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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
Slaves to Faith: A Therapist Looks Inside the Fundamentalist Mind
Description Based upon the author’s twenty years of classroom and clinical study, Slaves of Faith explores and explains the emotionally laden dynamic at work in the fundamentalist mind. As Dr. Mercer posits, the fundamentalist is fundamentally driven by anxiety layered over a fragile sense of self-identity constructed upon a system of beliefs that is both […]
Story of Philosophy
An endlessly inspiring and instructive chronicle of the world’s great thinkers, from Aristotle to Santayana. Eleven years of research and three years of writing went into the creation of this work, which should appeal to the layman as well as educators.
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 […]
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 Borderlands of Science
Subtitled: Where Orthodoxy Meets Heresy Shermer argues that science is the best lens through which to view the world, but he recognizes that it’s often difficult for most of us to tell where valid science leaves off and borderland science begins. To help us, Shermer looks at a range of topics that put the boundary […]
The Christian Right in American Politics
From the first rumblings of the Moral Majority over twenty years ago, the Christian Right has been marshalling its forces and maneuvering its troops in an effort to reshape the landscape of American politics. It has fascinated social scientists and journalists as the first right-wing social movement in postwar America to achieve significant political and […]
The Dream of Eternal Life: Biomedicine, Aging, and Immortality
Can we grow old without dying? Why do we have to grow old at all? In this fascinating book Mark Benecke investigates the biological meaning of life and death and the prospects for extending human longevity, or even achieving immortality. The first section of the book discusses the biological fundamentals of why death exists and […]
The Ethics of Ambiguity
In this philosophical essay, Beauvoir attempts to build an existential ethics on the universal basis of human freedom. Those interested in understanding Sartre would do well to read this book first since Beauvoir renders Sartre’s sometimes confusing technical terms in clear language.
The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of Eternity
Two brilliant young physicists, Fred Adams and Greg Laughlin, captured the attention of the world when they announced they had identified the five ages of time. But is it possible for us to know the complete life story of the universe from beginning to end? The astonishing truth is that recent study has defined the […]
The Heathen’s Guide to World Religions
The Heathen’s Guide to World Religions is the history they don’t teach in Sunday school. With a sharp wit and a flair for research, author William Hopper brings the world’s religions back down to earth, dissecting the traditional tales and exposing the treachery, deceit, and hilarity at the heart of the myths. The Heathen’s Guide […]
The Inflationary Universe
Just about everyone in the scientific community accepts the theory that our universe began in a “big bang” — but that theory leaves numerous unanswered questions about why the cosmos formed in just the manner we observe today. In The Inflationary Universe, physicist Alan Guth recounts his and others’ struggle to expound a theory that […]
The Life of the Cosmos
Lee Smolin is not afraid to think big–really, really big. His theory of cosmic evolution by the natural selection of black-hole universes makes what we can experience into an infinitesimal, yet crucial, part of an ever-larger whole. Smolin says, “the new view of the universe is light, in all its senses, because what Darwin has […]
The Militant Agnostic
With sword and buckler, E. Haldeman-Julius, publisher of the famed Blue Books, declared war on the enemies of freethought. This wide-ranging, candid, and humorous collection of articles and essays attacking organized religion in its various forms, covers such topics as biblical errancy, the miraculous, the number of churches in America, the skepticism of Mark Twain, […]
The Nature of All Being
Book Description In this comprehensive study of Wittgenstein’s modal theorizing, Bradley offers a radical reinterpretation of Wittgenstein’s early thought and presents both an interpretive and a philosophical thesis. A unique feature of Bradley’s analysis is his reliance on Wittgenstein’s Notebooks, which he believes offer indispensable guidance to the interpretation of difficult passages in the Tractatus. […]
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy
“This is a comprehensive enyclopedia of philosophy covering all the main issues and terminology used in historical and contemporary philosophy. It is a good starting point for getting a feel for what issues are involved in a topic such as epistemology or the philosophy of mind. It also includes charts illustrating how various branches of […]
The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief: Searching for Angels and the Parent-God
Book Description “Angels are indeed messengers, with extraordinary things to tell us, but they do not come from the supernatural realm, from God, from …” In this insightful new study, M.D. Faber, whose previous work on the psychology of religion has won widespread critical acclaim, offers a comprehensive, naturalistic explanation of religious experience from the […]
The Science of Morality: The Individual, Community, and Future Generations
This is an excellent example of proving with facts and argument that ethics can be a branch of science, and that the nature of man and the universe does entail certain universal moral truths without any reference to God or the supernatural. Some really excellent work in this arena has been done the past few […]
The Supreme Court on Church and State
This collection of major Supreme Court decisions offers a non-partisan guide to the Court’s opinions on the meanings and implications of the First Amendment.
