History And Belief

Author : Matthew Kneale
Publisher : Catapult
ISBN 13 : 1619023717
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book An Atheist's History of Belief written by Matthew Kneale and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What first prompted prehistoric man, sheltering in the shadows of deep caves, to call upon the realm of the spirits? And why has belief thrived since, shaping thousands of generations of shamans, pharaohs, Aztec priests and Mayan rulers, Jews, Buddhists, Christians, Nazis, and Scientologists? As our dreams and nightmares have changed over the millennia, so have our beliefs. The gods we created have evolved and mutated with us through a narrative fraught with human sacrifice, political upheaval and bloody wars. Belief was man's most epic labor of invention. It has been our closest companion, and has followed mankind across the continents and through history.

Author : Ethan H. Shagan
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691184941
Total Pages : 408 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Birth of Modern Belief written by Ethan H. Shagan and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-08 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating history of how religious belief lost its uncontested status in the West This landmark book traces the history of belief in the Christian West from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, revealing for the first time how a distinctively modern category of belief came into being. Ethan Shagan focuses not on what people believed, which is the normal concern of Reformation history, but on the more fundamental question of what people took belief to be. Shagan shows how religious belief enjoyed a special prestige in medieval Europe, one that set it apart from judgment, opinion, and the evidence of the senses. But with the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation, the question of just what kind of knowledge religious belief was—and how it related to more mundane ways of knowing—was forced into the open. As the warring churches fought over the answer, each claimed belief as their exclusive possession, insisting that their rivals were unbelievers. Shagan challenges the common notion that modern belief was a gift of the Reformation, showing how it was as much a reaction against Luther and Calvin as it was against the Council of Trent. He describes how dissidents on both sides came to regard religious belief as something that needed to be justified by individual judgment, evidence, and argument. Brilliantly illuminating, The Birth of Modern Belief demonstrates how belief came to occupy such an ambivalent place in the modern world, becoming the essential category by which we express our judgments about science, society, and the sacred, but at the expense of the unique status religion once enjoyed.

Author : Matt Stefon Assistant Editor, Religion
Publisher : The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc
ISBN 13 : 1615304932
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.36/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Christianity written by Matt Stefon Assistant Editor, Religion and published by The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the basic doctrines, history, and religious practices of Christianity, including Christian concepts of human nature, and profiles famous Christian figures throughout history.

Author : Robert Eric Frykenberg
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9780802807397
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History and Belief written by Robert Eric Frykenberg and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 1996 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this study of the relationship between history and belief, the author shows how our underlying commitments--whether religious or ideological--determine which events we find significant enough to remember as "history", yet how those same beliefs distort our understandings of events, leaving them incomplete and contingent.

Author : Gary Scott Smith
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 1613 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Religious History [3 volumes] written by Gary Scott Smith and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 1613 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mix of thematic essays, reference entries, and primary source documents covering the role of religion in American history and life from the colonial era to the present. Often controversial, religion has been an important force in shaping American culture. Religious convictions strongly influenced colonial and state governments as well as the United States as a new republic. Religious teachings, values, and practices deeply affected political structures and policies, economic ideology and practice, educational institutions and instruction, social norms and customs, marriage, and family life. By analyzing religion's interaction with American culture and prominent religious leaders and ideologies, this reference helps readers to better understand many fascinating, often controversial, religious leaders, ideas, events, and topics. The work is organized in three volumes devoted to particular periods. Volume one includes a chronology highlighting key events related to religion in American history and an introduction that overviews religion in America during the period covered by the volume, and roughly 10 essays that explore significant themes. These essays are followed by approximately 120 alphabetically arranged reference entries providing objective, fundamental information about topics related to religion in America. Each volume presents nearly 50 primary source documents, each introduced by a contextualizing headnote. A selected, general bibliography closes volume three.

Author : Becker J.r.
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781733475235
Total Pages : 36 pages
Book Rating : 4.30/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Annabelle & Aiden written by Becker J.r. and published by . This book was released on 2021-09-20 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did our earliest beliefs form? What were they, and what do they say about us? Tardigrade Tom takes our characters on a historical journey of world religions! From the earliest humans who believed everything around them (trees, rocks, skies) could think and feel - like they could. To deep inside dark caves, where early humans draw animal spirits on the walls, and watch shamans sway, illuminated by nearby fires. Watch us build amazing temples and tombs, and give offerings and praise, as we learn ideas of reciprocity and trade. Explore world religions & cultures chronologically, such as: Animism Shamanism Mesopotamia The Egyptians Indo-European & Greek Gods Zoroastrianism Hinduism & Buddhism Judaism, then Christianity, then Islam. But most uniquely, this book explains how and why our beliefs emerged and evolved, and what they say about who we are.

