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Author: John Bice
Publisher: Chelydra Bay Press
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 220
ISBN-13: 0979365201
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Exploring the power of "preaching to the converted," this motivating collection challenges other atheists, secularists, agnostics, and freethinkers to become vocal and involved in their own local media, adding a rational voice to the daily dialogue taking place in newspapers across the country.
Author: Carole M. Cusack
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-06
Total Pages: 164
ISBN-13: 131711325X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Utilizing contemporary scholarship on secularization, individualism, and consumer capitalism, this book explores religious movements founded in the West which are intentionally fictional: Discordianism, the Church of All Worlds, the Church of the SubGenius, and Jediism. Their continued appeal and success, principally in America but gaining wider audience through the 1980s and 1990s, is chiefly as a result of underground publishing and the internet. This book deals with immensely popular subject matter: Jediism developed from George Lucas' Star Wars films; the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, founded by 26-year-old student Bobby Henderson in 2005 as a protest against the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools; Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius which retain strong followings and participation rates among college students. The Church of All Worlds' focus on Gaia theology and environmental issues makes it a popular focus of attention. The continued success of these groups of Invented Religions provide a unique opportunity to explore the nature of late/post-modern religious forms, including the use of fiction as part of a bricolage for spirituality, identity-formation, and personal orientation.
Author: Andrew B. R. Elliott
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Published: 2017
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 184384463X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An exploration of how the Middle Ages are manipulated ideologically in today's communication.
Author: Michael Martin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2015-03-12
Total Pages: 709
ISBN-13: 0810886782
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength of scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise. In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife. Divided into four separate sections, this collection opens with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest evidence of whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next, contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of “surviving” death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—heaven, hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems supporting those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife. Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitiveneuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moralphilosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebookof arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for anyinstructor, researcher, and student of philosophy, religious studies, or theology. It issure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from thosewho believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecidedon the matter.
Author: Andrew M. Koch
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 186
ISBN-13: 0739149725
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Well into the twenty-first century, the United States remains one of the most highly religious industrial democracies on earth. Recent Gallup surveys suggest that 76 percent of Americans believe that the Bible is divinely inspired or the direct word of God. In Medieval America, Andrew M Koch and Paul H. Gates, Jr. offer a thoughtful examination of how this strong religious feeling, coupled with Christian doctrine, affects American political debates and collective practices and surveying the direct and indirect influence of religion and faith on American political culture. Koch and Gates open a more critical dialogue on the political influence of religion in American politics, showing that people's faith shapes their political views and the policies they support. Even with secular structures and processes, a democratic regime will reflect the belief patterns distributed among the public. Delving into a perspicacious analysis of the religious components in current practices in education, the treatment of political symbols, crime and punishment, the human body, and democratic politics, they contend that promoting and maintaining a free, open, and tolerant society requires the necessary limitation of religious influence in the domains of law and policy. Readers interested in religion and politics will find much to discuss in this incisive exploration of Christian beliefs and their impact on American political discourse.
Author: W. Eugene Kleinbauer
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 1989-01-01
Total Pages: 548
ISBN-13: 9780802067081
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A collection of essays that reflect the breadth of twentieth-century scholarship in art history. Kleinbauer has sought to illustrate the variety of methods scholars have developed for conveying the unfolding of the arts in the Western world. Originally published by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1971.
Author: H. James Birx
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 1139
ISBN-13: 1412957389
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Lawrence J. Terlizzese
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2009-01-10
Total Pages: 226
ISBN-13: 1725244624
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Trajectory of the Twenty-first Century explores what many prophets of the twentieth century, such as Oswald Spengler, Paul Tillich, Aldous Huxley, Jacques Ellul, and others, have predicted would transpire in the current century. Their vision included an out-of-control technological system and a return to religious sentiment that will ultimately undermine the system to which it is reacting. This book aims to accurately present their positions and draw certain logical conclusions from them that pertain to the course of history in our time. The book's theme argues that modernity is a secularized version of millennial Christianity, which reaches its fullest development in the twenty-first century and will regress into what Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev called "the new Middle Ages" or a new religious period. This will mean the twilight of modern technological society, as its values of rationalism give way to a postrationalist society. Ironically, decline will come through further technological advance. Omnicide threatens through religious world war driven by transcendent values and modern weaponry. Jihadist thinking and posthumanist technology both establish the omnicidal mentatlity. New technologies such as genetic engineering and artificial intelligence created under millennial inspiration to reach for immortality could potentially bring an end to the human species either through a slow, steady obsolescence or through environmental catastrophe. The titanic forces of technological progress and regress are on a direct collision course in the twenty-first century.
Author: T. M. Rudavsky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-06-28
Total Pages: 344
ISBN-13: 0192557653
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →T. M. Rudavsky presents a new account of the development of Jewish philosophy from the tenth century to Spinoza in the seventeenth, viewed as part of an ongoing dialogue with medieval Christian and Islamic thought. Her aim is to provide a broad historical survey of major figures and schools within the medieval Jewish tradition, focusing on the tensions between Judaism and rational thought. This is reflected in particular philosophical controversies across a wide range of issues in metaphysics, language, cosmology, and philosophical theology. The book illuminates our understanding of medieval thought by offering a much richer view of the Jewish philosophical tradition, informed by the considerable recent research that has been done in this area.
Author: F. R. Ankersmit
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1996
Total Pages: 444
ISBN-13: 9780804727303
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Taking as its point of departure a sharp critique of Rawls's influential "A Theory of Justice," this book looks at politics from an aesthetic perspective.
