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What first prompted prehistoric man, sheltering in the shadows of deep caves, to call upon the realm of the spirits? And why has belief thrived ever since, leading us to invent heaven and hell, sin and redemption, and above all, gods?Religion reflects our deepest hopes and fears; whether you are a believer or, like Matthew Kneale, a non-believer who admires mankind's capacity to create and to imagine, it has shaped our world. And as our dreams and nightmares have changed over the millennia, so h...

Ronald Aronson has a mission: to demonstrate that a life without religion can be coherent, moral, and committed. Optimistic and stirring, Living Without God is less interested in attacking religion than in developing a positive philosophy for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers. Aronson proposes contemporary answers to Immanuel Kant's three great questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope? Grounded in the sense that we are deeply dependent and...

Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists looks at the God debate with fresh eyes All of us, whether religious, agnostic or atheist, are searching for meaning. And in this wise and life-affirming book, non-believer Alain de Botton both rejects the supernatural claims of religion and points out just how many good ideas they sometimes have about how we should live. And he suggests that non-believers can learn and steal from them. Picking and choosing from the thousands of years of advice assemble...

INSIGHTS FROM AUSTRALIA'S LEADING ATHEIST THINKERS Does the Anzac ethos have roots in atheism? Does prayer have a place in Parliament? Should 'creation science' be taught in Australian schools? Is atheism maligned in political debate? Will Australia's future be godless? While prominent international thinkers have made significant contributions to the general conversation on belief and religion, Australians have been less heard. The Australian Book of Atheism is the first collection to explore at...

In this powerfully argued book, with its incisive analysis of modern art, literature and theology, the author claims that an authentic atheism can purify Christianity by demanding that faith should cease to be a substitute for courage or commitment to change. And as he looks at the thought and writing of Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Marx, Sartre and Camus he shows how atheism is not something to be feared, but even an sally for faith'. He puts forward good reasons for his view....

Does Buddhism require faith? Can an atheist or agnostic follow the Buddha’s teachings without believing in reincarnation or organized religion?   This is one man’s confession.   In his classic Buddhism Without Beliefs, Stephen Batchelor offered a profound, secular approach to the teachings of the Buddha that struck an emotional chord with Western readers. Now, with the same brilliance and boldness of thought, he paints a groundbreaking portrait of the historical Buddha—told from the author’s...

A psychiatrist presents a compelling argument for how human purpose and caring emerged in a spontaneous and unguided universe. Can there be purpose without God? This book is about how human purpose and caring, like consciousness and absolutely everything else in existence, could plausibly have emerged and evolved unguided, bottom-up, in a spontaneous universe. A random world--which according to all the scientific evidence and despite our intuitions is the actual world we live in--is too often...

The God Delusion is a clarion call to the faithless, the waverers, and even firm religious believers, to follow the author into radical atheism not merely as a private conviction but as a public profession. Wouldn't humankind be better off without religion, he asks. John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel is not so much a combative repudiation of Dawkins' arguments as a playful conversation with them, posing alternative view-points, exposing lapses in logic and errors of fact, from the vantage po...