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Confronting Religious Denial Of Science
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Book Synopsis Confronting Religious Denial of Science by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book Confronting Religious Denial of Science written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Religious Denial of Science: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination traces the cultural backstory of contemporary conflicts between biblical literalists who oppose evolution and "New Atheists" who insist that religion is so pernicious it should be outlawed, if not exterminated. That's a clash of fundamentalisms. It's a zero-sum game derived from high Victorian misunderstanding of both religion and science. The God whom science supposedly replaces is the Engineer Almighty sitting at his keyboard, controlling every event on earth. But that's not a viable concept of God. Far better, Wallace argues, to understand Christianity in Clifford Geertz's terms as a system of symbols that both constitutes a worldview and, according to David Sloan Wilson, encourages prosocial behavior. That reframing makes it possible to reclaim what biblical scholars have said for decades: the miracles of Jesus were confrontational symbolic actions. They contradicted the political status quo in colonial Palestine, not the laws of biology. Prayer, she explains, is not magical thinking. It's a creative, highly disciplined introspective process, most familiar to many people in forms like mindfulness meditation. Wallace offers an intriguing exploration of issues that believers seldom discuss in ways that make sense to the religiously unaffiliated.
Book Synopsis Confronting Religious Denial of Gay Marriage by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book Confronting Religious Denial of Gay Marriage written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2015-10-27 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Writing in part for secular humanists, non-Christians, and ex-Christians, Wallace locates the beginning of religious vilification of LBGTQ Americans: these attacks recycle earlier, equally reactionary political opposition to racial desegregation and equal rights for women. Then, step by step, she lays out three major flaws in the religious argument against gay marriage. First, it derives from Plato and Greco-Roman sexual anxieties, not from Jesus. Second, opposition to gay marriage takes Bible verses out of context, ignoring their roots in Iron Age biology, sexual politics in the classic era, and pagan ritual practices. Third and most importantly, this opposition reflects an inadequate moral theology based on a denial of contemporary science and social science. Then and only then does she offer her own concept of marriage as a morally rooted, creative process, laying out common ground easily shared by Christian humanists and secular humanists alike. Her nimble, accessible account, richly leavened by personal stories, will facilitate new conversations and alliances among all those, believers and nonbelievers alike, who affirm the moral dignity of gay marriage.
Book Synopsis Confronting Religious Absolutism by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book Confronting Religious Absolutism written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-10-27 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papal infallibility and biblical inerrancy provide the conceptual foundations of theocracy, which is to say religiously-based totalitarianism. These absolutist doctrines emerge for the very first time among the Victorians: they are not ancient beliefs at all. They appear in the 19th century, right alongside secular varieties totalitarian thought, and in response to all the same cultural anxieties. Reactionary religious leaders used these doctrines to oppose scholarly conclusions in geology and evolutionary biology. That much everyone knows. What's not as well known is the fact that their principal target was Christian-humanist biblical scholarship, an unbroken 500-year tradition of inquiry undertaken primarily by Christian clergy and seminary faculty. The alternative to faith-based totalitarianism is faith based upon the imagination, our most sophisticated cognitive skill. Faith rooted in the moral imagination does not depend upon abject deference to an array of rigid doctrines and improbable claims. Wallace contends that faith is best understood as a creative process, and religion is best understood as a multi-media art (and originally the Mother of all arts). The arts convince, they do not command. They persuade, they do not prove. The arts provide humane resources whereby we grapple with life's deepest mysteries. Symbolism, like quantum mathematics, is a tool for grappling with inescapable paradox at the heart of reality. It is an ancient strategy for articulating what we discover at the elusive mind-body interface.
Book Synopsis Confronting Religious Violence by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book Confronting Religious Violence written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-03-28 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confronting Religious Violence: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination tells the tale of Christian theocracy in the West. Who converted whom was never entirely clear: the empire did stop feeding people to the lions for public entertainment; but Christianity was theologically corrupted by its official role in legitimating empire-as-usual. That theological corruption led to crusades, inquisitions, torture, and so forth. And it leaves us with a major question: is God violent? More dangerously yet: is violence our only option in response to wrongdoing? Are we morally obligated to injure those who have injured others, to kill those who have killed others? If theocracy is a terrible idea, what is the proper relationship between church and state? We can't say that the state is never morally accountable at all. Furthermore: despite constitutional separation of church and state, hard-right Christian fundamentalism continues to play a culturally significant role in advocating military action abroad and supporting state violence at home. There is a lot at stake in reclaiming the systematic nonviolence and moral imagination of Jesus of Nazareth. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }
Book Synopsis Confronting Religious Judgmentalism by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book Confronting Religious Judgmentalism written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-05-23 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Come to church or go to hell. That's religious bullying. It's judgmentalism. And it's a theological distortion, a distortion insisting that shame and self-loathing are morally appropriate. In Christian humanist tradition, God is not some cosmic judge eager to smite all of us for our sinfulness. God is compassion. We are cherished by God beyond our wildest imagining. We are called to radical hospitality, not to crass judgmentalism. So where does this religious judgmentalism come from? It is the heritage of medieval theocracy: a violent, vindictive God of command and control was far more useful politically than a God of compassion, hospitality, and forgiveness. It comes from literal-minded misreading of the story of Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit, a story about shame, not disobedience. And it comes from political success in exploiting deep-seated liabilities in the American soul: we spend our lives trying to "prove ourselves," a hopeless task. There's an alternative. In the Christian humanist tradition, authentic moral judgment is rooted in conscience as a creative process. Morality is an art demanding both rigorous consideration of the facts and thoughtful introspection. Conscience properly understood and thoughtfully practiced is an antidote to shame, incessant self-criticism, and chronic self-doubt.