Author : Tim Whitmarsh
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307958337
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.34/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Battling the Gods written by Tim Whitmarsh and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-11-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How new is atheism? Although adherents and opponents alike today present it as an invention of the European Enlightenment, when the forces of science and secularism broadly challenged those of faith, disbelief in the gods, in fact, originated in a far more remote past. In Battling the Gods, Tim Whitmarsh journeys into the ancient Mediterranean, a world almost unimaginably different from our own, to recover the stories and voices of those who first refused the divinities. Homer’s epic poems of human striving, journeying, and passion were ancient Greece’s only “sacred texts,” but no ancient Greek thought twice about questioning or mocking his stories of the gods. Priests were functionaries rather than sources of moral or cosmological wisdom. The absence of centralized religious authority made for an extraordinary variety of perspectives on sacred matters, from the devotional to the atheos, or “godless.” Whitmarsh explores this kaleidoscopic range of ideas about the gods, focusing on the colorful individuals who challenged their existence. Among these were some of the greatest ancient poets and philosophers and writers, as well as the less well known: Diagoras of Melos, perhaps the first self-professed atheist; Democritus, the first materialist; Socrates, executed for rejecting the gods of the Athenian state; Epicurus and his followers, who thought gods could not intervene in human affairs; the brilliantly mischievous satirist Lucian of Samosata. Before the revolutions of late antiquity, which saw the scriptural religions of Christianity and Islam enforced by imperial might, there were few constraints on belief. Everything changed, however, in the millennium between the appearance of the Homeric poems and Christianity’s establishment as Rome’s state religion in the fourth century AD. As successive Greco-Roman empires grew in size and complexity, and power was increasingly concentrated in central capitals, states sought to impose collective religious adherence, first to cults devoted to individual rulers, and ultimately to monotheism. In this new world, there was no room for outright disbelief: the label “atheist” was used now to demonize anyone who merely disagreed with the orthodoxy—and so it would remain for centuries. As the twenty-first century shapes up into a time of mass information, but also, paradoxically, of collective amnesia concerning the tangled histories of religions, Whitmarsh provides a bracing antidote to our assumptions about the roots of freethinking. By shining a light on atheism’s first thousand years, Battling the Gods offers a timely reminder that nonbelief has a wealth of tradition of its own, and, indeed, its own heroes.

Author : Robert A. Orsi
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674984595
Total Pages : 378 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book History and Presence written by Robert A. Orsi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Honorable Mention, PROSE Award A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year A Junto Favorite Book of the Year Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ’s presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable. “This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle... If reformed theology has led to the gods’ ostensible absence in modern religion, History and Presence is a sort of counter-reformation literature that revels in the excesses of divine materiality: the contradictions, the redundancies, the scrambling of borders between the sacred and profane, the dead and the living, the past and the present, the original and the imitator...History and Presence is a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think.” —Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion “With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints and other divine–human encounters, Orsi constructs a theory of presence for the study of contemporary religion and history. Many interviews with individuals devoted to particular saints and relics are included in this fascinating study of how people process what they believe.” —Catholic Herald

Author : Karl Löwith
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022616229X
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Meaning in History written by Karl Löwith and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern man sees with one eye of faith and one eye of reason. Consequently, his view of history is confused. For centuries, the history of the Western world has been viewed from the Christian or classical standpoint—from a deep faith in the Kingdom of God or a belief in recurrent and eternal life-cycles. The modern mind, however, is neither Christian nor pagan—and its interpretations of history are Christian in derivation and anti-Christian in result. To develop this theory, Karl Löwith—beginning with the more accessible philosophies of history in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries and working back to the Bible—analyzes the writings of outstanding historians both in antiquity and in Christian times. "A book of distinction and great importance. . . . The author is a master of philosophical interpretation, and each of his terse and substantial chapters has the balance of a work of art."—Helmut Kuhn, Journal of Philosophy

Author : Constantin Fasolt
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 022611564X
Total Pages : 349 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Limits of History written by Constantin Fasolt and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-09-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History casts a spell on our minds more powerful than science or religion. It does not root us in the past at all. It rather flatters us with the belief in our ability to recreate the world in our image. It is a form of self-assertion that brooks no opposition or dissent and shelters us from the experience of time. So argues Constantin Fasolt in The Limits of History, an ambitious and pathbreaking study that conquers history's power by carrying the fight into the center of its domain. Fasolt considers the work of Hermann Conring (1606-81) and Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313/14-57), two antipodes in early modern battles over the principles of European thought and action that ended with the triumph of historical consciousness. Proceeding according to the rules of normal historical analysis—gathering evidence, putting it in context, and analyzing its meaning—Fasolt uncovers limits that no kind of history can cross. He concludes that history is a ritual designed to maintain the modern faith in the autonomy of states and individuals. God wants it, the old crusaders would have said. The truth, Fasolt insists, only begins where that illusion ends. With its probing look at the ideological underpinnings of historical practice, The Limits of History demonstrates that history presupposes highly political assumptions about free will, responsibility, and the relationship between the past and the present. A work of both intellectual history and historiography, it will prove invaluable to students of historical method, philosophy, political theory, and early modern European culture.