For ten of those years he was the founding pastor of one of Australia's largest churches (1979-89). Following the failure of his marriage, he resigned from the ministry and then spent the following few years seriously examining his faith and the veracity of the Bible. Finally he came to the conclusion that his Christian beliefs were seriously flawed and that the Bible is entirely the result of human invention, imaginations and myths passed down from generation to generation. As the Bible is then based on 'hearsay' and written by at least 40 different authors over a period of up to 1,600 years, none of whom were eyewitnesses to the events they recorded, it cannot substantiate the claim that it was 'inspired by God.' The result of Brian's search for evidence caused a personal transformation from believer to realist, rationalist, skeptic and atheist. He published his first book - From Faith to Reason - in 2009 which contains the reasons why he no longer believes in the existence of God, angels, demons, the devil, heaven, hell or an afterlife.In this book - Nonsense from the Bible - Brian uses the Bible texts to demonstrate their inaccuracies, inconsistencies, contradictions and fantasies. He deals with major issues which are widely believed and accepted as factual events such as the Creation story, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the prophecies concerning Jesus. Chapters are also devoted to the question of the second coming of Jesus and Christian Family values. Brian also totally invalidates the so-called 'power of prayer' and the claims that God heals the sick.This would be a 'hard read' for many Christians who totally believe that the Bible is literally 'The Word of God' and accept it as absolute truth. Brian also believed that for all those years but over a period of time and investigation by seeking evidence other than the Bible he was able to accept that he had been deceived and deluded - or as he now says, 'Once I was blind - but now I see!'This is an 'easy' read for those who may question their own faith as it provides some convincing information concerning the validity of the Bible.

    They consider themselves the new chosen—congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet in confidential cells, to pray and plan for a "leadership led by God," to be won not by force but through "quiet diplomacy." Their base is a leafy estate overlooking the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, and Jeff Sharlet is the only journalist to have reported from inside its walls.The Family is about the other half of American fundamentalist power—not its angry masses, but its sophisticated elites. Sharlet follows the story back to Abraham Vereide, an immigrant preacher who in 1935 organized a small group of businessmen sympathetic to European fascism, fusing the far right with his own polite but authoritarian faith. From that core, Vereide built an international network of fundamentalists who spoke the language of establishment power, a "family" that thrives to this day. In public, they host Prayer Breakfasts; in private, they preach a gospel of "biblical capitalism," military might, and American empire. Citing Hitler, Lenin, and Mao as leadership models, the Family's current leader, Doug Coe, declares, "We work with power where we can, build new power where we can't."Sharlet's discoveries dramatically challenge conventional wisdom about American fundamentalism, revealing its crucial role in the unraveling of the New Deal, the waging of the cold war, and the no-holds-barred economics of globalization. The question Sharlet believes we must ask is not "What do fundamentalists want?" but "What have they already done?"Part history, part investigative journalism, The Family is a compelling account of how fundamentalism came to be interwoven with American power, a story that stretches from the religious revivals that have shaken this nation from its beginning to fundamentalism's new frontiers. No other book about the right has exposed the Family or revealed its far-reaching impact on democracy, and no future reckoning of American fundamentalism will be able to ignore it.

    Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death established Kierkegaard as the father of existentialism and have come to define his contribution to philosophy. Lowrie's translation, first published in 1941 and later revised, was the first in English, and it has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to Kierkegaard's thought. Kierkegaard counted Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto Death among "the most perfect books I have written," and in them he introduces two terms--"the absurd" and "despair"--that have become key terms in modern thought. Fear and Trembling takes up the story of Abraham and Isaac to explore a faith that transcends the ethical, persists in the face of the absurd, and meets its reward in the return of all that the faithful one is willing to sacrifice, while The Sickness Unto Death examines the spiritual anxiety of despair.

    The human journey is an emotional quest to find truth and meaning.Countless books have presented this journey through the eyes of people who concluded their search with devotion to God, salvation by Jesus, or commitment to religion.But there's a changing zeitgeist in America and the world: a growing number of people are finding truth and meaning from the opposite perspective.Through 25 personal narratives, Generation Atheist tells their stories.

    Yet despite its influence on the 20th century, there are no modern histories of the trial and its aftermath. This book fills that void not only by skillfully narrating the trial's events, but also by framing it in a broader social context, showing how its influence has cut across religious, cultural, educational and political lines. With new material from both the prosecution and the defense, along with the author's astute historical and legal analysis, "Summer for the Gods" is destined to become a new classic about a pivotal milestone in American history.

    What's more, it uses the creationist's most-cited source to do it." - dailyatheist.net God Hates You, Hate Him Back makes the ultimate case for the claim that the God of the Bible is the most wicked character in the pages of history. With a wit as dry as a martini, and the cross examination techniques of a seasoned lawyer, CJ Werleman lays out all sixty-six chapters of the Bible to present an irrefutable argument that indeed God hates us all. If you have never read or never fully understood The Bible because of it's lifeless 16th century King's English then you will do no better than this unique, comedic, 21st century summary of the greatest story ever sold, or in Werleman's own words 'never read'. God Hates You, Hate Him Back provides you with an arsenal of Biblical facts, stories, mythology and assertions to ensure you victory in your next religious debate.