Book Synopsis Confronting a Controlling God by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book Confronting a Controlling God written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-08-24 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christianity has lost control of its brand. That matters even for nonbelievers because Christian symbolism permeates Western culture. It shapes the source code for how we think about ourselves and what we expect from one another. If God is all-controlling, then human control is divinely sanctioned. Our efforts to control one another have cosmic legitimacy--the legitimacy claimed by fundamentalists pursuing a political agenda that has nothing to do with Jesus of Nazareth. But if God is defined as compassion and loving-kindness, then Christianity calls the faithful to compassion and radical hospitality. Wallace traces the backstory of this vitally important tension all the way back to competing translations of Moses's argument with the burning bush, arguing for a "Copernican turn" in which the spiritual encounter with compassionate Presence lies at the heart of Christianity. .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }
Book Synopsis Living between Science and Belief by : Charles Villa-Vicencio
Download or read book Living between Science and Belief written by Charles Villa-Vicencio and published by African Sun Media. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most thoughtful people live in an interregnum between science and religion. Traditional religious answers concerning the beginning, purpose, and end of life are questioned by the natural sciences, with neuroscience conceivably constituting the last frontier where skeptics and believers explore common ground. The question concerns the nature of reflective and creative moments in life. Can these be reduced to the intersect between the nerve cells and molecules of the physical brain? Does this account for the human sense of mystery, or even spirituality? Is there a nexus between the physical and unknown dimensions of existence? The mutation in the history of theism suggest that progressive theology in the West may be set for a further change.
Book Synopsis The Confrontational Wit of Jesus by : Catherine M. Wallace
Download or read book The Confrontational Wit of Jesus written by Catherine M. Wallace and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2016-07-27 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jesus did not die to save us from God. He died because the Romans did not tolerate charismatic teachers who attracted a lively following. Jesus attracted that following through his personal compassion, his confrontational inclusivity, and his skill in using laughter as a nonviolent weapon of mass disruption. The Gospel authors picked up Jesus' witty techniques. They adeptly parodied the literary conventions of heroic biography, laying out "the kingdom of God" in a point-for-point contrast with the empire of Caesar Augustus. Most of this contrast was Jewish Prophetic Rant, Standard Edition: the God of the Jews had always demanded justice for workers, food for the hungry, care for those unable to earn a living, and an end to monopolizing natural resources for private and imperial profit. Jesus added a fourth and telling point: God is nonviolent. God smites no one. God's loving-kindness and compassionate presence embraces all of humanity equally. We are all the children of God. Then and now, that's a revolutionary claim. It portrays our obligation to the common good as a sacred obligation. It's owed to God. In cultural terms, that's the most potent variety of obligation. This is the cultural heritage at risk from fundamentalism, which portrays God as both crazy-violent and vindictive.
Book Synopsis Psychology, Symbolism, and the Sacred by : S. T. Manning
Download or read book Psychology, Symbolism, and the Sacred written by S. T. Manning and published by PageFree Publishing, Inc.. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One in a very long while a book like this comes along, offering startling insights into the very nature of being. Innovative and provocative, Manning presents a courageous and penetrating inside look into the convoluted religious world and offers some truly original formulas for dealing with society s current religious problems. This stirringly original book draws upon colorful and dramatic proofs in history, mythology, science, and psychology to candidly confront religious fundamentalism - probably the greatest menace facing our world today.
