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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Alternative belief systems > Humanist & secular alternatives to religion
Religion is currently gaining a much higher profile. The number of
faith schools is increasingly, and religious points of view are
being aired more frequently in the media. As religion's profile
rises, those who reject religion, including humanists, often find
themselves misunderstood, and occasionally misrepresented. Stephen
Law explores how humanism uses science and reason to make sense of
the world, looking at how it encourages individual moral
responsibility and shows that life can have meaning without
religion. Challenging some of the common misconceptions, he seeks
to dispute the claims that atheism and humanism are 'faith
positions' and that without God there can be no morality and our
lives are left without purpose. Looking at the history of humanism
and its development as a philosophical alternative, he examines the
arguments for and against the existence of God, and explores the
role humanism plays in moral and secular societies, as well as in
moral and religious education. Using humanism to determine the
meaning of life, he shows that there is a positive alternative to
traditional religious belief. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short
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Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both
an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how
we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of
France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations,
limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his
critical but sympathetic excavation of humanism, Tzvetan Todorov
seeks an answer to modernity's fundamental challenge: how to
maintain our hard-won liberty without paying too dearly in social
ties, common values, and a coherent and responsible sense of self.
Todorov reads afresh the works of major humanists--primarily
Montaigne, Rousseau, and Constant, but also Descartes, Montesquieu,
and Toqueville. Each chapter considers humanism's approach to one
major theme of human existence: liberty, social life, love, self,
morality, and expression. Discussing humanism in dialogue with
other systems, Todorov finds a response to the predicament of
modernity that is far more instructive than any offered by
conservatism, scientific determinism, existential individualism, or
humanism's other contemporary competitors. Humanism suggests that
we are members of an intelligent and sociable species who can act
according to our will while connecting the well-being of other
members with our own. It is through this understanding of free
will, Todorov argues, that we can use humanism to rescue
universality and reconcile human liberty with solidarity and
personal integrity. Placing the history of ideas at the service of
a quest for moral and political wisdom, Todorov's compelling and no
doubt controversial rethinking of humanist ideas testifies to the
enduring capacity of those ideas to meditate on--and, if we are
fortunate, cultivate--the imperfect garden in which we live.
Today, anti-humanism is a dominant, even definitive, feature of
contemporary theory. Setting out to challenge this tendency,
editors David Alderson and Kevin Anderson argue that the political
moment demands a reappraisal of the humanist tradition. Humanism,
in all its diversity and complexity, may facilitate the renewal of
progressive theory through the championing of human subjectivity,
agency and freedom. Across four extended essays, David Alderson,
Kevin Anderson, Barbara Epstein and Robert Spencer engage
critically with the Marxist tradition, recent developments in
poststructuralism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Incorporating
an overview of the historical context that resulted in socialist
humanism’s eclipse in the 1950s and '60s, and a strident critique
of anti-humanism, For Humanism offers a coherent and compelling
argument for the rehabilitation of a much maligned tradition.
With The Human Animal Earthling Identity Carrie P. Freeman asks us
to reconsider the devastating division we have created between the
human and animal conditions, leading to mass exploitation,
injustice, and extinction. As a remedy, Freeman believes social
movements should collectively foster a cultural shift in human
identity away from an egoistic anthropocentrism (human-centered
outlook) and toward a universal altruism (species-centered ethic),
so people may begin to see themselves more broadly as "human animal
earthlings." To formulate the basis for this identity shift,
Freeman examines overlapping values (supporting life, fairness,
responsibility, and unity) that are common in global rights
declarations and in the current campaign messages of sixteen global
social movement organizations that work on human/civil rights,
nonhuman animal protection, and/or environmental issues, such as
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Cooperative for
Assistance and Relief Everywhere, People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, the World Wildlife Federation, the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society, the Nature Conservancy, the Rainforest Action
Network, and Greenpeace. She also interviews the leaders of these
advocacy groups to gain their insights on how human and nonhuman
protection causes can become allies by engaging common opponents
and activating shared values and goals on issues such as the
climate crisis, enslavement, extinction, pollution, inequality,
destructive farming and fishing, and threats to democracy.
