Many books that challenge religious belief from a skeptical point of view take a combative tone that is almost guaranteed to alienate believers or they present complex philosophical or scientific arguments that fail to reach the average reader. This is undoubtably an ineffective way of encouraging people to develop critical thinking about religion. This unique approach to skepticism presents fifty commonly heard reasons people often give for believing in a God and then raises legitimate questions regarding these reasons, showing in each case that there is much room for doubt. Whether you're a believer, a complete skeptic, or somewhere in between, you'll find this review of traditional and more recent arguments for the existence of God refreshing, approachable, and enlightening. From religion as the foundation of morality to the authority of sacred books, the compelling religious testimony of influential people, near-death experiences, arguments from Intelligent Design, and much more, Harrison respectfully describes each rationale for belief and then politely shows the deficiencies that any good skeptic would point out. As a journalist who has traveled widely and interviewed many highly accomplished people, quite a number of whom are believers, the author appreciates the variety of belief and the ways in which people seek to make religion compatible with scientific thought. Nonetheless, he shows that, despite the prevalence of belief in God or religious belief in intelligent people, in the end there are no unassailable reasons for believing in a God. For skeptics looking for appealing ways to approach their believing friends or believers who are not afraid to consider a skeptical challenge, this book makes for very stimulating reading.

Robert Morrison offers an illuminating comparative study of two linked and interactive traditions that have had great influence in twentieth-century thought:Buddhism and the philosophy of Nietzsche. Nietzsche saw a direct historical parallel between the cultural situation of his own time and of the India of the Buddha's age: the emergence of nihilism as a consequence of loss of traditional belief. Nietzche's fear, still resonant today, was that Europe was about to enter a nihilistic era, in which people, no longer able to believe in the old religious and moral values, would feel themselves adrift in a meaningless cosmos where life seems to have no particular purpose or end. Though he admired Buddhism as a noble and humane response to this situation, Nietzsche came to think that it was wrong in not seeking to overcome nihilism, and constituted a threat to the future of Europe. It was in reaction against nihilism that he forged his own affirmative philosophy, aiming at the transvaluation of all values. Nietzsche's view of Buddhism has been very influential in the West; Dr Morrison gives a careful critical examination of this view, argues that in fact Buddhism is far from being a nihilistic religion, and offers a counterbalancing Buddhist view of the Nietzschean enterprise. He draws out the affinities and conceptual similarities between the two, and concludes that, ironically, Nietzsche's aim of self-overcoming is akin to the Buddhist notion of citta-bhavana (mind-cultivation). Had Nietzsche lived in an age where Buddhism was better understood, Morrison suggests, he might even have found in the Buddha a model of his hypothetical Ubermensch.

Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development--and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.

This book brings together scholars of a variety of the world's major civilisations to focus on the universal theme of inner transformation. The idea of the self is a cultural formation like any other, and models and conceptions of the inner world of the person vary widely from one civilisation to another. Nonetheless, all the world's great religions insist on the need to transform this inner world, however it is understood, in highly expressive and specific ways. Such transformations, often ritually enacted, reveal the primary intutitions, drives, and conflicts active within culuture. The individual essays - by such distinguished scholars as Wai-yee Li, Janet Gyatso, Wendy Doniger, Christiano Grottanelli, Charles Malamoud, Margalit Finkelberg, and Moshe Idel - study dramatic examples of these processes in a wide range of cultures, including China, India, Tibet, Greece and Rome, Late Antiquity, Islam, Judaism, and medieval and early-modern Chritian Europe.

A Frightening Love radically rethinks God and evil. It rejects theodicy and its impersonal conception of reason and morality. Faith survives evil through a miraculous love that resists philosophical rationalization. Authors criticised include Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Marilyn McCord Adams, Peter van Inwagen, John Haldane, William Hasker.

I Know myself, I know myself, I am One With God -From the Pert Em Heru "The Ru Pert em Heru" or "Ancient Egyptian Book of The Dead," or "Book of Coming Forth By Day" as it is more popularly known, has fascinated the world since the successful translation of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic scripture over 150 years ago. The astonishing writings in it reveal that the Ancient Egyptians believed in life after death and in an ultimate destiny to discover the Divine. The elegance and aesthetic beauty of the hieroglyphic text itself has inspired many see it as an art form in and of itself. But is there more to it than that? Did the Ancient Egyptian wisdom contain more than just aphorisms and hopes of eternal life beyond death? In this volume Dr. Muata Ashby, the author of over 25 books on Ancient Egyptian Yoga Philosophy has produced a new translation of the original texts which uncovers a mystical teaching underlying the sayings and rituals instituted by the Ancient Egyptian Sages and Saints. "Once the philosophy of Ancient Egypt is understood as a mystical tradition instead of as a religion or primitive mythology, it reveals its secrets which if practiced today will lead anyone to discover the glory of spiritual self-discovery. The Pert em Heru is in every way comparable to the Indian Upanishads or the Tibetan Book of the Dead."  $28.95 ISBN# 1-884564-28-3 Size: 81/2" X

