The wait will not disappoint. In a highly attractive product (the cover itself is stunning), the author presents all the details of his argument in an immensely readable and accessible format.

    Why is this? Why, despite the rise of science, technology, and secular education, are people turning to religion in greater numbers than ever before? Why do people believe in God at all?These provocative questions lie at the heart of How We Believe , an illuminating study of God, faith, and religion. Bestselling author Michael Shermer offers fresh and often startling insights into age-old questions, including how and why humans put their faith in a higher power, even in the face of scientific skepticism. Shermer has updated the book to explore the latest research and theories of psychiatrists, neuroscientists, epidemiologists, and philosophers, as well as the role of faith in our increasingly diverse modern world.Whether believers or nonbelievers, we are all driven by the need to understand the universe and our place in it. How We Believe is a brilliant scientific tour of this ancient and mysterious desire.

    The cult that surrounded him dissolved as Christianity surfaced. The cult surrounding Jesus Christ, son of God and originator of Christianity, appeared during the second century. Early historians, however, never mentioned Jesus and even now there is no actual proof of his existence. On the one hand, an actual historical figure missing his cult; on the other, a cult missing its actual historical figure. Jesus Was Caesar examines these intriguing mirror images. Is Jesus Christ really the historical manifestation of Divus Julius? Are the Gospels built on the life of Caesar, just as the first Christian churches were built on the foundations of antique temples? Corruptions in the copying of texts, misinterpretations in translations and the transformation of iconography from Roman to Christian have been traced to their origins. Are the Gospels a 'mis-telling' of the life of Caesar - from the Rubicon to his assassination - mutated into the narrative of Jesus - from the Jordan to his crucifixion?

    At the invitiation of the Conservancy for Tibetan Art and Culture in Washington, DC, His Holiness the Dalai Lama gave a one-say teaching and commentary on the Eight Verses for Training the Mind to over five thousand Western and Tibetan students.

    Great minds of the 20th century, including such distinguished names as Richard Swinburne, Alvin Platinga and Keith Ward, offers answers to some of life's key questions.

    A child prodigy and the daughter of famed socialist activist Grace Vern Silver, founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Queen Silver was the subject of Cecil B. De Mille's film The Godless Girl. She matured to become an international feminist, atheist, and socialist, living a remarkable and inspiring life, of which few feminists today are aware.Queen Silver: The Godless Girl is a fiery and profound biography of one of America's most amazing feminist thinkers, a woman who remained an active advocate of intellectual independence to the moment of her death in 1998 at the age of 86. Prolific feminist writer Wendy McElroy sympathetically chronicles the life of Queen Silver from personal interviews with her friends, published reports, letters, and a vast library of the family's personal papers. What emerges is a life like none other. A well-known thinker by the time she was 11-years-old, giving speeches titled "Pioneers of Freethought," "The Rights of Children," and "Science and the Workers," Queen challenged three-time presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan to a debate on evolution (he declined); organized an atheist group at her high school; and left home at 15 to marry a doctor three-times her age, which later became the source of a highly publicized divorce.As a teenager, Queen once served as a defense lawyer for her mother and won. She founded the scholarly and well-reviewed Queen Silver Magazine, and overcame personal tragedy and political persecution during World War I's red scare. Queen worked as an extra in movies directed by D.W. Griffith, attended violent and controversial meetings of the IWW, and went into hiding at the advent of McCarthyism. In her later years, Queen received many freethought awards, remained active in the American Civil Liberties Union, and campaigned hard for public libraries.McElroy tells a complete story by profiling Queen's mother, lecturer and feminist writer Grace Vern Silver, whose struggles for justice in the IWW found her running for Congress, and whose personal education motivated her to inspire the genius in her daughter.

    The author brings new evidence to bear on these issues by demonstrating that patterns of individual differences--largely ignored in disputes about human rationality--have strong implications for explanations of the gap between normative and descriptive models of human behavior. Separate chapters show how patterns of individual differences have implications for all of the major critiques of purported demonstrations of human irrationality in the heuristics and biases literature. In these critiques, it has been posited that experimenters have observed performance errors rather than systematically irrational responses; the tasks have required computational operations that exceed human cognitive capacity; experimenters have applied the wrong normative model to the task; and participants have misinterpreted the tasks.In a comprehensive set of studies, Stanovich demonstrates that gaps between normative and descriptive models of performance on some tasks can be accounted for by positing these alternative explanations, but that not all discrepancies from normative models can be so explained. Individual differences in rational thought can in part be predicted by psychological dispositions that are interpreted as characteristic biases in people's intentional-level psychologies. Presenting the most comprehensive examination of individual differences in the heuristics and biases literature that has yet been published, experiments and theoretical insights in this volume contextualize the heuristics and biases literature exemplified in the work of various investigators.

    Cadbury's examination of authorial intent based on linguistic and stylistic considerations; form-critical perspective; and comparison between Luke and other ancient writers offers scholars and laypeople alike a unique view of Luke's literary style and method.Henry J. Cadbury s analysis of the making of Luke-Acts is organized around four principal factors that affected that final form: the materials that were accessible to the author; the language and genre in which the author was writing; the author s own individual personality, often expressed unconsciously; and the author s conscious purpose in composition. "The Making of Luke-Acts" was first published in 1927 and has remained a mainstay in Lucan studies ever since. This edition includes a new introduction by Paul Anderson, George Fox University.The following pages aim to recover some features of the character of the third evangelist], to visualize the other factors which went into his noteworthy undertaking, to illustrate from his contemporaries the methods of composition that he employed, and so to give as clear, comprehensive and realistic a picture as possible of the whole literary process that produced Luke and Acts. " from the prefaceGenerations of students, whether novice or accomplished, have turned first to Henry Cadbury on matters related to Luke since the initial publication of "The Making of Luke-Acts" in 1927. In this disarmingly small text, Cadbury anticipated by decades almost every facet of contemporary concern in Lukan studies. The republication of this valuable bookis welcomed indeed. " Joel B. Green, Professor of New Testament, Asbury Theological Seminary