This anthology fills a conspicuous gap in the discussion of religion and theism. The issues that theology addresses, the meaning of life, the existence of God, the truth of the Bible, the possibility of life after death, are so important to people that they ought to examine both sides of these fundamental questions. The atheist and rationalist writings collected here are virtually impossible to obtain anywhere else, even in large university library collections. This material chronicles the contributions of many distinguished thinkers who have carefully investigated key issues in religion and philosophy, but have arrived at remarkably different conclusions from those of the clergy or media. We should not neglect this long and rich history or ignore the insights rooted in the freethough tradition. "An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism", a thorough introduction to the writings of the world's most famous freethinkers, will lead intellectually curious and intelligent people of all religious persuasions to an increased appreciation of the scope and limitations of their own opinions and attitudes on these important issues, including the existence of God, the definition of atheism and rationalism, the possibility of Divine Revelation, the existence of the Devil, and the real history/contribution of atheism to intellectual thought.

This book explores the religious foundations, political and social significance, and aesthetic aspects of the theatre created by the leaders of the Occult Revival. Lingan shows how theatre contributed to the fragmentation of Western religious culture and how contemporary theatre plays a part in the development of alternative, occult religions.

This volume brings together for the first time case studies on secularists of the 19th and early 20th centuries in national and transnational perspectives including examples from all over Europe. Its focus is on freethinkers taken as secular avant-gardes and early promoters of secularity. The authors of this book deal with multiple historical, religious, social, and cultural backgrounds and, in these contexts, analyze freethinkers' organizations, projects, networks, and contributions to forming a secular worldview, in particular, the promotion of concrete undertakings such as civil baptism or initiatives to leave church. Next to this secularist agenda, the contributions also take into account ambivalences and difficulties freethinkers were faced with, namely, the tensions between a national self-image and the transnational direction the movement has taken; the regional base of many projects and their transregional horizon; freethinkers' cultural programs and their immanent political mission; and the dialogue with respectively the conceptual distinction from other secularist groups. Readers interested in the history of secularity will learn that it was a heterogeneous enterprise already in its beginnings. This set the course for later European and global developments.

Undocumented Saints follows the migration of popular saints from Mexico into the US and the evolution of their meaning. The book explores how Latinx battles for survival are performed in the worlds of faith, religiosity, and the imaginary, and how the socio-political realities of exploitation and racial segregation frame their popular religious expressions. It also tracks the emergence of inter-religious states, transnational ethnic and cultural enclaves unified by faith. The book looks at five vernacular saints that have emerged in Mexico and whose devotions have migrated into the US in the last one hundred years: Jesus Malverde, a popular bandido turned saint caudillo; Santa Olguita, an emerging feminist saint linked to border women's experiences of sexual violence; Juan Soldado, a murder-rapist soldier who is now a patron for undocumented immigrants and the main suspect in the death of an eight-year-old victim known now as Santa Olguita; Toribio Romo, a Catholic priest whose ghost/spirit has been helping people cross the border into the US since the 1990s; and La Santa Muerte, a controversial personification of death who is particularly popular among LGBTQ migrants. Each chapter contextualizes a particular popular saint within broader discourses about the construction of masculinity and the state, the long history of violence against Latina and migrant women, female erasure from history, discrimination against non-normative sexualities, and as US and Mexican investment in the control of religiosity within the discourses of immigration.

This fascinating book explores how traumatic experience interacts with unconscious phantasy based in folklore, the supernatural and the occult. Drawing upon trauma research, case study vignettes, and psychoanalytic theory, it explains how therapists can use literature, the arts, and philosophy to work with clients who feel cursed and manifest self-sabotaging states. The book examines the challenges that can arise when working with this client population and illustrates how to work through them while navigating potent transferences and projective identifications. It's an important read for students, psychotherapists, and counselors in the mental health field.

