For the first time, a former high-level insider provides a behind-the-scenes look at the private world of James Dobson, one of the most powerful (yet clandestine) figures waging religious war against mainstream America. In James Dobson’s War On America we learn what only an insider could know about James Dobson, who has the power and […]
Meyebela, or “girlhood,” is a term coined by Nasrin (“Shame”) because no term for a girl’s childhood exists in Bengali. Nasrin, a Bangladeshi doctor-turned-writer, has been living in exile since 1994–ever since Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against her for her criticism of Islam’s repression of women. In this powerful memoir of her Muslim childhood, […]
This is a literary, not a philosophical work, but it deals with issues fundamental to the human quest for meaning and with the question of our relation to being. Sartre paints a portrait of a life lived in reaction to the seeming absurdities underlying the most fundamental metaphysical principles. The reaction is poetic: in place […]
With the passion of a true poet, Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99-55 B.C.E.) expounds the most coherent and eloquent system of materialism surviving from the ancient world. Developing the atomic theory of his master, Epicurus, Lucretius discusses the motion of atoms, natural phenomena, sensation, free will, and the soul’s relation to the body. Most importantly, […]
Book Description Parenting Beyond Belief is a book for loving and thoughtful parents who wish to raise their children without religion. There are scores of books available for religious parents. Now there’s one for the rest of us. It’s hard enough to live a secular life in a religious world. And bringing up children without […]
Description An essential work on historical methods. Almost all experts agree that the Jesus of the Bible is a composite of myth, legend, and some historical evidence. So what can we know about the real Jesus? For more than one hundred fifty years, scholars have attempted to answer this question. Unfortunately, the “Quest for the […]
Paul Edwards’ Reincarnation surveys the state of the evidence for and against reincarnation, from the more dubious claims that feelings of deja vu, LSD experiences, and the existence of child prodigies provide indirect evidence for reincarnation to the more widespread claims that “past life” hypnotic regressions and spontaneous “memories” of past lives in children provide […]
Several times in the distant past, catastrophic extinctions have swept the Earth, causing more than half of all species – from single-celled organisms to awe-inspiring behemoths – to suddenly vanish and be replaced by new life forms. Today the rich diversity of life on the Earth is again in grave danger – and the cause […]
Uses a question and answer format, with illustrations, to explain why the sky is blue, what a rainbow is, what atoms are, how gravity works, and many other scientific facts and events.
Arthur Dent is out of his bathrobe, in love, and wondering why the dolphins said…So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. Was the earth really demolished? Why did all the dolphins disappear? What is God’s final message to His creatures? Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and the new voivoid gang are off (by commercial airline) […]
This book contains manuscripts of Roberts (who was important in the early Mormon church) in which he questions the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and admits that Joseph Smith was capable of inventing the Book of Mormon.
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 […]
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, […]
A darkly brilliant novel of self-discovery the cutting edge of experimental fiction. It leads from nowhere to nowhere, the mysterious world-spanning structure on which everyone seems to live. Rescued from the sea, devoid of personality or memory, all John Orr knows is the Bridge, his persistent dreams of war, and his desire for Chief Engineer […]
Description Humanists have long contended that morality is a strictly human concern and should be independent of religious creeds and dogma. This principle was clearly articulated in the two Humanist Manifestos issued in the mid-twentieth century and in Humanist Manifesto 2000, which appeared at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Now distinguished economist Rodrigue Tremblay […]
The Early Ayn Rand contains previously unavailable short stories and plays from Rand’s early writing career. Of particular interest are cuts from The Fountainhead which detail Roark’s early relationships with Henry Cameron and Vesta Dunning, Roark’s first lover.
The Fountainhead has become an enduring piece of literature, more popular now than when published in 1943. On the surface, it is a story of one man, Howard Roark, and his struggles as an architect in the face of a successful rival, Peter Keating, and a newspaper columnist, Ellsworth Toohey. But the book addresses a […]
In The Jesus Legend, G. A. Wells explains how the story of Jesus developed through telling and re-telling, from an early version in the letters of Paul (who does not mention Jesus in connection with any specific time or place) to the more elaborate and detailed pictures later presented in the New Testament gospels.
The crowning achievement of any professional writer is to get paid twice for the same material: write a piece for one publisher and then tweak it just enough that you can turn around and sell it to someone else. While it’s specious to accuse Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke of this, fans of both […]
Description In recent years a number of bestselling books have forcefully argued that belief in God can no longer be defended on rational or empirical grounds, and that the scientific worldview has rendered obsolete the traditional beliefs held by Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The authors of these books—Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, […]
The Perfect Heresy chronicles the life and death of the Cathar movement, one of western civilization’s most mind-boggling tales. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians, thrived across what is now southern France. Supported by the leading nobility of the region, the Cathars held revolutionary beliefs that threatened […]
Anyone interested in Book of Mormon archaeology will be fascinated by the amazing story of Thomas Stuart Ferguson. The reader accompanies Ferguson on his exploratory journeys to Mexico and Guatemala in search of the remains of Book of Mormon peoples, assisted through generous funding by the LDS church. He became a closet doubter but made […]
Written by a professional biblical scholar, this is the first book that explores the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament through a specifically secular optic. Berlinerblau argues that secular intellectual culture is on the decline and that familiarity with religion is the only viable option for its survival. Today’s secularists too often have very little accurate knowledge about […]
Book Description Though the United States is the world leader in science and technology, many of its citizens display a shocking ignorance regarding basic scientific facts. Recent surveys have revealed that only about half of Americans realize that humans have never lived side by side with dinosaurs, and about the same number reject the idea […]
Written by Mark Twain during the Philippine-American War in the first decade of the twentieth century, The War Prayer tells of a patriotic church service held to send the town’s young men off to war. During the service, a stranger enters and addresses the gathering. He tells the patriotic crowd that their prayers for victory […]
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