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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
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, […]
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
Book Description For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why–and how–it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a […]
Church and State in Canada
What makes Canada tick? How does its church-state situation compare with that of the United States? Do Canadians enjoy as much religious liberty as Americans? These questions and others are answered in this brief overview of how religion affects education, law, and politics in Canada.
Creationism’s Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design
Forrest and Gross expose the scientific failure, the religious essence, and the political ambitions of “intelligent design” creationism. They examine the movement’s “Wedge Strategy,” which has advanced and is succeeding through public relations rather than through scientific research. Analyzing the content and character of “intelligent design theory,” they highlight its threat to public education and […]
Death of Ivan Ilyich
Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich is required reading for anyone interested in existentialism. We follow the protagonist through the story of his life to discover some startling truths about the meaning of life and the purpose of death. If death is not an event in life, as Wittgenstein maintains, then eternal life belongs to those […]
Distress
Investigative reporter Andrew Worth turns down a documentary on a mysterious new mental illness “Distress,” or acute clinical anxiety syndrome, for another assignment. He’s on his way to the artifical island of Stateless, where the world’s top physicists are gathering to decide on a new TOE, or Theory of Everything, to replace Einstein’s outmoded legacy. […]
Either/Or
Kierkegaard’s brilliance lies in his ability to take such deeply personal experiences–love, lust, sorrow–and comment universally in a way that is at least unmatched in philosophy and probably in all of literature. He understood life in a way that seems obvious but is in fact merely fundamental to us all. The book is a collection […]
Excession
Diplomat Byr Gen-Hofoen has been selected by The Department of Special Circumstances to investigate a 2,500-year-old mystery–the reported existence and sudden disappearance of a star 50 times older than the universe itself. The only way to break the silence is to steal the soul of a long-dead starship captain who first encountered the star, and […]
Finding Darwin’s God
Question: Who made us? Answer #1: God made us. Answer #2: Evolution made us. Which is it? What is the true answer to the age-old question of where we came from? Is it even possible to know for sure? In Finding Darwin’s God, Kenneth R. Miller offers a surprising resolution to the evolutionism vs. creationism […]
Garden of Rama
The Ramans return in the third saga of extraterrestrial contact–a riveting odyssey of a future Eden. The phenomenon begun in Rendezvous with Rama and carried on in Rama II continues in a masterpiece of technological extrapolation–an exhilarating adventure into the heart of both the universe and humankind.
Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America’s Leading Atheists
Book Description After 19 years as an evangelical preacher, missionary, and Christian songwriter, Dan Barker “threw out the bathwater and discovered there is no baby there.” Barker, who is now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (America’s largest organization of atheists and agnostics), describes the intellectual and psychological path he followed in moving from […]
Hitler, the War and the Pope
Direct rebuttal to John Cornwell’s Hitler’s Pope.