Book Synopsis Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture by : Keiji Nishitani
Download or read book Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture written by Keiji Nishitani and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years several books by major figures in Japan's modern philosophical tradition have appeared in English, exciting readers by their explorations of the borderlands between philosophy and religion. What has been wanting, however, is a book in a Western language to elucidate the life and thought of Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945), Japan's first philosopher of world stature and the originator of what has come to be called the Kyoto School. No one is more qualified to write such a book than Nishitani Keiji, whose lifetime coincides with the rise and flowering of the Kyoto School and whose own critical contribution to Japanese thought has been so important. Nishida Kitaro is a translation of essays Nishitani wrote about his teacher from 1936 to 1968 and published as a book in 1985. This series of meditations by one master on another provides a remarkable, living portrait of Nishida the person and conveys the enthusiasm he aroused in his students. Examining Nishida's most important work, An Inquiry into the Good, Nishitani penetrates to the core of his thought and presents it in language that is a marvel of clarity.
Book Synopsis Religion: Empirical Studies by : Steven J. Sutcliffe
Download or read book Religion: Empirical Studies written by Steven J. Sutcliffe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Treating 'religion' as a fully social, cultural, historical and material field of practice, this book presents a series of debates and positions on the nature and purpose of the 'Study of Religions', or 'Religious Studies'. Offering an introductory guide to this influential, and politically relevant, academic field, the contributors illustrate the diversity and theoretical viability of qualitative empirical methodologies in the study of religions. The historical and cultural circumstances attending the emergence, defence, and future prospects of Religious Studies are documented, drawing on theoretical material and case studies prepared within the context of the British Association for the Study of Religions (BASR), and making frequent reference to wider European, North American, and other international debates and critiques.
Book Synopsis Freedom: The End of the Human Condition by : Jeremy Griffith
Download or read book Freedom: The End of the Human Condition written by Jeremy Griffith and published by WTM Publishing and Communications. This book was released on 2016-05-24 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FREEDOM has its own very informative website: visit www.humancondition.com The fastest growing realization everywhere is that humanity can't go on the way it is going. Indeed, the great fear is we're entering endgame where we appear to have lost the race between self-destruction and self-discovery―the race to find the psychologically relieving understanding of our 'good and evil'-afflicted human condition. Well, astonishing as it is, this book by biologist Jeremy Griffith presents the 11th hour breakthrough biological explanation of the human condition necessary for the psychological rehabilitation and transformation of our species! The culmination of 40 years of studying and writing about our species' psychosis, FREEDOM delivers nothing less than the holy grail of insight we have needed to free ourselves from the human condition. It is, in short, as Professor Harry Prosen, a former president of the Canadian Psychiatric Association, asserts in his Introduction, 'The book that saves the world'. Griffith has been able to venture right to the bottom of the dark depths of what it is to be human and return with the fully accountable, true explanation of our seemingly imperfect lives. At long last we have the redeeming and thus transforming understanding of human behaviour! And with that explanation found all the other great outstanding scientific mysteries about our existence are now also able to be truthfully explained―of the meaning of our existence, of the origin of our unconditionally selfless moral instincts, and of why we humans became conscious when other animals haven't. Yes, the full story of life on Earth can finally be told―and all of these incredible breakthroughs and insights are presented here in this 'greatest of all books'.
Download or read book Blind Faith written by Chester Dolan and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rather than slavish adherence to sacred books and archaic superstitions, religion should mean, according to Dolan, nothing more than a genuine fellowship among people of good will united in mutual respect and cooperation. A personable yet defiant tract advocating a rejection of magical solutions offered for human problems and a discriminating use of reason in its stead. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Download or read book The Christian Science Journal written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 822 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis The Epic of Evolution by : James Bradley Miller
Download or read book The Epic of Evolution written by James Bradley Miller and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is offered as an example of the potential for dialogue between science and religion that is possible beyond the more popular convictions that science and religion are mutually exclusive. The papers offer a better appreciation of the complexity of thinking in both scientific and religious traditions on evolution and the fertile common ground that is still in great need of exploration. The essays examine evolution and the science and religion dialogue, evolution on the grand scale, the evolution of life on earth, Darwin and neo-Darwinism, the appearance of "homo sapiens," the evolution of culture, society and religion, the evolution of ethics and morality, and human impact on the evolution of the environment. For those interested in evolutionary and religious theory.
Book Synopsis Religion, Rites and Rituals by : Rameshwari Devi
Download or read book Religion, Rites and Rituals written by Rameshwari Devi and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory by : Andrew Bennett
Download or read book An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory written by Andrew Bennett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-02 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works, so that a reading of Jane Eyre opens up ways of thinking about racial difference, for example, while Chaucer, Raymond Chandler and Monty Python are all invoked in a discussion of literature and laughter. The fifth edition has been revised throughout and includes four new chapters – ‘Feelings’, ‘Wounds’, ‘Body’ and ‘Love’ – to incorporate exciting recent developments in literary studies. In addition to further reading sections at the end of each chapter, the book contains a comprehensive bibliography and a glossary of key literary terms. A breath of fresh air in a field that can often seem dry and dauntingly theoretical, this book will open the reader’s eyes to the exhilarating possibilities of reading and studying literature.
