Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions...

Recent cognitive approaches to the study of religion have yielded much understanding by focusing on common psychological processes that all humans share. One leading theory, Harvey WhitehouseOs modes of religiosity theory, demonstrates how two distinct modes of organizing and transmitting religious traditions emerge from different ways of activating universal memory systems. In Mind and Religion, top scholars from biology to religious studies question, test, evaluate and challenge Whitehou...

Around the world and throughout history, in cultures as diverse as ancient Mesopotamia and modern America, human beings have been compelled by belief in gods and developed complex religions around them. But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions...

Religious people have been known to push their beliefs onto others; in fact several religions require it. This book utilizes reason, logic, some psychology, and the experiences of someone who has been in several hundred religious debates with believers, mainly those of the Judeo-Christian faiths. Throughout this book, you will be presented with several of the most common arguments that believers utilize in order to attempt to convert people to followers; then you will be given a response t...

Jesus Cries When You Touch Yourself is a comic monologue written in tribute to the late George Carlin on the topic of religious bullshit in America. Influenced by Carlin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Bill Maher, Monty Python, and the writers of South Park, the author uses constant mockery and absurdist humor on a tour of ridiculous beliefs in America. With devastating logic, Jesus, the most beloved character in all of history, is revealed to be the world's greatest pedophile. After all, if Jesus i...

Every statement that a person makes is either true or falsethat is, a lie. In his comprehensive study, Lies Have Ruined the World, author Dennis Proux seeks to expose the dishonesty, myths, and fabrications provided by powerful influences in the most important areas of our lives, including religious institutions, government, and our legal system.Proux feels that all humans yearn to be free to discover their own worlds and realize their full potential. While relying on the ...

One man shares the story of his transformation from evangelical Christian to atheist and examines the train of thought that brought him there.After almost twenty years of evangelical preaching, missionizing, and Christian songwriting, Dan Barker "threw out the bathwater and discovered that there is no baby." In Godless, Barker describes the intellectual and psychological path he followed in moving from fundamentalism to freethought. Godless include...

Maybe you were born to Christian parents and raised as a Christian. Or maybe you are just a part of a Christian nation. You might have attended church regularly, or maybe just on special occasions. If asked, you say that you believe in God, but you really never thought about what that means exactly. You are a well-educated person who accepts the idea of Biblical miracles, but only the more "reasonable" ones. You have read some of the Bible, mostly just parts of the New Testament, but n...

Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett opened the door to a hard nosed look at religion in our society but no one seemed to be using their concepts to explain the psychology of religion and its practical effects on people. Dr. Darrel Ray, psychologist and lifelong student of religion stepped into this gap to discuss religious infection from the inside out. How does guilt play into religious infection? Why is sexual control so important to so many religions? What causes the anxiety and neuro...

Does your got accept human sacrifices? If you are a Christian or Jew and believe in the bible, he does.This book is a humorous, factual rewrite of the Bible in the vernacular. In it, you will find plenty of sex, rapes, incest, violence, fratricide, genocide, slavery, myths, abuse of women and children, false prophecies, contradictions, and other inconsistencies and errors that reveal that the Bible should be an X-Rated book, not a holy book.The author asks, "How can anyone wo...

This is a story of a true Christian who believed for nearly three decades, having grown up the son of evangelical missionary parents, later becoming a missionary himself. Yet he slowly lost his faith and now no longer holds it. In this part-autobiography, part-exposé, Ken traces his journey from evangelical missionary to secular humanist while remaining part of a committed Christian family. He looks back at a number of reasons he remained a believer for over a decade after his initial doub...

This book is a crash course in effective reasoning, meant to catapult you into a world where you start to see things how they really are, not how you think they are. The focus of this book is on logical fallacies, which loosely defined, are simply errors in reasoning. With the reading of each page, you can make significant improvements in the way you reason and make decisions. Logically Fallacious is one of the most comprehensive collections of logical fallacies with all original examples ...