Faith Versus Fact
Faith Versus Fact

Author: Jerry A. Coyne

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2016-05-17

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0143108263

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

“A superbly argued book.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion The New York Times bestselling author of Why Evolution is True explains why any attempt to make religion compatible with science is doomed to fail In this provocative book, evolutionary biologist Jerry A. Coyne lays out in clear, dispassionate detail why the toolkit of science, based on reason and empirical study, is reliable, while that of religion—including faith, dogma, and revelation—leads to incorrect, untestable, or conflicting conclusions. Coyne is responding to a national climate in which more than half of Americans don’t believe in evolution, members of Congress deny global warming, and long-conquered childhood diseases are reappearing because of religious objections to inoculation, and he warns that religious prejudices in politics, education, medicine, and social policy are on the rise. Extending the bestselling works of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, he demolishes the claims of religion to provide verifiable “truth” by subjecting those claims to the same tests we use to establish truth in science. Coyne irrefutably demonstrates the grave harm—to individuals and to our planet—in mistaking faith for fact in making the most important decisions about the world we live in. Praise for Faith Versus Fact: “A profound and lovely book . . . showing that the honest doubts of science are better . . . than the false certainties of religion.” —Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith

Religious Difference in a Secular Age
Religious Difference in a Secular Age

Author: Saba Mahmood

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2015-11-03

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0691153280

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How secular governance in the Middle East is making life worse—not better—for religious minorities The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East is often attributed to the failure of secularism to take root in the region. Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges this assessment by examining four cornerstones of secularism—political and civil equality, minority rights, religious freedom, and the legal separation of private and public domains. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Egypt with Coptic Orthodox Christians and Bahais—religious minorities in a predominantly Muslim country—Saba Mahmood shows how modern secular governance has exacerbated religious tensions and inequalities rather than reduced them. Tracing the historical career of secular legal concepts in the colonial and postcolonial Middle East, she explores how contradictions at the very heart of political secularism have aggravated and amplified existing forms of Islamic hierarchy, bringing minority relations in Egypt to a new historical impasse. Through a close examination of Egyptian court cases and constitutional debates about minority rights, conflicts around family law, and controversies over freedom of expression, Mahmood invites us to reflect on the entwined histories of secularism in the Middle East and Europe. A provocative work of scholarship, Religious Difference in a Secular Age challenges us to rethink the promise and limits of the secular ideal of religious equality.

Religion Vs. Science
Religion Vs. Science

Author: Elaine Howard Ecklund

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190650621

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

At the end of a five-year journey to find out what religious Americans think about science, Ecklund and Scheitle emerge with the real story of the relationship between science and religion in American culture. Based on the most comprehensive survey ever done-representing a range of religious traditions and faith positions-Religion vs. Science is a story that is more nuanced and complex than the media and pundits would lead us to believe. The way religious Americans approach science is shaped by two fundamental questions: What does science mean for the existence and activity of God? What does science mean for the sacredness of humanity? How these questions play out as individual believers think about science both challenges stereotypes and highlights the real tensions between religion and science. Ecklund and Scheitle interrogate the widespread myths that religious people dislike science and scientists and deny scientific theories. Religion vs. Science is a definitive statement on a timely, popular subject. Rather than a highly conceptual approach to historical debates, philosophies, or personal opinions, Ecklund and Scheitle give readers a facts-on-the-ground, empirical look at what religious Americans really understand and think about science.

Religion, Pluralism, and Reconciling Difference
Religion, Pluralism, and Reconciling Difference

Author: W. Cole Durham, Jr.

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-11-22

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1317067207

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

We live in an increasingly pluralized world. This sociological reality has become the irreversible destiny of humankind. Even once religiously homogeneous societies are becoming increasingly diverse. Religious freedom is modernity’s most profound if sometimes forgotten answer to the resulting social pressures, but the tide of pluralization threatens to overwhelm that freedom’s stabilizing force. Religion, Pluralism, and Reconciling Difference is aimed at exploring differing ways of grappling with the resulting tensions, and then asking, will the tensions ultimately yield poisonous polarization that erodes all hope of meaningful community? Or can the tradition and the institutions protecting freedom of religion or belief be developed and applied in ways that (still) foster productive interactions, stability, and peace? This volume brings together vital and thoughtful contributions treating aspects of these mounting worldwide tensions concerning the relationship between religious diversity and social harmony. The first section explores controversies surrounding religious pluralism from different starting points, including religious, political, and legal standpoints. The second section examines different geographical perspectives on pluralism. Experts from North and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East address these issues and suggest not only how social institutions can reduce tensions, but also how religious pluralism itself can bolster needed civil society.

Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference
Religion, the Secular, and the Politics of Sexual Difference

Author: Linell E. Cady

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-11-12

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0231162480

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Global struggles over women’s roles, rights, and dress have taken center stage in a drama that casts the secular and the religious in tense if not violent opposition. Advocates for equality speak of the issue in terms of rights and modern progress while reactionaries ground their authority in religious and scriptural appeals. Both sides presume women’s emancipation is tied to secularization. This volume upsets these certainties by blending diverse voices and traditions, both secular and religious, in studies historicizing, questioning, and testing the implicit links between secularism and expanded freedoms for women. Rather than treat secularism as the answer to conflicts over gender and sexuality, these essays show how it structures the conditions generating them.

The Christian Difference
The Christian Difference

Author: Publishing House Concordia

Publisher:

Published: 2019-01-08

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 9780758655660

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Christian Difference: An Explanation & Comparison of World Religions is an easy-to-read comparative based on content from experts and from actual sacred texts of the various world religions and global cults/sects.

Navigating Religious Difference in Spiritual Care and Counseling
Navigating Religious Difference in Spiritual Care and Counseling

Author: Mazvita Machinga

Publisher: Claremont Studies in Interreli

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9781946230324

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume on spiritual care and counseling brings an interreligious sensitivity to the tasks of spiritual and pastoral care. The volume contains individual chapters written in honor of Kathleen Greider of Claremont School of Theology.

Difference in Philosophy of Religion
Difference in Philosophy of Religion

Author: Philip Goodchild

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-11-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 135172472X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This title was first published in 2003. Can difference be subordinated to identity, simplicity or diversity? Or does it make a difference to the entire way in which we think? This book challenges the dominant agenda in the discipline of philosophy of religion by exploring issues of difference that have hitherto been obscured. It draws together some of the most innovative work in philosophical thinking about religion by some of the most creative and radical new thinkers in the field. Moving beyond debates between believers and skeptics, the contributors draw on critical theory to address differences in rationality, gender, tradition, culture and politics, showing how it is possible to think differently. Assumptions about rational neutrality, belief, tradition, experience and identity that undergird the rational exploration of classical theism are deconstructed. Instead it becomes important to explore a critical ethical reasoning, religious performance, internal religious tensions, location in culture, and a relation to exteriority as the groundwork for a future philosophy of religion.

Between Muslims
Between Muslims

Author: J. Andrew Bush

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-09-01

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 150361459X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Within the broad contours of Islamic traditions, Muslims are enjoined to fast during the month of Ramadan, they are invited to a disciplined practice of prayer, and they are offered the Quran as the divine revelation in the most beautiful verbal form. But what happens if Muslims choose not to fast, or give up prayer, or if the Quran's beauty seems inaccessible? When Muslims do not take up the path of piety, what happens to their relationships with more devout Muslims who are neighbors, friends, and kin? Between Muslims provides an ethnographic account of Iraqi Kurdish Muslims who turn away from devotional piety yet remain intimately engaged with Islamic traditions and with other Muslims. Andrew Bush offers a new way to understand religious difference in Islam, rejecting simple stereotypes about ethnic or sectarian identities. Integrating textual analysis of poetry, sermons, and Islamic history into accounts of everyday life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Between Muslims illuminates the interplay of attraction and aversion to Islam among ordinary Muslims.

Science Vs. Religion
Science Vs. Religion

Author: Elaine Howard Ecklund

Publisher: OUP USA

Published: 2010-05-06

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0195392981

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

That the longstanding antagonism between science and religion is irreconcilable has been taken for granted. And in the wake of recent controversies over teaching intelligent design and the ethics of stem-cell research, the divide seems as unbridgeable as ever.In Science vs. Religion, Elaine Howard Ecklund investigates this unexamined assumption in the first systematic study of what scientists actually think and feel about religion. In the course of her research, Ecklund surveyed nearly 1,700 scientists and interviewed 275 of them. She finds that most of what we believe about the faith lives of elite scientists is wrong. Nearly 50 percent of them are religious. Many others are what she calls "spiritual entrepreneurs," seeking creative ways to work with the tensions between science and faith outside the constraints of traditional religion. The book centers around vivid portraits of 10 representative men and women working in the natural and social sciences at top American research universities. Ecklund's respondents run the gamut from Margaret, a chemist who teaches a Sunday-school class, to Arik, a physicist who chose not to believe in God well before he decided to become a scientist. Only a small minority are actively hostile to religion. Ecklund reveals how scientists-believers and skeptics alike-are struggling to engage the increasing number of religious students in their classrooms and argues that many scientists are searching for "boundary pioneers" to cross the picket lines separating science and religion.With broad implications for education, science funding, and the thorny ethical questions surrounding stem-cell research, cloning, and other cutting-edge scientific endeavors, Science vs. Religion brings a welcome dose of reality to the science and religion debates.