An Age of Infidels

An Age of Infidels
Author: Eric R. Schlereth
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 303
Release: 2013-04-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812244931

Eric R. Schlereth places religious conflicts between deists and their opponents at the center of early American public life. This history recasts the origins of cultural politics in the United States by exploring how everyday Americans navigated questions of religious truth and difference in an age of emerging religious liberty.

Infidels

Infidels
Author: Andrew Wheatcroft
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2005-05-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812972392

Here is the first panoptic history of the long struggle between the Christian West and Islam. In this dazzlingly written, acutely nuanced account, Andrew Wheatcroft tracks a deep fault line of animosity between civilizations. He begins with a stunning account of the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, then turns to the main zones of conflict: Spain, from which the descendants of the Moors were eventually expelled; the Middle East, where Crusaders and Muslims clashed for years; and the Balkans, where distant memories spurred atrocities even into the twentieth century. Throughout, Wheatcroft delves beneath stereotypes, looking incisively at how images, ideas, language, and technology (from the printing press to the Internet), as well as politics, religion, and conquest, have allowed each side to demonize the other, revive old grievances, and fuel across centuries a seemingly unquenchable enmity. Finally, Wheatcroft tells how this fraught history led to our present maelstrom. We cannot, he argues, come to terms with today’s perplexing animosities without confronting this dark past.

Religion for Infidels

Religion for Infidels
Author: Anthony M. Ludovici
Publisher: Ostara Publications
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2019-05-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9781646065943

A tour de force from Anthony Ludovici which addresses one of his favorite subjects: the issue of what he sees as the negative role of Christianity in the development of Western philosophy and morals, and how the opposite position--outright atheism--is equally unacceptable. Instead, as he details in this work, a mean must be sought which encompasses reality, a lack of superstition, and a spiritual worldview which encourages personal health and well-being, and serves the betterment of all humanity. The first part of this book is devoted to a detailed analysis of why, as the author titled many of the chapters, Christianity is "not the thoughtful man's religion" and actually harmful to European racial interests. As he says in the introduction: "When examining the answers Christianity gives to the questions man incessantly asks about himself, life and the Universe, it is essential to remember that these answers were made for a remote generation of men whose knowledge, credulity, capacity for criticism and tendency to superstition, bear little resemblance to those of modern civilized people. "A generation that no longer believes in devils, demons and the demoniacal etiology of disease; cannot see any sense in vicarious punishment, and is therefore unable to take on trust the story of an Omnipotent Deity who could feel appeased and propitiated for the sins committed by beings he has himself created, by the death in agony of his own beloved and only-begotten son -- to such a generation, hardly one aspect of the Christian mythology and the supernatural events it includes appears to have even tolerable plausibility, let alone cogency." He then moves on in the second section to spell out the desirable virtues of what he sees as a realistic religious approach: a true religion for infidels: "In view of the harmony of many of its features and of its methods of contacting and of turning to its own account the formative and improvisatory powers of the life forces, it might perhaps be properly termed a 'natural' religion; except that, in its observance by humanity, there is a provision in the moral code consistent with its cosmology, that amounts to an unnatural factor, or a factor not found operative in Nature (except possibly precariously, as we have seen, in the influence, of the will to power). The wise and thoughtful infidel will hold the sensible view, now established by scientific psychology, that children are more asocial, more evil, than their seniors, that only when they have beenpurged of their asocial impulses and appetites can they be regarded as "good" or fit for their place in the community, and, therefore, that man cannot be regarded as born good.. . . the whole of the duties of man in society [is] to promote and defend all those influences and points of view which favour superior and flourishing, and to resist and condemn all those influences and points of view which favour decadent and degenerate, human life. Everything eke denotes a misunderstanding of the proper function of compassion and is a crime against both justice, sanity, good taste and -- posterity."

Infidels and Empires in a New World Order

Infidels and Empires in a New World Order
Author: David M. Lantigua
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2020-06-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1108498264

Examines early modern Spanish contributions to international relations by focusing on ambivalence of natural rights in European colonial expansion to the Americas.

