(Part 2) Top products from r/Freethought

Thanks for the comment!

>People who remove religion from their lives often fill the void with less effective (and sometimes harmful) substitutes.

This is actually really interesting and I think explains what happened to me, too. It's a good argument for showing one reason why religion, and creating a false need/purpose, can be a negative thing. It's much easier to live without religion if you've never believed in it before, in my opinion.

Hyperion looks like a good read. Thanks for the recommendation. I'll probably pick it up on Kindle.

For those interested in this topic, I'd also recommend The Mating Mind by Geoffrey Miller - a book about the impact of sexual selection on the development of the mind and our attraction to aesthetics, humor, music, etc.

And there's scholarship to suggest that lots of the martyrdom stories are later romantic inventions of the church fathers who were obsessed with the ideal of a "good death". This coming from Christian scholars even.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Persecution-Christians-Martyrdom/dp/0062104527

You might like the book Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Ehrman. It's full of stuff like this.

I am somewhat familiar with his notion. Is it pantheism? I was reading this book on pantheism and I realized that a concept of unity seems central to pantheism. I'm not sure why unity would be divine, though. https://www.amazon.com/Pantheism-Non-Theistic-Michael-P-Levine/dp/0415755867/ref=sr_1_12?keywords=pantheism&qid=1556842060&s=books&sr=1-12

I assume you haven't read this book then.

What do you suppose that social evolution is based on if it is not biological evolution? I.e. how did we get to be a social species?

One's culture certainly determines what god/s is/are ingrained, just like it determines what language is spoken. However, the culture does not determine whether or not the normal person will have the capacity for religious belief anymore than it determines the capacity for language.

See if you can find any culture that does not have gods. If people don't have gods they invent them. I watched this happen with my grandson who was being raised home schooled in an un-religious household that didn't talk about religion one way or the other. He invented space alien ancestors, reincarnation, and a sort of rapture (his alien relatives were coming to get him.)

Certainly he took elements from his surrounding culture to invent his religion, but he was not instructed to invent one nor to not invent one.

I highly recommend The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders.

http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Figure-Jesus-E-Sanders/dp/0140144994/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1256229581&sr=1-1

If you're intrigued by this idea, I can recommend The Clock of the Long Now.

Go google the history of our leaders regarding "Cult of Personality" vs "Cult of Character".

Also, go read (or get at your library/audible) Quiet: The Power Of Introverts.

I wonder if historically something like Dewey the Cat will have sold more copies than something like The Iliad. Well, maybe not that, but maybe something like Suicide by Durkheim or Sula by Morrison. Also makes me wonder if I've missed out on an especially stellar book due to poor sales/bad publisher/poor promotion/general non-awareness.

She has a contact form here where she asks you to ask permission to use the phrase Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

Some new readers have started to review her book here