The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies–How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths
Description Bestselling author Michael Shermer’s comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. In this work synthesizing thirty years of research, psychologist, historian of science, and the world’s best-known skeptic Michael Shermer upends the traditional thinking about how humans form beliefs about the world. Simply put, beliefs come […]
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time
Rosemary and Peter Grant and those assisting them have spend twenty years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos studying natural selection. They recognize each individual bird on the island, when there are four hundred at the time of the author’s visit, or when there are over a thousand. They have observed about twenty […]
The Battle for Christmas
Book Description A Pulitzer Prize finalist, this scholarly analysis of our modern celebration of Christmas pulls together a thoroughly convincing case for the widely accepted notion that it is a 19th-century creation, indeed a deliberate reformation and taming of a holiday with wilder pagan origins. Christmas was set at December 25 in the fourth century, […]
The Battle for America’s Families
Gilson approaches the religious right phenomenon through the lens of feminism. Along the way she tackles such questions as “What are family values?” and “Can right-wing family values fix social wrongs?” In her exploration of the roots of the religious right, Gilson also responds to the assumptions made in the religious right that families are […]
The Autobiography of Charles Darwin 1809-1882
Charles Darwin’s Autobiography was first published in 1887, five years after his death. It was a bowdlerized edition: Darwin’s family, attempting to protect his posthumous reputation, had deleted all the passages they considered too personal or controversial. The present complete edition did not appear until 1959, one hundred years after the publication of The Origin […]
The Atheist’s Creed
Description In The Atheist’s Creed Dr. Michael Palmer presents the most comprehensive anthology of the major philosophical arguments for atheism. While the so-called ‘new atheism’ of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and others, has attracted considerable publicity, it is the philosophical arguments that have been presented down through the ages that provide the principal […]
The Atheist Debater’s Handbook
A very basic introduction to atheism.
The Art of Living Consciously
In The Art of Living Consciously, Dr. Nathaniel Branden, our foremost authority on self-esteem, takes us into new territory, exploring the actions of our minds when they are operating as our life and well-being require — and also when they are not. No other book illuminates so clearly what true mindfulness means. … Today we […]
The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right
The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right by Didi Herman is a smart, thorough, concise book describing why and how conservative Protestant evangelicals employ antigay rhetoric in politics, journalism, and worship. Herman–a legal scholar at Keele University in Great Britain–has a convincing mastery of sociology, theology, rhetoric, and politics, in addition to her […]
The Anti-Christ
“In truth, the Anti-Christ is as necessary to the completeness of the whole of Nietzsche’s system as the keystone is to the arch. All the curvers of his speculation lead up to it. What he flung himself against, from the beginning to the end of his days of writing, was always, in the last analysis, […]
The Anthropic Cosmological Principle
Is there any connection between the vastness of the Universe and the existence of life within it on a small planet out in the suburbs of the Milky Way? Could there be other universes? How large is the range of conceivable universes that can give rise to living observers? What is the past history and […]
The Annotated H.P. Lovecraft
Offers four of the author’s best short stories along with the eerie novella, At the Mountains of Madness, complemented by a scholarly introduction, hundreds of detailed annotations, and photographs and illustrations depicting the author’s life and work.
The Age of the Earth
How old is the earth? Approximately 4.54 billion years. How do we know that? Read the book!
The Age of Reason: Examination of the Prophecies
Until the publication of this annotated edition, Thomas Paine’s third part of “The Age Of Reason” was extremely rare and almost unknown. Titled “Examination of the Prophecies,” the book examines all the supposed prophecies of Jesus in the Old Testament alleged by the evangelists of the New Testament. With great wit and penetrating logic, Paine […]
The Age of Reason
Thomas Paine, defender of freedom, independence, and rational common sense during America’s turbulent revolutionary period, offers insights into religion which ring sharply true more than two centuries later. This unabrdiged edition of The Age of Reason sets forth Paine’s provocative observations of the place of religion in society.