God Is Not Great

God Is Not Great
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2008-11-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1551991764

Christopher Hitchens, described in the London Observer as “one of the most prolific, as well as brilliant, journalists of our time” takes on his biggest subject yet–the increasingly dangerous role of religion in the world. In the tradition of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian and Sam Harris’s recent bestseller, The End Of Faith, Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

Why We Need Religion

Why We Need Religion
Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2018-05-09
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0190469692

How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.

Death to the Infidels

Death to the Infidels
Author: Mitchell G. Bard
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2014-09-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1137474580

For more than a century, much of the attention given to the Middle East has focused on the Arab-Israeli conflict. The rise of a Palestinian offshoot of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, transformed the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. According to Bard, the dispute, in the view of Hamas, is not over a division of Palestine, but rather about Jews ruling over Muslims and the presence of Jews on Islamic land. However, this Islamic-Jewish conflict is not simply confined to the Middle East. Muslim terrorist attacks have been directed at Jews all around the world, from Europe to Asia to Latin America. Radical Muslims in European countries are becoming more brazen, particularly in France, where the Muslims constitute nearly ten percent of the population. In just the last year, there have been several Muslim attacks on Jews throughout France. Death to the Infidels documents the growth of radical Islam in the Middle East and how, from the author's interpretation, it has transformed what had primarily been a political conflict into a one-sided religious war limiting the prospect for peace, particularly in Israel.

Christian Martyrs Under Islam

Christian Martyrs Under Islam
Author: Christian C. Sahner
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2020-03-31
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 069120313X

A look at the developing conflicts in Christian-Muslim relations during late antiquity and the early Islamic era How did the medieval Middle East transform from a majority-Christian world to a majority-Muslim world, and what role did violence play in this process? Christian Martyrs under Islam explains how Christians across the early Islamic caliphate slowly converted to the faith of the Arab conquerors and how small groups of individuals rejected this faith through dramatic acts of resistance, including apostasy and blasphemy. Using previously untapped sources in a range of Middle Eastern languages, Christian Sahner introduces an unknown group of martyrs who were executed at the hands of Muslim officials between the seventh and ninth centuries CE. Found in places as diverse as Syria, Spain, Egypt, and Armenia, they include an alleged descendant of Muhammad who converted to Christianity, high-ranking Christian secretaries of the Muslim state who viciously insulted the Prophet, and the children of mixed marriages between Muslims and Christians. Sahner argues that Christians never experienced systematic persecution under the early caliphs, and indeed, they remained the largest portion of the population in the greater Middle East for centuries after the Arab conquest. Still, episodes of ferocious violence contributed to the spread of Islam within Christian societies, and memories of this bloodshed played a key role in shaping Christian identity in the new Islamic empire. Christian Martyrs under Islam examines how violence against Christians ended the age of porous religious boundaries and laid the foundations for more antagonistic Muslim-Christian relations in the centuries to come.

They Say We Are Infidels

They Say We Are Infidels
Author: Mindy Belz
Publisher: NavPress
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1496425405

Now with a new chapter! “Everywhere militants were blowing up Christians, their churches, their shops. They threatened them with kidnapping. They promised to take their children. The message to these ‘infidels’: You have no place in Iraq. Pay a penalty to stay, leave, or be killed.” Sweeping from Syria into Iraq, Islamic State fighters (ISIS) have been brutalizing and annihilating Christians. How? Why? Where did the terrorists come from, and what can be done to stop them? For more than a decade, journalist Mindy Belz has reported on the ground from the Middle East, giving her unparalleled access to the story no one wants to believe. In They Say We Are Infidels, she brings the stark reality of this escalating genocide to light, tracking the stories of real-life Christians who refuse to abandon their faith—even in the face of losing everything, including their lives. As Reading Lolita in Tehran did for Iran and We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families did for Rwanda, They Say We Are Infidels shines light into the Middle East through the stories of everyday heroes and heroines who will not be silenced. A must-read for anyone seeking a firmer grasp on the complex dynamics at play in war-torn Iraq and Syria, They Say We Are Infidels is the eye-opening and revelatory testimony of a journalist who heads into a war zone—and is forever changed by the people she encounters there.