WHY DO YOU BELIEVE THE THINGS YOU BELIEVE? Do you remember events differently from how they really happened? Where do your superstitions come from? How do morals evolve? Why are some people religious and others nonreligious? Everyone has thoughts and questions like these, and now Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman expose, for the first time, how our complex views emerge from the neural activities of the brain. Bridging science, psychology, and religion, they demonstrate, in simple terminology, how the brain perceives reality and transforms it into an extraordinary range of personal, ethical, and creative premises that we use to build meaning, value, spirituality, and truth into our lives. When you come to understand this remarkable process, it will change forever the way you look at the world and yourself. Supported by groundbreaking research, including brain scans of people as they pray, meditate, and even speak in tongues, Newberg and Waldman propose a new model for how deep convictions emerge and influence our lives. You will even glimpse how the mind of an atheist works when contemplating God. Using personal stories, moral paradoxes, and optical illusions, the authors demonstrate how our brains construct our fondest assumptions about reality, offering recommendations for exercising your most important "muscle" in order to develop a more life-affirming, flexible range of attitudes. You'll discover how to: Recognize when your beliefs are altered by othersGuard against mental traps and prejudicial thinkingDistinguish between destructive and constructive beliefsCultivate spiritual and ethical ideals Ultimately, we must always return to our beliefs. From the ordinary to the extraordinary, they give meaning to the mysteries of life, providing us with our individual uniqueness and the ability to fill our lives with joy. Most important, though, they give us inspiration and hope, beacons to guide us through the light and dark corners of the soul.
My fellow trustees at the Foundation, Greg Langer and Todd Stiefel, reviewed earlier versions of the manuscript and ... A. J. Figueredo, Helen Fisher, Russ Gardner, Edward Hagen, Sarah Hrdy, Owen Jones, Rob Kurzban, Geoffrey Miller, ...
A fascinating intervention into some of the most common misconceptions about human nature, this book employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief—the ability to commit passionately and ...
A crane, in contrast, is a subprocess or special feature of a design process that can be demonstrated to permit the local speeding up of the basic, slow process of natural selection, and that can be demonstrated to be itself the ...
About the author: The Reverend Doctor George Byron Koch (pronounced coke) is Pastor and teacher at Resurrection Anglican Church in West Chicago, Illinois (USA), though this book is intentionally neither Anglican nor denominational in ...
Meanwhile, Yellow Bird, Big Foot's holy man, launched into the Ghost Dance, reminding his men that the shirts they wore would be impenetrable by the soldiers' bullets. The officers ordered the Indians to strip, hoping to reveal hidden ...
If you didn't have faith you wouldn't ask the question. IfI did not believe in a just and law-abiding God, I would not find injustice and human suffering worthy of question whatsoever. After all, the universe, if it has no God, ...
For new believers and seasoned Christians alike, this book will strengthen their faith by answering that all consuming question, "Why?"
From the author of the bestselling novel The Shack and the New York Times bestsellers Cross Roads and Eve comes a compelling, conversational exploration of twenty-eight assumptions about God—assumptions that just might be keeping us from ...
Introduces the Black Lives Matter movement with images to color, brief explanatory texts, and questions to stimulate reflection and discussion.
Faith Foundations from A-Z Your family will love this unique board book!