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Nature is enough: enough to allow us to find meaning in life and to answer our religious sensibilities. This is the position of religious naturalists, who deny the existence of a deity and a supernatural realm. In this book, Loyal Rue answers critics by describing how religious naturalism can provide a satisfying vision of the meaning of human existence. The work begins with a discussion of how to evaluate the meaning of life itself, referencing a range of thought from ancient Greek philosophy to the Abrahamic traditions to the Enlightenment to contemporary process and postmodern philosophies. Ultimately proposing meaning as an emergent property of living organisms, Rue writes that a meaningful life comes through happiness and virtue. Spiritual qualities that combine evolutionary cosmology and biocentric morality are described: reverence, gratitude, awe, humility, relatedness, compassion, and hope. Rue looks at why religious naturalism is not currently more of a movement, but nevertheless predicts that it will become the prevailing religious sensibility.
Annotation If religion is not about God, then what on earth is it about? Loyal Rue contends that religion is a series of strategies that aims to influence human nature so that we might think, feel, and act in ways that are good for us, both individually and collectively.
Only a noble lie can save us from the psychological and social chaos now threatened by the spread of skepticism about the meaning of life and the universe.
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The author, a prominent French philosopher, writes of life under the German occupation
In this provocative new study, Professor Martinich shows that religious concerns pervade Leviathan and indicates how, for Hobbes, Christian doctrine is not politically destabilising and is consistent with modern science.
Over the past decade a strident public debate has arisen about the nature and origin of religions. Controversies include how exactly religion evolved, whether by individual or group selection, if it is adaptive, and if not, whether and how it is a side effect of evolution. This volume focuses on the issue of naturalizing religion: on the ways in which cognitive science and social sciences have treated religion as a natural phenomenon. It questions whether religious behaviour, institutions, and experiences can be explained in natural terms. The editor brings together some of the best published work on the definition of 'religion', intelligent design and the evolution of religion.
In a compelling read for anyone interested in where we came from and where we're going, Everybody's Story offers an exhilarating tour of natural history that illuminates the evolution of matter, life, and consciousness. As old myths, religious stories, and other shared narratives of humankind are increasingly viewed as intellectually implausible and morally irrelevant, they become less likely to fulfill their original purposeāto give people answers and provide a sense of stability and peace in daily life. Loyal Rue restores that imbalance with a new story based on fact. Rue, author of a New York Times Notable Book of 1994, By the Grace of Guile: The Role of Deception in Natural History in Human Affairs, now provides an evolutionary tour recounting our shared "epic of evolution."
Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature explores the nature of religion and, in James' observation, its divorce from science when studied academically. After publication in 1902 it quickly became a canonical text of philosophy and psychology, remaining in print through the entire century. "Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see 'the liver' determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind."
Jeremy Sherman distills Terrence Deacon's breakthrough natural science hypothesis for the emergence of agents and agency, selves and aims in an otherwise aimless universe. The theory cuts a new path through the dualistic spirit vs. mechanism debate, unifying the hard and soft sciences and suggesting new solutions to philosophical mysteries.