Great journeys often start with a single question. For D. K. Evans, a newly married professional in the Christian-dominated South, that question was, "Why Do I Believe in God?" That simple query led him on a years-long search to better understand the nature of religion and faith, particularly as it applies to the Black community. While many taking such a journey today might immerse themselves in the writing of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, Evans took inspiration not only from John Henrik Clarke, Yosef-Ben Jochannan, Hubert Harrison, and John G. Jackson, champions of a rich Black tradition of challenging religious orthodoxy, but also from many others in his own community who had similarly come to question their core religious beliefs. While this journey eventually led him to discount the notion of God, he calls on all to ask their own questions, particularly those within the Black community who act on blind faith. While their own journey might not lead to his truth, he acknowledges, that is the only way they will ever emancipate themselves from the truths thrust on them by others and arrive at their most important truth—their own.

"The Black Atheist in America" is a powerful and thought provoking wake up call for the Black Community. Author Jason Winn delivers a rock solid combination of facts and flavor that will transform the aimless believer into a well informed doer.Religion has maintained a very violent and sordid history throught mankinds' life on the planet. Religion was very instrumental in The Crusades, the Trans-Atlantic/Trans-Sahara slave trade, the Arab/Israeli War, and the Spanish Inquisition just to name a few. These ultra destructive events have caused vast numbers of people to lose their lives all in the name of one mans' god being greater than the other mans' god.In the Black Community. The pastors and preists of today are keeping their congregations ill informed. Much is swept under the rug by these religious leaders who continue to make lack luster headlines involving sex, drugs, and betrayal. In the end, everybody suffers. People, both young and old, will lose their time, money, and (if no action is taken) their lives.From start to finish "The Black Atheist in America" is excellent. It examines the harmful effects that religion has on the African American from a historical and factual stand point. It reveals the very retrogressive mindset of religion and the progressive mindset of critical thinking. And lastly, this book reveals workable solutions to the limited horizons and dismal expectations so "characteristic" in the Black Community. These solutions are extremely viable only if a critically thinking mind is brought to the table and not religion."

From the provocative author of Straw Dogs comes an incisive, surprising intervention in the political and scientific debate over religion and atheism When you explore older atheisms, you will find that some of your firmest convictions—secular or religious—are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thought. For a generation now, public debate has been corroded by a shrill, narrow derision of religion in the name of an often vaguely understood “science.” John Gray’s stimulating and enjoyable new book, Seven Types of Atheism, describes the complex, dynamic world of older atheisms, a tradition that is, he writes, in many ways intertwined with and as rich as religion itself. Along a spectrum that ranges from the convictions of “God-haters” like the Marquis de Sade to the mysticism of Arthur Schopenhauer, from Bertrand Russell’s search for truth in mathematics to secular political religions like Jacobinism and Nazism, Gray explores the various ways great minds have attempted to understand the questions of salvation, purpose, progress, and evil. The result is a book that sheds an extraordinary light on what it is to be human.

Islam has become an increasingly attractive option for many African-Americans. This book offers an ethnographic study of this phenomenon & asks what attraction the Qur'an has for them & how the Islamic lifestyle accommodates mainstream US values.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Martin Delany--these figures stand out in the annals of black protest for their vital antislavery efforts. But what of the rest of their generation, the thousands of other free blacks in the North? Patrick Rael explores the tradition of protest and sense of racial identity forged by both famous and lesser-known black leaders in antebellum America and illuminates the ideas that united these activists across a wide array of divisions. In so doing, he reveals the roots of the arguments that still resound in the struggle for justice today. Mining sources that include newspapers and pamphlets of the black national press, speeches and sermons, slave narratives and personal memoirs, Rael recovers the voices of an extraordinary range of black leaders in the first half of the nineteenth century. He traces how these activists constructed a black American identity through their participation in the discourse of the public sphere and how this identity in turn informed their critiques of a nation predicated on freedom but devoted to white supremacy. His analysis explains how their place in the industrializing, urbanizing antebellum North offered black leaders a unique opportunity to smooth over class and other tensions among themselves and successfully galvanize the race against slavery.

Antislavery white clergy and their congregations. Radicalized abolitionist women. African Americans committed to ending slavery through constitutional political action. These diverse groups attributed their common vision of a nation free from slavery to strong political and religious values. Owen Lovejoy’s gregarious personality, formidable oratorical talent, probing political analysis, and profound religious convictions made him the powerful leader the coalition needed. Owen Lovejoy and the Coalition for Equality examines how these three distinct groups merged their agendas into a single antislavery, religious, political campaign for equality with Lovejoy at the helm. Combining scholarly biography, historiography, and primary source material, Jane Ann Moore and William F. Moore demonstrate Lovejoy's crucial role in nineteenth-century politics, the rise of antislavery sentiment in religious spaces, and the emerging congressional commitment to end slavery. Their compelling account explores how the immorality of slavery became a touchstone of political and religious action in the United States through the efforts of a synergetic coalition led by an essential abolitionist figure.

This book examines the misuse of history in New Atheism and militant anti-religion. It looks at how episodes such as the Witch-hunt, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust are mythologized to present religion as inescapably prone to violence and discrimination, whilst the darker side of atheist history, such as its involvement in Stalinism, is denied. At the same time, another constructed history—that of a perpetual and one-sided conflict between religion and science/rationalism—is commonly used by militant atheists to suggest the innate superiority of the non-religious mind. In a number of detailed case studies, the book traces how these myths have long been overturned by historians, and argues that the New Atheism’s cavalier use of history is indicative of a troubling approach to the humanities in general. Nathan Johnstone engages directly with the God debate at an academic level and contributes to the emerging study of non-religion as a culture and an identity.

In Ontological Terror Calvin L. Warren intervenes in Afro-pessimism, Heideggerian metaphysics, and black humanist philosophy by positing that the "Negro question" is intimately imbricated with questions of Being. Warren uses the figure of the antebellum free black as a philosophical paradigm for thinking through the tensions between blackness and Being. He illustrates how blacks embody a metaphysical nothing. This nothingness serves as a destabilizing presence and force as well as that which whiteness defines itself against. Thus, the function of blackness as giving form to nothing presents a terrifying problem for whites: they need blacks to affirm their existence, even as they despise the nothingness they represent. By pointing out how all humanism is based on investing blackness with nonbeing—a logic which reproduces antiblack violence and precludes any realization of equality, justice, and recognition for blacks—Warren urges the removal of the human from its metaphysical pedestal and the exploration of ways of existing that are not predicated on a grounding in being.