or read book Origins of the Gods written by Andrew Collins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-19 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: • Explores how our ancestors used shamanic rituals at sacred sites to create portals for communication with nonhuman intelligences • Shares supporting evidence from the spiritual and shamanic beliefs of more than 100 Native American tribes • Shows how the earliest forms of shamanism began at sites like Qesem Cave in Israel more than 400,000 years ago From Göbekli Tepe in Turkey to the Egyptian pyramids, from the stone circles of Europe to the mound complexes of the Americas, Andrew Collins and Gregory L. Little show how, again and again, our ancestors built permanent sites of ceremonial activity where geomagnetic and gravitational anomalies have been recorded. They investigate how the earliest forms of animism and shamanism began at sites like the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia and Qesem Cave in Israel more than 400,000 years ago. They explain how shamanic rituals and altered states of consciousness combine with the natural forces of the earth to create portals for contact with otherworldly realms—in other words, the gods of our ancestors were the result of an interaction between human consciousness and transdimensional intelligence. The authors show how the spiritual and shamanic beliefs of more than 100 Native American tribes align with their theory, and they reveal how some of these shamanic transdimensional portals are still active, sharing vivid examples from Skinwalker Ranch in Utah and Bempton in northern England. Ultimately, Collins and Little show how our modern disconnection from nature and lack of a fully visible night sky makes the manifestations from these ultraterrestrial intelligences seem random. If we can restore our spiritual connections, perhaps we can once again communicate with the higher dimensional beings who triggered the advancements of our earliest ancestors.

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 God and Nature written by David C. Lindberg and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-11-10 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the publication in 1896 of Andrew Dickson White's classic History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, no comprehensive history of the subject has appeared in the English language. Although many twentieth-century historians have written on the relationship between Christianity and science, and in the process have called into question many of White's conclusions, the image of warfare lingers in the public mind. To provide an up-to-date alternative, based on the best available scholarship and written in nontechnical language, the editors of this volume have assembled an international group of distinguished historians. In eighteen essays prepared especially for this book, these authors cover the period from the early Christian church to the twentieth century, offering fresh appraisals of such encounters as the trial of Galileo, the formulation of the Newtonian worldview, the coming of Darwinism, and the ongoing controversies over "scientific creationism." They explore not only the impact of religion on science, but also the influence of science and religion. This landmark volume promises not only to silence the persistent rumors of war between Christianity and science, but also serve as the point of departure for new explorations of their relationship, Scholars and general readers alike will find it provocative and readable.

Download or read book Living with the Gods written by Neil MacGregor and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2018-09-17 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following the award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, a panoramic exploration of peoples, objects and beliefs from the celebrated author of A History of the World in 100 Objects and Germany 'Riveting, extraordinary ... tells the sweeping story of religious belief in all its inventive variety. The emphasis is not on our differences, but on shared spiritual yearnings' Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times, Books of the Year One of the central facts of human existence is that every society shares a set of beliefs and assumptions - a faith, an ideology, a religion - that goes far beyond the life of the individual. These beliefs are an essential part of a shared identity. They have a unique power to define - and to divide - us, and are a driving force in the politics of much of the world today. Throughout history they have most often been, in the widest sense, religious. Yet this book is not a history of religion, nor an argument in favour of faith. It is about the stories which give shape to our lives, and the different ways in which societies imagine their place in the world. Looking across history and around the globe, it interrogates objects, places and human activities to try to understand what shared beliefs can mean in the public life of a community or a nation, how they shape the relationship between the individual and the state, and how they help give us our sense of who we are. For in deciding how we live with our gods, we also decide how to live with each other. 'The new blockbuster by the museums maestro Neil MacGregor ... The man who chronicles world history through objects is back ... examining a new set of objects to explore the theme of faith in society' Sunday Times

Download or read book The Treatises of M T Cicero written by Marcus Tullius Cicero and published by . This book was released on 1853 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A Religion of Nature written by Donald A. Crosby and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The beauty, sublimity, and wonder of nature have been justly celebrated in all of the religious traditions of the world, but usually these traditions have focused on beings or powers presumed to lie behind nature, providing nature's ultimate explanation and meaning. In a radical departure, Donald A. Crosby makes an eloquent case for regarding nature itself as the focus of religion, conceived without God, gods, or animating spirits of any kind, and argues that nature is metaphysically ultimate. He explores the concept of nature, the place of humans in nature, the responsibilities of humans to one another and to their natural environments, and offers a religious vision that grants to nature the kind of reverence, awe, love, and devotion formerly reserved for God. Crosby also shares his personal journey from theistic faith to a religion of nature.

Download or read book De Natura Deorum written by Marcus Tullius Cicero and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Lacan s Return to Antiquity written by Oliver Harris and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-08-05 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781138820388 Lacan’s Return to Antiquity is the first book devoted to the role of classical antiquity in Lacan’s work. Oliver Harris poses a question familiar from studies of Freud: what are Ancient Greece and Rome doing in a twentieth-century theory of psychology? In Lacan’s case, the issue has an additional edge, for he employs antiquity to demonstrate what is radically new about psychoanalysis. It is a tool with which to convey the revolutionary power of Freud’s ideas by digging down to the philosophical questions beneath them. It is through these questions that Lacan allies psychoanalysis with the pioneering intellectual developments of his time in anthropology, philosophy, art and literature. Harris begins by considering the role of Plato and Socrates in Lacan’s conflicted thoughts on teaching, writing and the process of becoming an intellectual icon. In doing so, he provides a way into considering the uniquely challenging nature of the Lacanian texts themselves, and the live performances behind them. Two central chapters explore when and why myth is drawn upon in psychoanalysis, its threat to the discipline’s scientific aspirations, and Lacan’s embrace of its expressive potential. The final chapters explore Lacan’s defence of tragedy and his return to Ovidian themes. These include the unwitting voyeurism of Actaeon, and the fate of Narcissus, a figure of tragic metamorphosis that Freud places at the heart of infantile development. Lacan’s Return to Antiquity brings to Lacan studies the close reading and cross-disciplinary research that has proved fruitful in understanding Freud’s invention of psychoanalysis. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and advanced students studying in the field, being of particular value to those interested in the roots of Lacanian concepts, the evolution of his thought, and the cultural context of his work. What emerges is a more nuanced, self-critical figure, a corrective to the reputation for dogmatism and obscurity that Lacan has attracted. In the process, new light is thrown on enduring controversies, from Lacan’s pronouncements on feminine sexuality to the opaque drama of the seminars themselves.