Freeman's analysis of activist discourse considers ethical
ideologies on behalf of social justice, animal rights, and
environmentalism, using animal rights' respect for sentient
individuals as a bridge connecting human rights to a more holistic
valuing of species and ecological systems. Ultimately, Freeman uses
her findings to recommend a set of universal values around which
all social movements' campaign messages can collectively cultivate
respectful relations between "human animal earthlings," fellow
sentient beings, and the natural world we share.
Calmly engaging the philosophical arguments posed by best-selling
authors Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and to a lesser extent,
Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, Gregory Ganssle's A Reasonable
God is a nuanced, charitable, and philosophically well-informed
defense of the existence of God. Eschewing the rhetoric and
provocative purposes of the New Atheists, Ganssle instead lucidly
and objectively analyzes each argument on its own philosophical
merits, to see how persuasive they prove to be. Surveying topics
including the relationship between faith and reason, moral
arguments for the existence of God, the Darwinian theories of the
origin of religion, he pays particular attention to, and ultimately
rejects, what he determines is the strongest logical argument
against the existence of god posed by the new atheists, put forth
by Dawkins: that our universe resembles more of what an atheistic
universe would be like than it does with what a theistic universe
would be like.
With The Human Animal Earthling Identity Carrie P. Freeman asks us
to reconsider the devastating division we have created between the
human and animal conditions, leading to mass exploitation,
injustice, and extinction. As a remedy, Freeman believes social
movements should collectively foster a cultural shift in human
identity away from an egoistic anthropocentrism (human-centered
outlook) and toward a universal altruism (species-centered ethic),
so people may begin to see themselves more broadly as "human animal
earthlings." To formulate the basis for this identity shift,
Freeman examines overlapping values (supporting life, fairness,
responsibility, and unity) that are common in global rights
declarations and in the current campaign messages of sixteen global
social movement organizations that work on human/civil rights,
nonhuman animal protection, and/or environmental issues, such as
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Cooperative for
Assistance and Relief Everywhere, People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, the World Wildlife Federation, the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society, the Nature Conservancy, the Rainforest Action
Network, and Greenpeace. She also interviews the leaders of these
advocacy groups to gain their insights on how human and nonhuman
protection causes can become allies by engaging common opponents
and activating shared values and goals on issues such as the
climate crisis, enslavement, extinction, pollution, inequality,
destructive farming and fishing, and threats to democracy.
Freeman's analysis of activist discourse considers ethical
ideologies on behalf of social justice, animal rights, and
environmentalism, using animal rights' respect for sentient
individuals as a bridge connecting human rights to a more holistic
valuing of species and ecological systems. Ultimately, Freeman uses
her findings to recommend a set of universal values around which
all social movements' campaign messages can collectively cultivate
respectful relations between "human animal earthlings," fellow
sentient beings, and the natural world we share.
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God is Good
(Paperback)
Martin G Kuhrt; Foreword by Alex Jacob
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Discovery Miles 5 760
Save R261 (31%)
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Ever felt confused about religious belief but reluctant to question
it? Ever considered that religious beliefs may in fact be less than
wholesome, but weren't sure how to ponder them? Well this book will
help. Written by someone who attended religious schools all his
life, studied theology, and was a committed believer for many
years, the author will walk you through his journey from belief to
full-blown scepticism. Easy-to-read, and containing over 200
drawings, this book will help give you clarity of mind and a sense
of liberation allowing you to move forward in life with new found
confidence and self-acceptance. Pick up a copy of 'How to See
Religion Differently' today and see why it's better to be an
amazing primate than a fallen angel, why religion is like a teddy
bear, why God would be unfriended on social media today, and why
religion should fall foul of advertising standard guidelines.
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