Showing titles in Agnosticism

Because you know it's nonsense, but were never sure why.

For the millions of people who want spirituality without religion, Sam Harris’s new book is a guide to meditation as a rational spiritual practice informed by neuroscience and psychology. From bestselling author, neuroscientist, and “new atheist” Sam Harris, Waking Up is for the increasingly large numbers of people who follow no religion, but who suspect that Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and the other saints and sages of history could not have all been epileptics, schizophrenics, or frauds.

There is but one form of human enslavement more villainous and more detestable than the chains of the tyrant or the shackles of the despot, and that is the enslavement of the human mind under ecclesiastical tyranny, whose cowering and crouching victims at the crack of the priestly lash are driven from the cultivation of their own intelligence, from the custody of their own thoughts, from the guardianship of their own souls, and who, like whipt dogs, trembling and whining in abject submission at the feet of the oppressor, lick the very hand that wields the lash.

Moving from the Paleolithic age to the present, Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names, such as God, Brahman, Nirvana, Allah, or Dao. Focusing especially on Christianity but including Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese spiritualities, Armstrong examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable?

Looking back to the crisis of the Reformation and beyond, Unbelievers shows how, long before philosophers started to make the case for atheism, powerful cultural currents were challenging traditional faith. These tugged in different ways not only on celebrated thinkers such as Machiavelli, Montaigne, Hobbes, and Pascal, but on men and women at every level of society whose voices we hear through their diaries, letters, and court records. Ryrie traces the roots of atheism born of anger, a sentiment familiar to anyone who has ever cursed a corrupt priest, and of doubt born of anxiety.

Atheists talk a lot about the importance of skepticism. But the truth is, they're not nearly skeptical enough. While atheists champion the importance of a critical stance toward religion, they often fail to take that same stance toward their own beliefs.

A deeply personal and heart-breaking memoir that explores the troubled relationship between Mary Garden and her younger sister, Anna, who died in 2023 after a short illness. Mary unpacks her life of growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s and ’60s, before making Australia home. She reveals complex layers of intergenerational trauma, including the baggage of her eccentric, deeply flawed father and the secret her mother kept from all of them, revealed only after her death. Mary deals movingly with her sister’s long battle with mental illness and how she once saved Anna’s life.

Danger: Truth at Work is the first in a series titled Authentic Living and goes to the heart of our most fundamental human issues. Why can't we just live happily and be content? While we seem to have all the knowledge we need to solve our problems, we haven't. In this timely audio series, Osho explains that religious conditioning has held us back. "The religious prophets, the political leaders, the moral lawgivers - you have respected them, not even suspecting that they are the cause of your misery."

Discover America's forgotten sage. This is a new anthology of Elbert Hubbard's most insightful, inspiring, and provocative writings, edited and introduced by Sam Torode. Elbert Hubbard was a philosopher, entrepreneur, and leader of the arts and crafts movement in America. One of the most widely read authors of his day, his work fell into obscurity in the decades after he perished at the outset of WWI. This audiobook aims to bring Elbert Hubbard back into the limelight.

I’ve shared the details of my spiritual journey in Goodbye Jesus: An Evangelical Preacher’s Journey Beyond Faith. My aim in this book is raise four challenging questions that need to be addressed by every Christian believer and then to offer one incredibly simple answer—an answer that challenges the veracity of the Christian faith but can also be the gateway to a rewarding new life that is based on truth and does not require the suspension of common sense. Objectively examining your closely held belief system is not a walk in the park. And facing up to the idea that you might be under...

Known as the ‘four horsemen’ of New Atheism, these four big thinkers of the 21st century met only once. Their electrifying examination of ideas on this remarkable occasion was intense and wide-ranging. Everything that was said as they agreed and disagreed with one another, interrogated ideas and exchanged insights - about religion and atheism, science and sense - speaks with urgency to our present age.

Extraordinary Popular Delusions of Our Times is a modern sequel to Charles Mackay's 1841 literary classic "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds." Mackay wrote about the tulip bulb mania and the poor sailor who mistook a priceless bulb for an onion and ate it for breakfast. He wrote about alchemy, which was practiced with all seriousness by great thinkers of the time like Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon.

Humanity consists of coevolving software (our religion and culture), firmware (our hardcoded proclivities, such as language acquisition), and hardware (our brains). Ripping out a third of the equation has led to innumerous unintended—and typically negative—consequences. This book offers a guide to rebuilding or fortifying this increasingly neglected aspect of the human condition.

Not believing, but only experiencing, says Osho in this inspiring series of talks, is a way of finding truth and meaning. While Nietzsche's declaration that "God is dead, therefore man is free" was an incredible step in understanding, he argues, it is in itself a negative solution and does not bring freedom. Simply removing God is not enough. Osho is no atheist by far and not in favor of any "anti-believe" system either. "It is meditation that fulfills your inner being and takes away the vacuum that used to be filled by a great lie, God."

Interfaith marriages fail more often than same-faith partnerships. So what are the chances of survival for the ultimate mixed marriage - one between religious and nonreligious partners? Nearly 20 percent of Americans now self-identify as nonreligious, including millions who are married to religious believers. Despite the differences, many of these marriages succeed beautifully. In this landmark book, popular author and secular humanist Dale McGowan explores some of the stories of these unions.

The Book of Jubilees, or, as it is sometimes called, "the little Genesis," purports to be a revelation given by God to Moses through the medium of an angel, and containing a history, divided up into jubilee-periods of forty-nine years, from the creation to the coming of Moses.

A “funny, gently touching, and brutally honest” memoir, I Hope I Was Wrong About Eternal Damnation is a story about how to adjust when you realize that your life is built on false beliefs. In the 1990s, Evangelical culture was an outrageous mishmash of Christian ska concerts, sexual abstinence pledges, and mega-church worship services. Thrust into Christian leadership in his youth, Tim Mathis built his entire life around that sort of thing. By his twenties, religion provided his career path, his identity, and a tight-knit social circle of priests, missionaries, and evangelists. His only...

Do we have free will? And if we don’t, why do we feel as if we do? In a godless universe governed by impersonal laws of cause and effect, are you responsible for your actions? Former evangelical minister Dan Barker and author of God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction unveils a novel solution to the question that has baffled scientists and philosophers for millennia.

This personal story about a spiritual journey away from Christianity is an honest examination of what we can know about God. Popular religious beliefs and practices are challenged, with potential new information for those who may be questioning their faith. After formal academic study of religion, Baptist minister David Ramsey became agnostic and left the ministry altogether. In this book, he shares how his search for truth led to personal doubts about the foundation of Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus, and eventually the very existence of God.

What happens when we die? Life begins with an orgasm, can this be topped at the end? The greatest moment of the author's life was watching his mother-in-law die. At this moment, observing her in a state of ecstasy, he came to understand death maybe is not the end. This began his years of work as a hospice volunteer and a student of the sometimes supernatural dying process.