Stark's provocative report challenges conventional wisdom and finds that Christianity's astounding dominance of the Western world arose from its offer of a better, more secure way of life."Compelling reading" (Library Journal) that is sure to "generate spirited argument" (Publishers Weekly), this account of Christianity's remarkable growth within the Roman Empire is the subject of much fanfare. "Anyone who has puzzled over Christianity's rise to dominance...must read it." says Yale University's Wayne A. Meeks, for The Rise of Christianity makes a compelling case for startling conclusions. Combining his expertise in social science with historical evidence, and his insight into contemporary religion's appeal, Stark finds that early Christianity attracted the privileged rather than the poor, that most early converts were women or marginalized Jews—and ultimately "that Christianity was a success because it proved those who joined it with a more appealing, more assuring, happier, and perhaps longer life" (Andrew M. Greeley, University of Chicago).

    Luckily, for the millions of American nonbelievers who have quietly stewed for years as the religious right made gains in politics and culture, the wait is over. Bestselling author Jack Huberman's zeitgeist sense has honed into the backlash building against religious fundamentalism and collected a veritable treasure trove of quotes by philosophers, scientists, poets, writers, artists, entertainers, and political figures. His colorful cast of atheists includes Karen Armstrong, Lance Armstrong, Jules Feiffer, Federico Fellini, H. L. Mencken, Ian McKellen, Isaac Singer, Jonathan Swift, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf and the Marquis de Sade.

    A small, fearless book that takes aim at big, stupid targets--and nails them.For the last several years, PZ Myers, writing the blog Pharyngula, has entertained millions of readers every month with his infectious love of evolutionary science and his equally infectious disdain for creationism, biblical literalism, "intelligent design" theory, and other products of godly illogic. While PZ does not accept the common atheist argument that religion necessarily makes people do evil, violent things, he does think that, most of the time, it makes them believe in the truly ridiculous--which is exactly what he skewers in this riotously funny book. In fact, The Happy Atheist is so outrageous, it's the only book about religion anyone should take seriously.

      In today’s contentious political climate, understanding religion’s role in American government is more important than ever. Christian nationalists assert that our nation was founded on Judeo-Christian principles, and advocate an agenda based on this popular historical claim. But is this belief true? The Founding Myth answers the question once and for all. Andrew L. Seidel, a constitutional attorney at the Freedom from Religion Foundation, builds his case point by point, comparing the Ten Commandments to the Constitution and contrasting biblical doctrine with America’s founding philosophy, showing that the Bible contradicts the Declaration of Independence’s central tenets. Thoroughly researched, this persuasively argued and fascinating book proves that America was not built on the Bible and that Christian nationalism is, in fact, un-American.

    Here, acclaimed scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores it with profound appreciation for its cultural and psychological power as literature. From the birth of the Hebrew Bible to the awe-inspiring contributions of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in bringing Adam and Eve to vivid life, Greenblatt unpacks the story’s many interpretations and consequences over time. Rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, narrow literalism, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature: all can be counted as children of our “first” parents.

    For good and for evil, religion is the single greatest influence in the world. We accept as self-evident that competing economic systems (capitalist or communist) or clashing political parties (Republican or Democratic) propose very different solutions to our planet's problems. So why do we pretend that the world's religious traditions are different paths to the same God? We blur the sharp distinctions between religions at our own peril, argues religion scholar Stephen Prothero, and it is time to replace naÏve hopes of interreligious unity with deeper knowledge of religious differences. In Religious Literacy, Prothero demonstrated how little Americans know about their own religious traditions and why the world's religions should be taught in public schools. Now, in God Is Not One, Prothero provides readers with this much-needed content about each of the eight great religions. To claim that all religions are the same is to misunderstand that each attempts to solve a different human problem. For example: –Islam: the problem is pride / the solution is submission –Christianity: the problem is sin / the solution is salvation –Confucianism: the problem is chaos / the solution is social order –Buddhism: the problem is suffering / the solution is awakening –Judaism: the problem is exile / the solution is to return to God Prothero reveals each of these traditions on its own terms to create an indispensable guide for anyone who wants to better understand the big questions human beings have asked for millennia—and the disparate paths we are taking to answer them today. A bold polemical response to a generation of misguided scholarship, God Is Not One creates a new context for understanding religion in the twenty-first century and disproves the assumptions most of us make about the way the world's religions work.

    John Gray's stimulating and extremely enjoyable new book describes the rich, complex world of the atheist tradition, a tradition which he sees as in many ways as rich as that of religion itself, as well as being deeply intertwined with what is so often crudely viewed as its 'opposite'.The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary and varied light on what it is to be human and on the thinkers who have, at different times and places, battled to understand this issue.

    From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world’s funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry—especially chemical embalming—and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the morbid unknown, a fascinating tour through the unique ways people everywhere confront mortality.

