A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Ballantine Books | ISBN 0345384563 | 1994 edition | PDF | 219 pages | 5.2 MB

Armstrong, a British journalist and former nun, guides us along one of the most elusive and fascinating quests of all time--the search for God. Like all beloved historians, Armstrong entertains us with deft storytelling, astounding research, and makes us feel a greater appreciation for the present because we better understand our past. Be warned: A History of God is not a tidy linear history. Rather, we learn that the definition of God is constantly being repeated, altered, discarded, and resurrected through the ages, responding to its followers' practical concerns rather than to mystical mandates. Armstrong also shows us how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have overlapped and influenced one another, gently challenging the secularist history of each of these religions.

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The Kabbalah Experience: The Definitive Q&A Guide to Authentic Kabbalah

Author: Michael Laitman, PhD
Published by: Laitman Kabbalah Publishers
File size: ~1.77 megabytes
File type: PDF

The Kabbalah Experience: The Definitive Q&A Guide to Authentic Kabbalah
Never has the language of Kabbalah been as clear and accessible as it is here, in this compelling, informative collection. The depth of wisdom revealed in the questions and answers of this book will inspire reflection and contemplation. Readers will also begin to experience a growing sense of enlightenment while simply absorbing the words on every page. The Kabbalah Experience is a guide from the past to the future, revealing situations that all students of Kabbalah will experience at some point on their journeys. For those who cherish every moment in life, the author offers unparalleled insights into the timeless wisdom of Kabbalah.

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Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence

Author: Mark Juergensmeyer
Published by: University of California Press
File size: 4.41 Mb
File type: pdf

The book sets out to explore why, in a few extreme instances, religion is used to justify terrorism. "Terror in the Mind of God" was published in 2000, before the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, but it is extremely relevant to today's headlines.
This dark, enthralling book not only documents the global rise of religious terrorism but seeks to understand the "odd attraction of religion and violence." Mark Juergensmeyer, the Director of the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies and Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an expert on religious violence, conflict resolution and South Asian religion and politics, and has published more than two hundred articles and a dozen books. The author bases his study on scholarly sources, media accounts and personal interviews with convicted terrorists. He exercises caution with the term "terrorist," preferring to emphasize the large religious community of supporters who make violent acts possible rather than the relatively small number who carry them out. Juergensmeyer identifies certain "cultures of violence" via case studies along the spectrum of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism. Such religious communities often perceive themselves and their way of life as under attack. In Japan, for example, a new branch of "socially prophetic" Buddhists released toxic sarin gas in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, shattering their own nonviolent ethic and harming thousands because they had adopted millenarian prophecies about an imminent end to the world. Juergensmeyer is a powerful, skillful writer whose deeply empathic interviewing techniques allow readers to enter the minds of some of the late 20th century's most feared religious terrorists. Yet he is also a sensitive scholar who aptly dissects religious terrorism as a sociological phenomenon. Later chapters pay special attention to issues of "performance violence," enemy formation, martyrology, satanization and "images of cosmic confrontation."

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TMS - Heaven or Heresy: A History of the Inquisition

Author: Thomas F. Madden
Published by: Modern Scholar (TMS)
File size: 220 MB
File type: mp3, VBR V6, stereo

Heaven or Heresy: A History of the Inquisition
AUDIO ONLY

Course Overview
For many, the Inquisition conjures Gothic images of cloaked figures and barbarous torture chambers. So enmeshed is this view of the Inquisition in popular culture that such scenes play out even in comedies such as Mel Brooks' History of the World and Monty Python's Flying Circus. But is this a fair portrayal? And how was the Inquisition perceived in its own time? Professor Thomas F. Madden of Saint Louis University delivers a stimulating series of lectures exploring all facets of the Inquisition, including the religious and political climate of its time and the Inquisition's relationship to heresy and reformation. With a scholarly eye and infectious enthusiasm, widely published author and noted expert on pre-modern European history Thomas Madden imparts an understanding of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions while dispelling popular myths associated with the subject.

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The Cambridge Companion to Jesus

Author: Markus Bockmuehl
Published by: Cambridge
File size: 1 MB
File type: pdf

The Cambridge Companion to Jesus
This Companion takes as its starting point the realization that Jesus of Nazareth cannot be studied purely as a subject of ancient history, ‘a man like any other man’. History, literature, theology and the dynamic of a living, worldwide religious reality, all appropriately impinge on the study of Jesus. The two parts of the book roughly correspond to the interdependent tasks of historical description and critical and theological reflection. It incorporates the most up-to-date historical work on Jesus the Jew with the ‘bigger issues’ of critical method, the story of Christian faith and study, and Jesus in a global church and in the encounter with Judaism and Islam. Written by seventeen leading international scholars, the book encourages students of the historical Jesus to discover the vital contribution of theology, and students of doctrine to engage the Christ of faith as Jesus the first-century Jew.

• Accessible treatments of state-of-the-art scholarship on a full range of subjects pertaining to Jesus and christology
• Offers a unique combination of historical, textual, hermeneutical and theological perpectives
• Emphasizes the continuing significance of Jesus in an age of globalization

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Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West

Author: Robert Spencer
Published by: Regnery Publishing
File size: 1.7 MB
File type: pdf

In this shocking book Robert Spencer details how jihad warriors have already established numerous footholds in America, and are an established, growing, and ominous threat in Europe. Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West reveals the open violent contempt of radical Muslims in the United States and around the world for Western freedom and tolerance, and details why a clash of civilizations is already upon us.