Cattoi and McDaniel present a selection of articles on the role of the body and the spiritual senses--our transfigured channels of sensory perceptions--in the context of spiritual practice. The volume investigates this theme across a variety of different religious traditions, starting from early and medieval Christianity, addressing a number of Eastern traditions, such as Hinduism, Buddhism, and Daoism, and finally touching on some modern forms of spirituality and psychotherapy.

This volume presents the theory of culture of the Russian-born German Jewish social philosopher David Koigen (1879-1933). Heir to Hermann Cohen's neo-Kantian interpretation of Judaism, he transforms the religion of reason into an ethical Intimitatsreligion. He draws upon a great variety of intellectual currents, among them, Max Scheler's philosophy of values, the historical sociology of Max Weber, the sociology of religion of Emile Durkheim, Ernst Troeltsch and Georg Simmel and American pragmatism. Influenced by his personal experience of marginality in German academia yet the same time unconstrained by the dictates of the German Jewish discourse, Koigen shapes these theoretical strands into an original argument which unfolds along two trajectories: theodicy of culture and ethos. Distinguished from ethics, ethos identifies the non-formal factors that foster a group's sense of collective identity as it adapts to continuous change. From a Jewish perspective, ethos is grounded in the biblical covenant as the paradigm of a social contract and corporate liability. Although the normative content of the covenantal ethos is subject to gradual secularization, its metaphysical and existential assumptions, Koigen argues, continue to inform Jewish self-understanding. The concept of ethos identifies the dialectic of tradition as it shapes Jewish religious consciousness, and, in turn, is shaped by the evolving cultural and axiological sensibilities. In consonance, Jewish identity cannot be reduced to ethnicity or a purely secular culture. Urban develops these fragmentary and inchoate theories into a sociology of religious knowledge and suggests to read Koigen not just as a Jewish sociologist but as the first sociologist of Judaism who proposes to overcome the dogmatic anti-metaphysical stance of European sociology.

This is a view of the work of philosopher Giorgio Agamben in relation to his own most basic theological premises and the discipline of theology. Though the work of Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben has been increasing in popularity over the last several years in the English-speaking world, little work has been done directly on the theological legacy which actually dominates the overall force of his critical analyses, a topic which has intrigued his readers since the publication of his short book on Saint Paul's 'Letter to the Romans'. "Agamben and Theology" intends to illuminate such a connection by examining the theologically inflected terms that have come to dominate his work over time, including the messianic, the sacred, sovereignty, glory, creation, original sin, redemption and revelation. "The Philosophy and Theology" series looks at major philosophers and explores their relevance to theological thought as well as the response of theology.

The volume will consist of a series of interpretative studies of Locke 's philosophical and religious thought in historical context and consider his contributions to the Enlightenment and modern liberal thought.

Christians look with hope to the resurrection of the dead and the restoration of all things. But what of those who have already died? Do they also await these things, or have they in some sense already happened for them? Within the Catholic theological community, this question has traditionally been answered in terms of the disembodied souls of human beings awaiting bodily resurrection. Since the 1960s, Catholic theologians have proposed two alternatives: resurrection at death into the Last Day and the consummation of all things, or resurrection in death into an interim state in which the embodied dead await, with us, the final consummation of all things. This book critically examines the Scriptural, philosophical and theological reasons for these alternatives and, on the basis of this analysis, offers an account of the traditional schema which makes clear that in spite of these challenges it remains the preferable option.

The political writings of John Wesley (1703-1791) reveal a passionate campaigner engaged throughout his life with the care of the oppressed. His life was one of great paradox: as a high-churchman and Tory, living under the instruction of the Bible, tradition set him against radical change, yet few individuals could have been more responsible for upheaval in church and society. He believed scriptures set him against the cause of democracy, yet scarcely one other single person could have contributed more to its realization. His gospel religion inflamed in him an outrage at the social and political evils of his day that was barely matched by the more explicitly radical of his contemporaries. This volume collects addresses and pamphlets that capture Wesley's views on a variety of political subjects including the nature of political power, his response to Richard Price's Observations on Liberty, his views on slavery, on poverty, on the secession of the American colonies, and on the luxury of the rich. Together they make clear the relevance of Wesley to subsequent developments in the abolition of slavery and the evolution of labour politics. The book features an extensive new introduction by the editor.