The Roots of Religion

The Roots of Religion PDF Author: Professor Roger Trigg
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1472427319
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 249

Book Description
The cognitive science of religion is a new discipline that looks at the roots of religious belief in the cognitive architecture of the human mind. This book deals with the philosophical and theological implications of the cognitive science of religion which grounds religious belief in human cognitive structures: religious belief is ‘natural’, in a way that even scientific thought is not. Philosophers and theologians from North America, UK and Australia, explore the alleged conflict between truth claims and examine the roots of religion in human nature.

Homo Religiosus?

Homo Religiosus? PDF Author: Timothy Samuel Shah
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108422357
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 279

Book Description
Examines whether religion is natural to human experience, and whether this helps to ground a universal right to religious freedom.

Occult Roots of Religious Studies

Occult Roots of Religious Studies PDF Author: Yves Mühlematter
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110660334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
The historiographers of religious studies have written the history of this discipline primarily as a rationalization of ideological, most prominently theological and phenomenological ideas: first through the establishment of comparative, philological and sociological methods and secondly through the demand for intentional neutrality. This interpretation caused important roots in occult-esoteric traditions to be repressed. This process of “purification” (Latour) is not to be equated with the origin of the academic studies. De facto, the elimination of idealistic theories took time and only happened later. One example concerning the early entanglement is Tibetology, where many researchers and respected chair holders were influenced by theosophical ideas or were even members of the Theosophical Society. Similarly, the emergence of comparatistics cannot be understood without taking into account perennialist ideas of esoteric provenance, which hold that all religions have a common origin. In this perspective, it is not only the history of religious studies which must be revisited, but also the partial shaping of religious studies by these traditions, insofar as it saw itself as a counter-model to occult ideas.

Religicide

Religicide PDF Author: Georgette F. Bennett
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1637581025
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Book Description
A brave and timely proposal to name, investigate, and ultimately stop a new crime–the mass murder of millions of people for their faith. eligion-related violence is the fastest spreading type of violence worldwide. Attacks on religious minorities follow a clear pattern and are preceded with early warning signs. Until now, such violence had no name, let alone a set of policies designed to identify and prevent it. A unique attempt to create a new moral and legal category alongside other forms of persecution and mass murder, Religicide explores the roots of atrocities such as the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, the Bosnian war, and other human rights catastrophes. The authors tap into their decades of activism, interreligious engagement, and people-to-people diplomacy to delve into a gripping examination of contemporary religicides: the Yazidis in Iraq, the Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghur Muslims and Tibetan Buddhists in China, and the centuries-long efforts to wipe out Indigenous Americans. Yet, even in the face of these horrific atrocities, the authors resist despair. They amplify the voices of survivors and offer a blueprint for action, calling on government, business, civil society, and religious leaders to join in a global campaign to protect religious minorities.

A History of Japanese Religion

A History of Japanese Religion PDF Author: 笠原一男
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 660

Book Description
Seventeen distinguished experts on Japanese religion provide a fascinating overview of its history and development. Beginning with the origins of religion in primitive Japanese society, they chart the growth of each of Japan's major religious organizations and doctrinal systems. They follow Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, and popular religious belief through major periods of change to show how history and religion affected each-and discuss the interactions between the different religious traditions.

Religion Explained

Religion Explained PDF Author: Pascal Boyer
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 046500461X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

Book Description
Many of our questions about religion, says renowned anthropologist Pascal Boyer, are no longer mysteries. We are beginning to know how to answer questions such as "Why do people have religion?" Using findings from anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary biology, Religion Explained shows how this aspect of human consciousness is increasingly admissible to coherent, naturalistic explanation. This brilliant and controversial book gives readers the first scientific explanation for what religious feeling is really about, what it consists of, and where it comes from.

The Soul of Doubt

The Soul of Doubt PDF Author: Dominic Erdozain
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199844615
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
From Freud to the new atheists, it is widely assumed that science is the enemy of religious faith. The idea is so pervasive that whole industries of religious apologetics converge around the challenge of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This book challenges such assumptions by proposing a different cause of unbelief in the West: the Christian conscience. Tracing a history of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, 'The soul of doubt' argues that the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself. The book demonstrates that the radical criticism of philosophers as influential as Spinoza, Voltaire and Ludwig Feuerbach was not the product of science. It emerged from a collision between religious values and religious practices, preeminently acts of persecution. This study offers a bold interpretation of the Enlightenment as a movement of vigorous spirituality, and it turns on its head conventional wisdom about the impact of Darwin and scientific naturalism.0The "nemesis of faith" was not science or secular reason: it was an ethical intuition that a dangerous God cannot be real.

The Religious Roots of Rebellion

The Religious Roots of Rebellion PDF Author: Phillip Berryman
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1592445160
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 465

Book Description
This is a provocative and important contribution to understanding the role of Catholicism in the struggle for justice in Central America. Phillip Berryman writes with the sensitivity and passion of a Christian who has lived the biblical option for the poor. Penny Lernoux

The Religious Roots of the First Amendment

The Religious Roots of the First Amendment PDF Author: Nicholas P. Miller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199942803
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Traditional understandings of the genesis of the separation of church and state rest on assumptions about "Enlightenment" and the republican ethos of citizenship. In The Religious Roots of the First Amendment, Nicholas P. Miller does not seek to dislodge that interpretation but to augment and enrich it by recovering its cultural and discursive religious contexts--specifically the discourse of Protestant dissent. He argues that commitments by certain dissenting Protestants to the right of private judgment in matters of Biblical interpretation, an outgrowth of the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, helped promote religious disestablishment in the early modern West. This movement climaxed in the disestablishment of religion in the early American colonies and nation. Miller identifies a continuous strand of this religious thought from the Protestant Reformation, across Europe, through the English Reformation, Civil War, and Restoration, into the American colonies. He examines seven key thinkers who played a major role in the development of this religious trajectory as it came to fruition in American political and legal history: William Penn, John Locke, Elisha Williams, Isaac Backus, William Livingston, John Witherspoon, and James Madison. Miller shows that the separation of church and state can be read, most persuasively, as the triumph of a particular strand of Protestant nonconformity-that which stretched back to the Puritan separatist and the Restoration sects, rather than to those, like Presbyterians, who sought to replace the "wrong" church establishment with their own, "right" one. The Religious Roots of the First Amendment contributes powerfully to the current trend among some historians to rescue the eighteenth-century clergymen and religious controversialists from the enormous condescension of posterity.

The Roots of Ethics

The Roots of Ethics PDF Author: Daniel Callahan
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461333032
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 453

Book Description
OUR AGE IS CHARACTERIZED by an uncertainty about the na ture of moral obligations, about what one can hope for in an afterlife, and about the limits of human knowledge. These uncertainties were captured by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason, where he noted three basic human questions: what can we know, what ought we to do, and what can we hope for. Those questions and the uncer tainties about their answers still in great part define our cultural per spective. In particular, we are not clear about the foundations of ethics, or about their relationship to religion and to science. This volume brings together previously published essays that focus on these inter relationships and their uncertainties. It offers an attempt to sketch the interrelationship among three major intellectual efforts: determining moral obligations, the ultimate purpose and goals of man and the cosmos, and the nature of empirical reality. Though imperfect, it is an effort to frame the unity of the human condition, which is captured in part by ethics, in part by religion, and in part by the sciences. Put another way, this collection of essays springs from an attempt to see the unity of humans who engage in the diverse roles of valuers, be lievers, and knowers, while still remaining single, individual humans.