Spencer exposes truths about radical Islam that the media denies and disregards, including:

* Why Iraqi democracy will have a tough time no matter how long American troops stay in the country
* The American Left: its unholy alliance with radical Islam
* The concept of jihad: how it poisons chances for peace in Israel and in other conflicts
* The myth of Islamic “tolerance” in history and today
* Why the threat of violent jihad is growing daily, despite claims that Islam is a “religion of peace”
* How Muslims are undermining Western Europe’s commitment to freedom
* Why moderate Muslims have been unable to stop the spread of violent Islam

Using Muslim sources, Spencer uncovers the tracts that influence radical Muslims — material full of naked hatred and intolerance; material that is freely and popularly available, and that is almost completely ignored by the establishment media.

This explosive book concludes with a series of practical steps that we must take to combat jihad terrorism — before it’s too late.

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Encyclopedia of Religion, 15 Volume Set

Product Details
»Book Publisher: MacMillan Reference Books (30 January, 2005)
»ISBN: 0028657330
»Book author: Lindsay Jones
»Amazon Rating: 5.0

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The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life

The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life
Indiana University Press (2002-05) | ISBN: 0253340942 | 269 Pages | 17.92 MB | PDF
"This book is great fun to read and highly informative." -- Raymond Smullyan

"This is a delightful and fascinating book that will surely appeal to anyone who is fascinated by, or infuriated by, mental puzzles." --Keith Devlin

Why are humans fascinated by puzzles? Puzzle-addict and renowned communication theorist Marcel Danesi takes readers on an exploration of the philosophical implications of the puzzle instinct. Puzzles are as old as humanity and the human instinct for puzzles betrays the larger perpetual search for meaning to life. Danesi not only has included many in this book to puzzle over, he explores why we like to puzzle over them as well. Among the smaller puzzles in this book are the solutions to some much larger puzzles: What is the raison daetre that puzzles serve, why did they emerge at the same time in history as myth, magic and the occult arts, and why canat we put them down.

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New Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience, and the Transcendent

John Hick, new Frontier of Religion and Science: Religious Experience, Neuroscience, and the Transcendent
Palgrave MacMillan | 0333961471 | 2007 | PDF | 1.7 MB | 241 pages

This is the first major response to the new challenge of neuroscience to religion. There have been limited responses from a purely Christian point of view, but this takes account of eastern as well as western forms of religious experience. It challenges the prevailing naturalistic assumption of our culture, including the idea that the mind is either identical with or a temporary by-product of brain activity. It also discusses religion as institutions and religion as inner experience of the Transcendent, and suggests a form of spirituality for today.


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Science, Religion, and the Meaning of Life

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Language: english
ISBN: 0230013414
Paperback: 224 pages
Data: January 23, 2007
Format: PDF

Description:
Have evolution, science and the trappings of the modern world killed off God irrevocably? And what do we lose if we choose not to believe in him? From Newton and Descartes to Darwin and the discovery of the genome, religion has been pushed back further and further while science has gained ground. But what fills the void that religion leaves behind? This book is an attempt to look at these questions and to suggest a third way between the easy consolations of religion and the persuasive force of science that the everyday modern reader can engage with.

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God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything - Christopher Hitchens

Hitchens, one of our great political pugilists, delivers the best of the recent rash of atheist manifestos. The same contrarian spirit that makes him delightful reading as a political commentator, even (or especially) when he's completely wrong, makes him an entertaining huckster prosecutor once he has God placed in the dock. And can he turn a phrase!: "monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents." Hitchens's one-liners bear the marks of considerable sparring practice with believers. Yet few believers will recognize themselves as Hitchens associates all of them for all time with the worst of history's theocratic and inquisitional moments. All the same, this is salutary reading as a means of culling believers' weaker arguments: that faith offers comfort (false comfort is none at all), or has provided a historical hedge against fascism (it mostly hasn't), or that "Eastern" religions are better (nope). The book's real strength is Hitchens's on-the-ground glimpses of religion's worst face in various war zones and isolated despotic regimes. But its weakness is its almost fanatical insistence that religion poisons "everything," which tips over into barely disguised misanthropy.

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A Brief Illustrated Guide to Understanding Islam

This is a unique book of dawah. It is written to introduce Islam to non-Muslims . . . The book was reviewed by a group of specialist to insure correctness and accuracy and is printed in color. It contains 43 illustrations

By I. A. Ibrahim

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Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry

Book Description
In this book the author, who is both a feminist and a Muslim, aims to shed light on the status of women in Islam by examining and reassessing the literary sources as far back as 7th century Islam. She portrays how, far from being the oppressor of women that his detractors have claimed, the Prophet upheld the equality of all true believers. Here is a bold reconciliation of feminism with the Prophet's thoughts and beliefs.

By Fatima Mernissi

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The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Islam

The Qur'an -- the Muslim Bible or something more?-- A day in the life of a Muslim -- prayers toward Mecca and keeping halal-- The Islamic dress code and life ceremonies -- and Ramadan and Hajj, the two Islamic holidays-- The life of the Prophet Muhammad -- and 1400 years of Islamic history-- More than one type of Muslim -- the Sunnis, the Shi'as, and the Sufis-- Islam in the modern world -- cultural revivalism and politics-- The other side of the coin -- the Arab-Israeli conflict and Islam..

By Yahiya Emerick

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