Religious belief combines thought, feeling and experience in a way that optimally leverages the natural tendency of the mind to latch on to socially and personally useful concepts. This effect delivers tangible benefits because religious concepts and practice feed the mind's natural drive to cling to strong beliefs. At the same time, beliefs are reinforced by favourable emotional responses. This text explains how these elements work together to make religious belief such a powerful placebo effect.

The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzche's first book in 1072 and is still one of the most relevant statements on tragedy. It sounded themes developed by existialist and psychoanslysts of the times.The Anti-hrist is Nietzche's writings about the ant-Christ, the evil leader who arises in the last days in opposition to God and His church.

This compact, forcefully argued work calls Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, and the rest of the so-called 'New Atheists' to account for failing to take seriously the historical record to which they so freely appeal when attacking religion. The popularity of such books as Harris's The End of Faith, Dawkins's The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great set off a spate of reviews, articles, and books for and against, yet in all the controversy little attention has focused on the historical evidence and arguments they present to buttress their case. This book is the first to challenge in depth the distortions of this New Atheist history. It presents the evidence that the three authors and their allies ignore. It points out the lack of historical credibility in their work when judged by the conventional criteria used by mainstream historians. It does not deal with the debate over theism and atheism nor does it aim to defend the historical record of Christianity or religion more generally. It does aim to defend the integrity of history as a discipline in the face of its distortion by those who violate it.

This book identifies that "Xiang thinking" is the eidetic connotation and a fundamental trait of traditional Chinese thinking, offering insights of considerable methodological significance. "Xiang thinking" is a mode of thinking different from conceptual thinking or idealized rational thinking and, in a certain sense, it is more primal. In the past century, particularly since 1949, the primary works on Chinese philosophical history have, as a rule, addressed the ancient Chinese tradition of philosophical ideas by virtue of the philosophies of Plato, Descartes and Hegel: methods that inherently challenge Chinese philosophical insights. This has naturally led to the fact that the insights as such remained obscured. This book starts to reverse this trend, intending to help Chinese people understand and appraise themselves in a more down-to-earth fashion. In addition, it is particularly helpful to people of other cultures if they want to understand ancient Chinese philosophy and culture in a context of fresh and inspiring philosophical ideas. (By Zhang Xianglong)

This is a collection of articles on William James's (1842-1910) philosophy of religion and its current relevance authored by a team of international experts. Famous for his work in psychology, James was the founder of the philosophical movement known as pragmatism as well as an early classic in religious studies. A new look at his philosophy of religion is crucially important for the development of this field of inquiry today. The book offers novel investigations of James's philosophy of religion and its contemporary importance as well as his controversial 'will to believe' argument in particular. Thus, for instance, both the account of religious experience in James's Varieties and the debate on the ethics of belief are illuminated.

Joseph M. Boyle Jr. has been a major contributor to the development of Catholic bioethics over the past thirty five years. Boyle's contribution has had an impact on philosophers, theologians, and medical practitioners, and his work has in many ways come to be synonymous with analytically rigorous philosophical bioethics done in the Catholic intellectual tradition. Four main themes stand out as central to Boyle's contribution: the sanctity of life and bioethics: Boyle has elaborated a view of the ethics of killing at odds with central tenets of the euthanasia mentality, double effect and bioethics: Boyle is among the pre-eminent defenders of a role for double effect in medical decision making and morality, the right to health care: Boyle has moved beyond the rhetoric of social justice to provide a natural law grounding for a political right to health care; and the role of natural law and the natural law tradition in bioethics: Boyle's arguments have been grounded in a particularly fruitful approach to natural law ethics, the so-called New Natural Law theory. The contributors to BIOETHICS WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE: THEMES IN THE WORK OF JOSEPH M. BOYLE discuss, criticize, and in many cases extend the Boyle's advances in these areas with rigor and sophistication. It will be of interest to Catholic and philosophical bioethicists alike.

One of the most profound, deeply affecting questions we face as human beings is the matter of our mortality--and its connection to immortality. Ancient animist ghost cultures, Egyptian mummification, late Jewish hopes of resurrection, Christian eternal salvation, Muslim belief in hell and paradise all spring from a remarkably consistent impulse to tether a triumph over death to our conduct in life.
In After Lives, British scholar John Casey provides a rich historical and philosophical exploration of the world beyond, from the ancient Egyptians to St. Thomas Aquinas, from Martin Luther to modern Mormons. In a lively, wide-ranging discussion, he examines such topics as predestination, purgatory, Spiritualism, the Rapture, Armageddon and current Muslim apocalyptics, as well as the impact of such influences as the New Testament, St. Augustine, Dante, and the Second Vatican Council. Ideas of heaven and hell, Casey argues, illuminate how we understand the ultimate nature of sin, justice, punishment, and our moral sense itself. The concepts of eternal bliss and eternal punishment express--and test--our ideas of good and evil. For example, the ancient Egyptians saw the afterlife as flowing from ma'at, a sense of being in harmony with life, a concept that includes truth, order, justice, and the fundamental law of the universe. "It is an optimistic view of life," he writes. "It is an ethic that connects wisdom with moral goodness." Perhaps just as revealing, Casey finds, are modern secular interpretations of heaven and hell, as he probes the place of goodness, virtue, and happiness in the age of psychology and scientific investigation.
With elegant writing, a magisterial grasp of a vast literary and religious history, and moments of humor and irony, After Lives sheds new light on the question of life, death, and morality in human culture.