From the author of The Man who Played with Time. Set in a visionary future of Andrew Man's recent trilogy, After the Flood, continues the story with a work of speculative fiction and spirituality. In this fourth book of the Series, five woman and a man must survive on a barren planet, to uncover the secrets of why there are so many human species back on planet Earth. At the same time, James and his team travel back in time to a legendary land off the coast of India, only to discover unpleasant survivors of a lost race. On returning to Europe, with his mind reading friend Jana, she is fearful of being used in a sex game by rich foreign oligarchs. Amid shadowy, corrupt ruling powers, James and Jana have to decide on their next move to help their time travelling friends at a pyramid in the Balkans.

Upon arrival in the United States, most African immigrants are immediately subsumed under the category "black." In the eyes of most Americans-and more so to American legal and social systems-African immigrants are indistinguishable from all others, such as those from the Caribbean whose skin color they share. Despite their growing presence in many cities and their active involvement in sectors of American economic, social, and cultural life, we know little about them. In From Africa to America, Moses O. Biney offers a rare full-scale look at an African immigrant congregation, the Presbyterian Church of Ghana in New York (PCGNY). Through personal stories, notes from participant observation, and interviews, Biney explores the complexities of the social, economic, and cultural adaptation of this group, the difficult moral choices they have to make in order to survive, and the tensions that exist within their faith community. Most notably, through his compelling research Biney shows that such congregations are more than mere "ethnic enclaves," or safe havens from American social and cultural values. Rather, they help maintain the essential balance between cultural acclimation and ethnic preservation needed for these new citizens to flourish.

Can theology still operate in the void of post-theism? In attempting to answer this question Agnosis examines the concept of the void itself, tracing a history of nothingness from Augustine through Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to Bataille and Derrida, and dialoguing with Japan's Kyoto School philosophers. It is argued that neither Augustinian nor post-Hegelian metaphysics have given a satisfactory understanding of nothingness and that we must look to an experience of nothingness as the best ground for future religious life and thought.

A unique take on death and bereavement without a belief in God or an afterlife   Accepting death is never easy, but we don’t need religion to find peace, comfort, and solace in the face of death. In this inspiring and life-affirming collection of short essays, prominent atheist author Greta Christina offers secular ways to handle your own mortality and the death of those you love.

A surprisingly large number of English poets have either belonged to a secret society, or been strongly influenced by its tenets. One of the best known examples is Christopher Smart's membership of the Freemasons, and the resulting influence of Masonic doctrines on A Song to David. However, many other poets have belonged to, or been influenced by not only the Freemasons, but the Rosicrucians, Gormogons and Hell-Fire Clubs. First published in 1986, this study concentrates on five major examples: Smart, Burns, William Blake, William Butler Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, as well as a number of other poets. Marie Roberts questions why so many poets have been powerfully attracted to the secret societies, and considers the effectiveness of poetry as a medium for conveying secret emblems and ritual. She shows how some poets believed that poetry would prove a hidden symbolic language in which to reveal great truths. The beliefs of these poets are as diverse as their practice, and this book sheds fascinating light on several major writers.

What is it like to be a preacher or rabbi who no longer believes in God? In this expanded and updated edition of their groundbreaking study, Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola comprehensively and sensitively expose an inconvenient truth that religious institutions face in the new transparency of the information age—the phenomenon of clergy who no longer believe what they publicly preach. In confidential interviews, clergy from across the ministerial spectrum—from liberal to literal—reveal how their lives of religious service and study have led them to a truth inimical to their professed beliefs and profession. Although their personal stories are as varied as the denominations they once represented, or continue to represent—whether Catholic, Baptist, Episcopalian, Methodist, Mormon, Pentecostal, or any of numerous others—they give voice not only to their own struggles but also to those who similarly suffer in tender and lonely silence. As this study poignantly and vividly reveals, their common journey has far-reaching implications not only for their families, their congregations, and their communities—but also for the very future of religion.

The rise of atheism and unbelief is a key feature in the development of the modern world, yet it is a topic which has been little explored by historians. This book presents a series of studies of irreligious ideas in various parts of Europe during the two centuries following the Reformation. Atheism was everywhere illegal in this period. The word itself first entered the vernacular languages soon after the Reformation, but it was not until the eighteenth century that the first systematic defences of unbelief began to appear in print. Its history in the intervening years is significant but problematic and hitherto obscure. The leading scholars who have contributed to this volume offer a range of approaches and draw on a wide variety of sources to produce a scholarly, original, and fascinating book. Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment will be essential reading for all concerned with the religious, intellectual, and social history of early modern Europe.