The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism contains Rand’s writings on ethics and political theory. The essay “The Objectivist Ethics” contains her most definitive statement concerning the metaphysical foundation of her ethical system. “The Ethics of Emergencies” and “The ‘Conflicts’ of Men’s Interests” supplement and elaborates upon points made in this essay. In […]
Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism
The face of creationism has been through some major plastic surgery in the past decade or so. The leading proponents of “intelligent design theory” have left the ranting flat-earth types behind and found respected positions in the academic world from which to launch attacks on mainstream science. Philosopher of science Robert T. Pennock has explored […]
Visions: How Science Will Revolutionize the 21st Century
In a spellbinding narrative that brings together the cutting-edge research of today’s foremost scientists, Michio Kaku examines the three scientific revolutions that have reshaped the twentieth century–quantum mechanics, bio-genetics, and artificial intelligence–and tells how they will dramatically alter science and the way in which people will live in the 21st century.
When Prayer Fails: Faith Healing, Children, and the Law
Book Description Relying on religious traditions that are as old as their faith itself, many devout Christians turn to prayer rather than medicine when their children fall victim to illness or injury. Faith healers claim that their practices are effective in restoring health–more effective, they say, than modern medicine. But, over the past century, hundreds […]
Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith
Description Richard Carrier explains the four reasons he rejects Christianity, describing the four facts that—were they different—he would be a believer. Those four facts are God’s silence, God’s inaction, the lack of evidence, and the way the universe looks exactly like a godless universe would, and not at all like a Christian universe would—even down […]
Yours, Isaac Asimov : A Lifetime of Letters
Isaac Asimov was one of the most prolific authors of our time. When he died in 1992 at the age of seventy-two, he had published more than 470 books innearly every category of fiction and nonfiction. Asimov was a prodigious correspondent as well as a prolific author. During his professional career he received more than […]
3001 : The Final Odyssey
One thousand years after the Jupiter mission to explore the mysterious Monolith had been destroyed, after Dave Bowman was transformed into the Star Child, Frank Poole drifted into space, frozen and forgotten, leaving the supercomputer HAL inoperable. But now Poole has returned to life, awakening in a world far different from the one he left […]
A Meeting with Medusa (Abridged Audio Cassette)
After the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Clarke became perhaps the best known living Sci-Fi writer in the world. Using his inherent sense of humor and personal flair for adventure, Clarke combines the worlds of science and literature. The three award-winning stories in this volume take the listener into the realms of space adventure, […]
All in the Mind: A Farewell to God
Since childhood, Ludovic Kennedy has questioned the existence of God, and he is not alone; at the end of the twentieth century, with 2000 years of Christian teaching behind us, the majority of the population no longer go to church. Now in ‘the most important book I have ever written’ he discusses how society has […]
Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime 2
The second volume of the spectacular science-fiction thriller evolving from the works of Arthur C.Clarke, grandmaster of science fiction and author of 2001: A Space Odyssey.. Her code name is Sparta. Her beauty veils a mysterious past and abilities of superhuman dimension-the product of advanced biotech engineering. When a team of scientists is trapped in […]
Atheists, Agnostics, and Deists in America: A Brief History
When did atheism first appear in America? Why did many of the Founding Fathers become deists? Are atheism and deism a threat to the Christian, Jewish, and Moslem religions? The book not only attempts to answer these questions, but also explores the influence of such philosophers as Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius and Voltaire on American leaders. […]
Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
They were the men most trusted: Father Geoghan, Father Birmingham, Father Shanley, Father Trupia, and hundreds of others. They were the rulers of the Catholic Church: Cardinal Law, Cardinal Egan, Cardinal Mahony, and others. They had all taken vows to live by the gospel and to care for their parishioners. And they were believed. Now, […]