Spinoza and the Specters of Modernity draws new theoretical conclusions from a study of Spinoza's legacy in the age of Goethe and beyond, largely transmitted through the writings of Herder, that will have implications for the study of German intellectual history and, more broadly, the study of religion and literature. Michael Mack describes how a line of writers and thinkers re-configured Spinoza's ideas and how these ideas thus became effective in society at large. Mack shows that the legacy of Spinoza is important because he was the first thinker to theorize narrative as the constitutive fabric of politics, identity, society, religion and the larger sphere of culture. Indeed, Mack argues for Spinoza's writings on politics and ethics as an alternative to a Kantian conception of modernity.

Where did the ideas of heaven and hell come from? As strange as it may seem to us now, there was a time when no one thought they would go to heaven or hell after they died. In fact, there is no mention of them in the Old Testament, and Jesus did not believe the souls of the departed were bound for either realm. In this gripping history of the afterlife, Bart Ehrman reveals how the concepts of heaven and hell developed and took hold, and why they endure to this day. He examines the social, cultural and historical roots of competing views held by Greeks, Jews and Christians, and traces how beliefs changed over time. Ultimately, he shows that many of our ideas about heaven and hell emerged long after Jesus's time, through the struggle to explain the injustices of the world.

In this elegantly written book, Mark S. Cladis invites us to reflect on the nature and place of the public and private in the work of Rousseau and, more generally, in democratic society. Listening closely to the religious pitch in Rousseau's voice, he convincingly shows that Rousseau, when attempting to portray the most characteristic aspects of the public and private, reached for a religious vocabulary. Cladis skillfully leads the reader on an exploration of the conflicting claims with which Rousseau wrestled - prerogatives and obligations to self, friends, family, vocation, civic life, and to humanity. At the juncture of diverse theological and secular traditions, Rousseau forged a vision of human happiness found not exclusively in the public or private, but in a complex combination of the two.

The first critical guide to the essential literature reflecting and expressing psychoanalytic approaches to religion, this volume's concentrates on critical assessments that steer the user toward works of lasting value. The book's first priority is to include publications clearly aimed at continuing the Freudian tradition and contributing to the psychoanalytic study of religion. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of psychology and religion as well as the general reader who is seeking works on those topics. Most of the psychoanalytic literature in English since 1920 is included and is organized in 21 topical sections. Cross-references and indexes increase the usefulness of the work. The author has tried to include every coherent effort, guided by psychoanalytic theory, to offer an explanation, understanding, or interpretation of religion or religious behavior. The work will be of interest in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, folklore, and religion. Public libraries will find this a valuable reference tool to offer the general reader who is interested in a broad spectrum of ideas.

The editor, Thomas V. Morris presents a collection of discussions on the philosophy of religion, especially with regard to Christianity. The essays cover such subjects as salvation, the resurgence of philosophy of religion, the Acts of the Apostles, the Trinity, original sin and the Holy Spirit. The work aims to reveal the ease with which Christians discuss religion and philosophy compared with their past discomfort when confronted with the subject.

This is a major contribution to the link between theology and philosophy, introducing the core ideas of Michel Foucault to students of theology. Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to the early church Fathers. He did so not for anything like a return to God but rather because he found in those sources alternatives for re-imaging the self. And though Foucault never seriously entertained Christianity beyond theorizing its aesthetic style one might argue that Christian practices like confession or Eucharist share family resemblances to Foucaultian sensibilities. This book will explain how to do theology in light of Foucault, or more precisely, to read Foucault as if God mattered. Therefore, it will seek to articulate practices like confession, prayer, and so on as techniques for the self, situate 'the church as politics' within present constellations of power, disclose theological knowledges as modes of critical intervention, or what Foucault called archaeology, and conceptualize Christian existence in time through mnemonic practices of genealogy. "The Philosophy and Theology" series looks at major philosophers and explores their relevance to theological thought as well as the response of theology.

The divide between liberal and postliberal theology is one of the most important and far-reaching methodological disputes in twentieth-century theology. Their divergence in method brought related differences in their approaches to hermeneutics and religious language. This split in the understanding of religious language is widely acknowledged, but rigorous philosophical analysis and assessment of it is seldom seen.
Liberalism versus Postliberalism provides such analyses, using the developments in analytic philosophy of language over the past forty years. The book provides an original reading of the "theology and falsification" debates of the 1950s and 60s, and Knight's interpretation of the debates supplies a philosophical lens that brings into focus the centrality of religious language in the methodological dispute between liberal and postliberal theologians. Knight suggests that recent philosophical developments reveal problems with both positions and argues for a more inclusive method that takes seriously the aspirations of the debaters. His book makes an important contribution to contemporary theological method, to the understanding of liberal and postliberal theologies, and to our understanding of the role of analytic philosophy in contemporary theology and religious studies.