    The Atheist knows that god did not make man. The opposite is true - man made god in the image and likeness of a man, in the form of a virile Greco-Roman male in his early prime. Man completed this effort over 2,300 years ago. With this creation came religion. We know that religion requires unconditional belief and complete submission, without thought. Any discipline based on belief in man’s written words - requires complete submission - without concern for facts; and a set of rules that knowingly and completely overlook self-determination - appears cult like, trivial, and not worthy of respect. Upon examining, the benefits of believing Atheists realize that any benefit or benefits derived from affiliation with religion are at their very best meaningless or insignificant. Atheists are aware of atrocities committed in the name of spiritual superiority. Atheists view these events as wasteful, shameful, and as always elusive of any perceived victory and devoid of any social redeeming qualities or values. Accepting this truth is imperative, as it is so easy to verify, too many lose contact with reality based on trivial religious beliefs and bizarre religious doctrine. Most of religion’s beliefs are products of the ninth thru fifteenth century - the Dark-Ages period of Western Europe. These products include very basic child-like stories intended for the most uneducated members of society including pseudo horror stories. The stories are about demons, evil spirits, devils, and the like. However, the target audience changed now religion is an exceedingly mainstream belief system and extremely profitable for its promoters. Religion’s impact on our society is shocking, almost mind boggling. The wild stories work even today. If you are a clever preacher, you can tell your followers you saw a man walk on water. Many will believe you. The answers to the so-called mysteries of faith never elude us as they are in any public library. Most are just too lazy, complacent, stupid, or fearful to conduct the required research to explore such topics. “He who knows nothing is closer to the truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors” Thomas Jefferson April 13, 1743 – July 4, 1826 Truth is not in demand in this society. We stand in abject fear of learning the truth. In being honest with ourselves, we must admit and accept that of our own volition we constructed a high tech do-it-yourself version of the European Dark-Ages in this so-called 21st century. We refer to this, as fundamentalism. After a thousand years of mental conditioning, we must admit the churches trained us too well. Now these habits are difficult to break, but changing a habit is not impossible. Always remember... “After your death, you will be what you were before your birth” Arthur Schopenhauer February 22 1788 – September 21 1860

    In Polynesia we set sail with navigators whose ancestors settled the Pacific ten centuries before Christ. In the Amazon we meet the descendants of a true lost civilization, the Peoples of the Anaconda. In the Andes we discover that the earth really is alive, while in Australia we experience Dreamtime, the all-embracing philosophy of the first humans to walk out of Africa. We then travel to Nepal, where we encounter a wisdom hero, a Bodhisattva, who emerges from forty-five years of Buddhist retreat and solitude. And finally we settle in Borneo, where the last rain forest nomads struggle to survive. Understanding the lessons of this journey will be our mission for the next century. For at risk is the human legacy--a vast archive of knowledge and expertise, a catalog of the imagination. Rediscovering a new appreciation for the diversity of the human spirit, as expressed by culture, is among the central challenges of our time.

    An advocate of reason and common sense, the author debunks traditional believer apologetics and challenges theist platitudes, while providing food for thought and debate fodder for the neophyte to intermediate atheist. With more than one hundred no-holds-barred, plain-speaking rants and essays on a variety of religious subjects, The Atheist Camel Chronicles is the go-to book to find a burr to place under the saddle of the holier than thou, or to glean retorts to the banal "Truths" that religionists use to bolster their faith in the face of the Scientific Age and 21st century reality. Sometimes funny, always hard hitting and thought provoking, this book belongs in the library of every atheist, agnostic and skeptic who engages in debate and discourse with the religiously afflicted.

    It is a scientific look at how ancient humans made sense of the world and the phenomena they encountered around them.In the past, arguments against the existence of gods have mainly come in the form of scientific inquiries that attempt to show there is no evidence for their existence. The Invention of Religion, however, investigates the psychological mechanisms that cause religions to originate and it sets out to prove that when humans have neither science nor religion, these mechanisms cause them to invent new religions. It also investigates how the differences (like monotheism vs. pantheism) between religions arise and how probable these differences are.

    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.

    Now Garfield takes on a subject even dearer to our fanatical human hearts: maps.Imagine a world without maps. How would we travel? Could we own land? What would men and women argue about in cars? Scientists have even suggested that mapping—not language—is what elevated our prehistoric ancestors from ape-dom. Follow the history of maps from the early explorers’ maps and the awe-inspiring medieval Mappa Mundi to Google Maps and the satellite renderings on our smartphones, Garfield explores the unique way that maps relate and realign our history—and reflect the best and worst of what makes us human.Featuring a foreword by Dava Sobel and packed with fascinating tales of cartographic intrigue, outsize personalities, and amusing “pocket maps” on an array of subjects from how to fold a map to the strangest maps on the Internet, On the Map is a rich historical tapestry infused with Garfield’s signature narrative flair. Map-obsessives and everyone who loved Just My Type will be lining up to join Garfield on his audacious journey through time and around the globe.

    In an effort to help those who've been hurt by or turned off by negative religion, Martin Thielen explains that there is an alternative to abandoning religion: good religion. Thielen uses personal stories to illustrate the dangers of religion that is judgmental, anti-intellectual, and legalistic. While addressing the growth of the new atheism movement and the "Nones" (people that have no religious affiliation), this book argues that leaving religion is not practical, not helpful, and not necessary. Thielen provides counterparts to the characteristics of bad religion, explaining that good religion is grace-filled, promotes love and forgiveness, and is inclusive and hope-filled. Perfect for individual, group, or congregational study, a Leader's Guide and a Worship and Outreach Kit are also available to further the discussion and increase community involvement.