Atheist Awakening is a groundbreaking study of the growth and revitalization of the atheist movement in the U.S. Through in-depth interviews and observation of atheist gatherings, the authors find that much of this "awakening" has come about as atheists have engaged in new forms of activism and community-building. The book portrays a new atheism-one that has revised strategies to wage a powerful defensive and offensive battle against their ideological and political antagonists.

Atheism: Atheist Organizations and Activism What are the main beliefs of atheism? Why secular humanism can do what atheism can't. what is the difference between an atheist and secular humanism? This study shows how their judiciary battles ensured the clarification and galvanization of the First Amendment's Establish Clause, how they challenged the Protestant domination of government institutions, and helped to reveal a schism within Protestant churches between progressive and conservative factions.

Spirituality.The search for happiness --Religion, East and West --Mindfulness --The truth of suffering --Enlightenment --The mystery of consciousness.The mind divided --Structure and function --Are our minds already split? --Conscious and unconscious processing in the brain --Consciousness is what matters --The riddle of the self.What are we calling "I"? --Consciousness without self --Lost in thought --The challenge of studying the self --Penetrating the illusion --Meditation.Gradual versus sudden realization --Dzogchen: taking the goal as the path --Having no head --The paradox of acceptance --Gurus, death, drugs, and other puzzles.Mind on the brink of death --The spiritual uses of pharmacology.

This is a book that could change your life ... and death. What would happen if an atheist visited the afterlife? Once an atheist, now a clairvoyant medium. Follow one man's extreme transformation in this multifaceted memoir, which brings you through a life filled with trauma, death, denial, personal development, paranormal experiences, mediumship, spiritual gifts, true love, and triumph in his ultimate search for enlightenment. From atheist to clairvoyant medium; Ray Catania's The Atheist and The Afterlife is the first book in the Awakening series. This is a book that can change your life and death, or at the very least, the way you envision both to be. Follow along one man's extreme transformation from a complete non- believing atheist to the undeniable confirmation of an afterlife. The book includes the details of his experiencing death firsthand in which he describes his death as the best day of his life. This event sparked a journey spanning many years of researching the science of life, death, the afterlife, energy, consciousness, Quantum Physics, and pursuing the development of his 6th sense. A skill that he says anyone can develop and utilize for their own personal wellbeing. You will read along in real time as these paranormal events took place, including speaking with the dead. Each story is taken directly from Ray's personal journal and written with humility, sarcasm, and humor. Although the subject matter may be quite serious and a little gritty at times, it is the author's wish that those who can relate to having these traumatic experiences, learn that regardless of your past nothing can stop you from achieving your goals in the future and accomplishing everything you set out to do. By tapping into the universal collective consciousness structure, all can be yours for the asking. This book takes you from the very beginning of this realization and through the events that transpired for him to learn and accept the laws of the universe and the fact that they were undeniably real. This book is not simply about becoming a medium. Although that aspect of the book certainly adds some comic relief, it is about the pursuit of happiness, love, and enlightenment when the odds are stacked against you having any of that. We wish you peace, love, and light, throughout your journey. Based on real-life accounts of the author. This book contains sensitive subject matter that may not be suitable for all ages and contains a list of triggers that you should review before reading this book.