    Noah's Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, David and Goliath, maybe. But there are more than 100 others that are unknown to pretty much everyone. Did you know, for example, that God: *Forced friends and family to kill each other for dancing naked around Aaron's golden calf? *Burned complainers to death, forced the survivors to eat quail until it literally came out their noses, sent "fiery serpents" to bite people for complaining about the lack of food and water, and killed 14,700 for complaining about his killings? *Helped Samson murder thirty men for their clothes, slaughter 1000 with the jawbone of an ass, and kill 3000 civilians in a a suicide terrorist attack? *Smote Philistines with hemorrhoids in their secret parts? *Slowly killed a baby to punish David for committing adultery? *Killed 70,000 because David had a census that he (or Satan) told him to do? *Sent a lion to kill a prophet for believing another prophet's lie, another lion to kill a man for not smiting a prophet, and more lions to kill people that didn't fear him enough? *Killed 450 religious leaders in a prayer contest and burned 102 men to death for asking Elijah to come down from his hill? *Sent two bears to rip apart 42 boys for making fun of Elisha's bald head? *Killed Ahab for not killing a captured king, and then sent Jehu to kill all of Ahab's family and friends who had ever "pissed against a wall?" All of these killings, and more, are found in the Bible, and the God of the Bible is proud of each one. Here's what he said about them: "I kill ... I wound ... I will make mine arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh." -- Deuteronomy 32:39-42 These stories fill the pages of the Bible, yet they are seldom read in church and are ignored by most Bible believers. Drunk with Blood brings them out into the open. It's time for us all to take a look.

    In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities.Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata.Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries.As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes. From the Hardcover edition.

    M. Scott Peck brilliantly probes into the essence of human evil.People who are evil attack others instead of facing their own failures. Peck demonstrates the havoc these people of the lie work in the lives of those around them. He presents, from vivid incidents encountered in his psychiatric practice, examples of evil in everyday life.This book is by turns disturbing, fascinating, and altogether impossible to put down as it offers a strikingly original approach to the age-old problem of human evil.

    Randi and his team of researchers attended scores of "miracle services" and often were pronounced "healed" of the nonexistent illnesses they claimed. They viewed first-hand the tragedies resulting from the wide-spread belief that faith healing can cure every conceivable disease. The ministries, they discovered, were rife with deception, chicanery, and often outright fraud.Self-annointed ministers of God convince the gullible that they have been healed - and that they should pay for the service. The Faith Healers examines in depth the reasons for belief in faith healing and the catastrophic results for the victims of these hoaxes. Included in Randi's book are profiles of a highly profitable "psychic dentist", and the "Vatican-approved wizard."

    St. Francis of Assisi's ecstatic embrace of a life of poverty revolutionized Christianity even as it transformed the ethics of the West. In this luminous and lively book, St. Francis's followers preserved his legend and those of his first disciples, combining stories of miracles with convincing portraits of men who were no less human for having been touched by God."God is our home but many of us have strayed from our native land.  The venerable authors of these Spiritual Classics are expert guides--may we follow their directions home."--Archbishop Desmond Tutu

    This iconic journey changed the world forever, and the truths revealed continue to influence every corner of the globe today.A young man in line for the throne is trapped in his father's kingdom and yearns for the outside world. Betrayed by those closest to him, Siddhartha abandons his palace and princely title. Alone and face-to-face with his demons, he becomes a wandering monk and embarks on a spiritual fast that carries him to the brink of death. Ultimately recognizing his inability to conquer his body and mind by sheer will, Siddhartha transcends his physical pain and achieves enlightenment.Although we recognize Buddha today as an icon of peace and serenity, his life story was a tumultuous and spellbinding affair filled with love and sex, murder and loss, struggle and surrender. From the rocky terrain of the material world to the summit of the spiritual one, Buddha captivates and inspires—ultimately leading us closer to understanding the true nature of life and our selves.

    In understanding the true nature of what it means to be fully human, he contends that we come face to face with the essence of Xian theology: human beings investing ordinary concepts with divine meaning & significance. The true danger to humanity occurs when theology is given the force of dogma & doctrine. Losing sight of its anthropological underpinnings & dependence upon or emergence from human nature, it then acquires an existence separate from that of humankind. He leaves nothing untouched: miracles, the Trinity, Creation, prayer, resurrection, immortality, faith & much more.The essential nature of manThe essence of religion considered generallyGod as a being of the understanding God as a moral being or law The mystery of the incarnation; or, God as love, as a being of the heartThe mystery of the suffering GodThe mystery of the Trinity & the mother of GodThe mystery of the Logos & divine imageThe mystery of the cosmogonical principle in God The mystery of mysticism, or of nature in God The mystery of providence & creation out of nothingThe significance of the creation in Judaism The omnipotence of feeling, or the mystery of prayer The mystery of faith, the mystery of miracle The mystery of the resurrection and of the miraculous conceptionThe mystery of the Christian Christ, or the personal GodThe distinction between Christianity & heathenismThe significance of voluntary celibacy & monachismThe Christian heaven, or personal immortality The essential standpoint of religion The contradiction in the existence of GodThe contradiction in the revelation of GodThe contradiction in the nature of God in generalThe contradiction in the speculative doctrine of GodThe contradiction in the Trinity The contradiction in the sacramentsThe contradiction of faith & loveConcluding application

    But the truth is, they're not nearly skeptical enough.While they champion the importance of a critical stance toward religion, they often fail to take that same stance toward their own beliefs. This double standard results in grandiose claims about the certainty of unbelief. However, their confidence in the rational strength of their own position is logically inconsistent at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Turning atheists' skepticism around on their own naturalist worldview, philosopher Mitch Stokes critically examines two things that such skeptics hold dear—science and morality—revealing deep inconsistencies among atheists' most cherished beliefs, inconsistencies that threaten to undo atheism itself.

    It is an indispensable guide to the depth and power of the Shia–Sunni split.