A beautifully illustrated guide from a Celtic Wiccan High Priestess to celebrating the Wiccan way, from Halloween to handfastings, as well as everyday rituals to enhance all areas of your life. The Wiccan calendar is marked by significant festivals, called sabbats. The most famous is Halloween, also known as Samhain, but you will be familiar with others, too, such as the Summer and Winter Solstices. Wiccans celebrate these sabbats with rituals, crafts, and food and drink, and in this book, Silja reveals how you can bring some of that magic into your life, even if working as a solitary witch. She also details other special days throughout the year, such as August 23, the Roman festival of Vulcanalia, which is celebrated with bonfires. Discover, too, how Wiccans celebrate personal rites of passage, such as the naming of a baby and a couple committing to each other in a Wiccan wedding, known as a handfasting. Finally, Silja explains how to write your own daily, weekly, or monthly rituals to bring you peace and happiness. Lavishly illustrated throughout, this is your essential guide to all your Wiccan celebrations.

Mystery. Manipulation. Murder. Cults are associated with all of these. But what really goes on inside them? More specifically, what goes on inside the minds of cult leaders and the people who join them? Based on the hit podcast Cults, this is essential reading for any true crime fan. Cults prey on the very attributes that make us human: our desire to belong, to find a deeper meaning in life, to live everyday with divine purpose. Their existence creates a sense that any one of us, at any time, could step off the cliff's edge and fall into that daunting abyss of manipulation and unhinged dedication to a misplaced cause. Perhaps it's this mindset that keeps us so utterly obsessed and desperate to learn more, or it's that the stories are so bizarre and unsettling that we are simply in awe of the mechanics that make these infamous groups tick. The premier storytelling podcast studio Parcast has been focusing on unearthing these mechanics--the cult leaders and followers, and the world and culture that gave birth to both. Parcast's work in analyzing dozens of case studies has revealed patterns: distinct ways that cult leaders from different generations resemble one another. What links the ten notorious figures profiled in Cults are as disturbing as they are stunning--from Manson to Applewhite, Koresh to Rael, the stories woven here are both spellbinding and disturbing. Cults is more than just a compilation of grisly biographies, however. In these pages, Parcast's founder Max Cutler and national bestselling author Kevin Conley look closely at the lives of some of the most disreputable cult figures and tell the stories of their rise to power and fall from grace, sanity, and decency. Beyond that, it is a study of humanity, an unflinching look at what happens when the most vulnerable recesses of the mind are manipulated and how the things we hold most sacred can be twisted into the lowest form of malevolence.

After reviewing the mounting evidence that organised religion is declining in many countries, this accessible book provides the first scientific study of active atheists.

Between the years of 1898 and 1926, Edward Westermarck spent a total of seven years in Morocco, visiting towns and tribes in different parts of the country, meeting local people and learning about their language and culture; his findings are noted in this two-volume set, first published in 1926. The first volume contains extensive reference material, including Westermarck's system of transliteration and a comprehensive list of the tribes and districts mentioned in the text. The chapters in this, the second volume, explore such areas as the rites and beliefs connected with the Islamic calendar, agriculture, and childbirth. This title will fascinate any student or researcher of anthropology with an interest in the history of ritual, culture and religion in Morocco.

In the Hellenistic and Roman world intimate relations existed between those holding power and the cults of Isis. This book is the first to chart these various appropriations over time within a comparative perspective. Ten carefully selected case studies show that "the Egyptian gods" were no exotic outsiders to the Hellenistic and Roman Mediterranean, but constituted a well institutionalised and frequently used religious option. Ranging from the early Ptolemies and Seleucids to late Antiquity, the case studies illustrate how much symbolic meaning was made with the cults of Isis by kings, emperors, cities and elites. Three articles introduce the theme of Isis and the longue duree theoretically, simultaneously exploring a new approach towards concepts like ruler cult and Religionspolitik.