Did man evolve accidentally, or is his existence the result of a creative act? Is there life after death? Am I given a purpose? Where do we look for answers to such questions, assuming we care? In Christianity alone, statisticians tell us there are over thirty thousand denominations. Which of these offers authentic truth? It is no small inquiry. I venture to say there is no man, woman, or child who will not contemplate the questions of how they came to exist, the purpose behind it, whether they will continue to exist and in what way. Furthermore, the central question of the existence of a higher power and its consequences for us has vexed and divided mankind since he first aspired to ask it. In the seventeenth century, when Galileo described the earth as rotating the sun, science began to assert itself as the arbiter of the yet unknown. With the Age of Reason, the authority of the scientific method of inquiry began its rise to occupying the place of rational authority. Religion experienced a relatively humbling categorization as quaint mystery. Most unsolved material questions that were matters of competing views have fallen to the credit of the scientist. We now know why volcanoes erupt, in other words. But the scientist has overextended himself. He rose from the high seat to mount the high horse; explaining all things by reducing them to their smallest elements. His accounting for cosmogenesis, arrival of life, evolution, and the nonexistence of God is an accounting he cannot make without assumptions. So he assumes for us all. This creates a troublesome dilemma for modern man. Is he required to reject his faith, or in practicing faith in God, is he required to reject the rationality of science? In The Next Awakening, a solution is offered to the wrangling debate of the atheistic scientist with the fundamentalist Christian.

“Illuminating.” —Phil Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life If the First Amendment protects the separation of church and state, why have atheists had to fight for their rights? In this valuable work, R. Laurence Moore and Isaac Kramnick reveal the fascinating history of atheism in America and the legal challenges to federal and state laws that made atheists second-class citizens.

A national bestseller and acclaimed guide to Buddhism for beginners and practitioners alike In this simple but important volume, Stephen Batchelor reminds us that the Buddha was not a mystic who claimed privileged, esoteric knowledge of the universe, but a man who challenged us to understand the nature of anguish, let go of its origins, and bring into being a way of life that is available to us all. The concepts and practices of Buddhism, says Batchelor, are not something to believe in but something to do—and as he explains clearly and compellingly, it is a practice that we can engage in, regardless of our background or beliefs, as we live every day on the path to spiritual enlightenment.

Is Atheism Dead? is an entertaining, impressively wide-ranging, and decidedly provocative answer to that famous 1966 TIME cover that itself provocatively asked “Is God Dead?” In a voice that is by turns witty, muscular, and poetic, Metaxas intentionally echoes C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton in cheerfully and logically making his astonishing case, along the way presenting breathtaking—and often withering—new evidence and arguments against the idea of a Creatorless universe. Taken all together, he shows atheism not merely to be implausible and intellectually sloppy, but now demonstrably ridiculous. Perhaps the only unanswered question on the subject is why we couldn’t see this sooner, and how embarrassed we should be about it.

Over the last 160 years, a great dilemma has been hatching out of Western spiritual consciousness. In our modern existence, we have lost faith in the traditional routes by which human beings have come to experience the Divine, and an acceptance of oneself as having a place in the order of the universe. In Spiritual Atheism, Steve Antinoff argues that the dilemma burning within the West has been given its most fundamental expression by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed: "God is necessary, and so must exist . . . Yet I know that he doesn't exist, and can't exist . . . But don't you understand that a man with two such ideas cannot go on living?" According to Antinoff, spiritual atheism begins with three realizations: that our experience of ourselves and our world leaves us ultimately dissatisfied, that our dissatisfaction is intolerable and so must be broken through, and that there is no God. Continuing where such writers as Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris left off, Antinoff's unique and prescient take on deity and spirituality makes this book a critical contribution to the understanding of the quest for salvation and enlightenment in a world full of chaos and need.

In this study of new atheism and religious fundamentalism, this book advances two provocative - and surprising - arguments. Liam Jerrold Fraser argues that atheism and Protestant fundamentalism in Britain and America share a common historical origin in the English Reformation, and the crisis of authority inaugurated by the Reformers. This common origin generated two presuppositions crucial for both movements: a literalist understanding of scripture, and a disruptive understanding of divine activity in nature. Through an analysis of contemporary new atheist and Protestant fundamentalist texts, Fraser shows that these presuppositions continue to structure both groups, and support a range of shared biblical, scientific, and theological beliefs. Their common historical and intellectual structure ensures that new atheism and Protestant fundamentalism - while on the surface irreconcilably opposed - share a secret sympathy with one another, yet one which leaves them unstable, inconsistent, and unsustainable.