The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus
In their groundbreaking bestseller, The Five Gospels, Robert Funk and The Jesus Seminar offered their controversial analysis of what Jesus really said. Now, in The Acts of Jesus, these distinguished scholars reveal their startling assessment of what Jesus really did — and didn’t — do. Publishers Weekly calls the Jesus Seminar “one of the most […]
The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God
Book Description (Finalist, 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards, Science Category) You’ve probably seen it before: a human brain dramatically lit from the side, the camera circling it like a helicopter shot of Stonehenge, and a modulated baritone voice exalting the brain’s elegant design in reverent tones. To which this book says: Pure nonsense. In a […]
That Godless Court?
Here’s a book that’s wonderfully long on information and mercifully brief but very cogent in its author’s opinions. Coauthor of a text on church-state Supreme Court adjudication, Flowers is ideally informed to present the constitutional reasoning behind Court decisions in church-state cases. What’s more, he writes with crystalline clarity and great impetus; his clean prose […]
Testimony: A Philosophical Study
The role of testimony in the getting of reliable belief or knowledge is a central but neglected epistemological issue. Western philosophical tradition has paid scant attention to the individual thinker’s reliance upon the word of others; yet this reliance is both extensive and often hidden from view. Professor Coady begins by exploring the nature and […]
Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence
Beneath the histories of religious traditions – from biblical wars to crusading ventures and great acts of martyrdom – violence has lurked as a shadowy presence. Images of death have never been far from the heart of religion’s power to stir the imagination. In this wide-ranging and erudite book, Mark Juergensmeyer asks one of the […]
Teranesia
Nine-year-old Prabir Suresh lives alone with his baby sister, Madhusree, and his biologist parents on a tropical Indonesian isle. Teranesia is so small and remote, it’s not on the maps, and its strange native species of butterfly remained undiscovered until the 21st century. Prabir never wants to leave, but war forces him to flee with […]
Ten Philosophical Mistakes
Adler’s general argument is this: the important modern philosophers, beginning with Descartes, made certain errors which have had disastrous results for contemporary notions of the objects of consciousness, the nature of the human mind, the nature of language, of knowledge, of moral principles, of free will, and even the nature of happiness. Succeeding philosophers, especially […]
Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism
In the 28 years since Roe v. Wade legal in the United States, the right of women to secure a safe abortion has been under almost constant assault. In court after court, community after community, state after state, anti-abortion forces have fought long, bitter, too-often violent battles to shut down access to safe, legal abortions. […]
Tales of the Rational
Engaging, compelling, witty essays that put in perspective some of the most fascinating scientific and pseudo-scientific claims of the 20th century. Includes discussions of: atheism, straw-man arguments, creationism, debating creationists and theists, evolutionary biology, Christian apologetics, critiques of modern science, the search for extraterrestrial life, the search for the origins of life, chaos theory, and […]
Tales from the ‘White Hart’
Long before Douglas Adams ever thought of a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Arthur C. Clark brought off a successful marriage between humor and science fiction. Whereas Adams’ humor is broad, lowbrow, and slapstick, Clark’s is intelligent, dry, and refined.
Tales from Planet Earth
Collection of short stories.
Taking Responsibility: Self-Reliance and the Accountable Life
The bestselling author of The Psychology of Self-Esteem presents an illuminating guide to self-realization through self-reliance and a vision of a society transformed by a new ethical individualism.
System of Nature (Volume 1)
The System of Nature, known as the Atheists’ Bible, is the most radical expression of atheist materialism to come from the eighteenth century milieu of the philosophes in Paris. D’Holbach (1723-1789) was a central figure of the French intellectual enlightenment, contributing prolifically to Diderot’s Encyclopedie, and undertaking numerous translations of British free thought. His intention […]
Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are
Product Description: In 1996 Joseph LeDoux’s The Emotional Brain presented a revelatory examination of the biological bases of our emotions and memories. Now, the world-renowned expert on the brain has produced with a groundbreaking work that tells a more profound story: how the little spaces between the neurons–the brain’s synapses–are the channels through which we […]
