[PDF] Humankind Religion And God eBook

Author : Reza Aslan
Publisher : Random House
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 48,89 MB
Release : 2017-11-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0553394738

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of Zealot and host of Believer explores humanity’s quest to make sense of the divine in this concise and fascinating history of our understanding of God. In Zealot, Reza Aslan replaced the staid, well-worn portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth with a startling new image of the man in all his contradictions. In his new book, Aslan takes on a subject even more immense: God, writ large. In layered prose and with thoughtful, accessible scholarship, Aslan narrates the history of religion as a remarkably cohesive attempt to understand the divine by giving it human traits and emotions. According to Aslan, this innate desire to humanize God is hardwired in our brains, making it a central feature of nearly every religious tradition. As Aslan writes, “Whether we are aware of it or not, and regardless of whether we’re believers or not, what the vast majority of us think about when we think about God is a divine version of ourselves.” But this projection is not without consequences. We bestow upon God not just all that is good in human nature—our compassion, our thirst for justice—but all that is bad in it: our greed, our bigotry, our penchant for violence. All these qualities inform our religions, cultures, and governments. More than just a history of our understanding of God, this book is an attempt to get to the root of this humanizing impulse in order to develop a more universal spirituality. Whether you believe in one God, many gods, or no god at all, God: A Human History will challenge the way you think about the divine and its role in our everyday lives. Praise for God “Timely, riveting, enlightening and necessary.”—HuffPost “Tantalizing . . . Driven by [Reza] Aslan’s grace and curiosity, God . . . helps us pan out from our troubled times, while asking us to consider a more expansive view of the divine in contemporary life.”—The Seattle Times “A fascinating exploration of the interaction of our humanity and God.”—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette “[Aslan’s] slim, yet ambitious book [is] the story of how humans have created God with a capital G, and it’s thoroughly mind-blowing.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Aslan is a born storyteller, and there is much to enjoy in this intelligent survey.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Author : Faoso F. Telaumbanua
Publisher : Exceller Books
Page : 144 pages
File Size : 11,79 MB
Release :
Category : Religion
ISBN :

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There is no space whatsoever in this universe nor in the human mind, including the space called religion, that can contain the Creator of All Things. Anyone and anything that tries to monopolize God or the news about God will be torn apart and humiliated by its own stupidity and arrogance. Hopefully this book can help build brightness in the midst of a world filled with people whose love and admiration for their religion exceeds the love for God and fellow humans. Love for religion should not make people lose their minds, on the contrary, religion exists to help those who live in the dark.

Author : R. F. M.
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 102 pages
File Size : 29,52 MB
Release : 2010-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 145023898X

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Who are we? Where do we come from? What is our destiny? In God, Divinity, the Universe, and Humankind, author R.F.M. addresses these questions and more, sharing his interpretations and reflections of an array of ideas related to human existence and destiny. Drawing on religious insights, R.F.M. provides many examples to provide a guide for those seeking wisdom about their life, their existence, their spiritual journey, and their destiny. God, Divinity, the Universe, and Humankind explores the doubts and perplexities humans have experienced throughout history and discusses how to find new understanding and guidance. This exploration of spirituality presents a psychiatrist's thoughts on the creation of the universe, our relatedness to God and to divinity, and the importance of faith in our life. It communicates the idea that in the whole orchestration of the universe, we are only the instruments; God is the composer, the conductor, and the player. We should surrender to Him in union and oneness in our spiritual origin and nature, for we all are the same from Him and all shall return in Him.

Author : William Schweiker
Publisher : Fortress Press
Page : 340 pages
File Size : 39,59 MB
Release :
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781451416282

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Much of the rampant violence in the world today seems rooted in religion, and daily we see its vast potential for both creation and destruction. In the face of religious extremism, religious pluralism, and globalization, it has become profoundly important to reassess what the three often-conflicting Abrahamic traditions affirm about being human before God.

Author : Ajay Kansal
Publisher : Epicurus Books
Page : 245 pages
File Size : 20,67 MB
Release : 2012-04-23
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9350294389

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Did gods create mankind, or did mankind create gods? Why, when and how did mankind begin to worship gods? Religious scriptures the world over claim that one or the other god made man, but science has not yet identified any supernatural power that created and governed human beings. Was it man who came up with the idea of gods to help him cope with his own fears? Could it be that ancient people attributed natural phenomena-unfathomable and frightening to them-to the working of invisible gods? What kind of sufferings or bewilderments made people bow before unseen powers or gods as we call them? When were these gods created? Who invented morals and methods of worship? Who wrote the ancient scriptures such as the Bible and the Vedas? Most crucially, have gods and the scriptures shaped our responses to the world around us? The Evolution of Gods seeks to answer these questions, and explains scientifically how, when and why religions and gods came into being. Ajay Kansal marshals anthropological and historical facts about the development of religions in a simple and straightforward manner to assert that it was mankind that created gods, and not the other way around.

Author : Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher : Vintage
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 47,98 MB
Release : 2015-11-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0307958337

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How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. 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.

Author : Alberta Parish
Publisher : iUniverse
Page : 161 pages
File Size : 39,37 MB
Release : 2020-06-29
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1663203334

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God is on Trial takes a deep look at modern-day belief systems that have given us ancient concepts of gods having also originated from astrotheology, which is a belief system based on the observation of the stars and the Zodiac. This book not only criticizes major world religions for the falsehoods and atrocities they’ve perpetuated on the masses, but it exposes the deeper meanings and truths in the Abrahamic belief traditions that were originally created to keep humanity from not only evolving as a species but to keep us under mind control and fear. God is on Trial also examines the major biblical accounts like the Genesis Creation and Flood, and the ancient myths from which they originate. This book seeks to educate those who have not yet awakened from their religious mind control programming and is also a testament to my personal experiences as a former believer who broke the chain of religious mind control and fear in my own life. I encourage anyone reading this book to keep an open mind, because what we have learned in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions is a distortion of the truth. And it is time for humanity to know the truth.

Author : Zondervan,
Publisher : Zondervan Academic
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 36,53 MB
Release : 2018-11-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0310595487

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Engaging with the Complex Subject of Theological Anthropology. Theological anthropology is a complicated doctrinal subject that needs to be elaborated with careful attention to its relation to other major doctrines. Among other things, it must confess the glory and misery of humanity, from creation in the image of God to the fall into a state of sin. It must reckon with a holism that spans distinctions between body, soul, and spirit, and a unity that encompasses male and female, as well as racial and cultural difference. The Christian Doctrine of Humanity represents the proceedings of the sixth annual Los Angeles Theology Conference, which sought, constructively and comprehensively, to engage the task of theological anthropology. The twelve diverse essays in this collection include discussions on: Human thought and the image of God. The relevance of biblical eschatology for philosophical anthropology. Living and flourishing in the Spirit. Vocation and the "oddness" of human nature. Each of the essays collected in this volume engage with Scripture as well as with others in the field—theologians both past and present, from different confessions—in order to provide constructive resources for contemporary systematic theology and to forge a theology for the future.