Religion og videnskab

Sprogligt veloplagt debatbog med skarpe pointer, skrevet i fællesskab af den forhenværende og nuværende formand for Ateistisk Selskab. De er nok de to personer i Danmark, der seneste år har været mest aktive i debatten om ateisme og religion. Her er et par af deres pointer: De fleste danskere er ateister. Nogle ved det bare ikke - og selv om andre inderst inde har erkendt det, er de ikke parat til at ”springe ud”. Religiøse ideer bremser vores udvikling og står både i vejen for at løse de store problemer, vi står over for på verdensplan. Milliarder af mennesker hindres i at leve et godt liv, fordi overtro tvinger dem til at følge absurde dogmer og forbud. Samfundet har historisk set har haft brug for religion, men i dag er der i højere grad brug for, at vi tager nogle aktive skridt væk fra religionerne.De to forfattere belyser både de mange negative følger af religionerne og viser, at man ikke behøver guder for at leve et godt, etisk og meningsfyldt liv. Emne for emne gennemgår de, hvilken betydning religion har for samfundet og for den enkelte. Fra de mest dogmatiske og fundamentalistiske varianter til den bløde, danske kulturkristendom. Deres konklusion er klar: verden ville være et bedre sted uden religionerne.

Den danske åndsforsker Martinus (1890-1981) formidler principperne for en ny verdensmoral, der danner grundlag for skabelsen af en fredens og kærlighedens kultur på jorden. Udvikling af en ny tilgivelseskultur og sundere levevis, skabelse af én retfærdig verdensstat, indførelse af verdenssproget esperanto, vegetarisme, udfoldelse af større kærlighed til planter, dyr og mennesker – til alt levende, såvel i mikro-, mellem- og makrokosmos – indgår som vigtige elementer i Martinus Kosmologi, der kan betegnes som et helstøbt verdensbillede, hvor alt er indbyrdes forbundet. Det er både lærerig og underholdende læsning under overskrifter som f.eks.: Martinus får kosmisk bevidsthed, Krishnamurti som verdenslærer, Profetier om den danske verdenslærer, Pyramidens hemmelighed, Jordkloden – et levende væsen, Verdensstaten, Verdenssproget esperanto, Kærlighed til dyrene, Sygdom og helbredelse, Kristusmoralen, Kan evigheden forstås? og Kristi genkomst. Bogen viser konturerne af en ny kultur baseret på en ny verdensmoral og henvender sig til alle, der interesserer sig for politik, videnskab, filosofi, miljø, sundhed og fred. Bogen kan også læses som introduktion til hele Martinus’ livsværk Det Tredje Testamente.

"How could you ever have thought [our world] was the ultimate reality? How could you ever have thought that it was merely a stage set for the moral drama of men and women?"For the many who share these thoughts from C.S. Lewis, our world is far more than mere matter, space and energy. Its orderly patterns, its reliable processes and arresting natural beauty give it the capacity to speak, without words, a mysterious language that feeds our curiosity and wonder about it. We are drawn into the world of the audacious, with thoughts beyond the conventional, to posit an intelligent and imaginative Artist and Architect whose ineffable Creation in both its spatial and temporal dimensions defies adequate verbal expression.In delving into revelation contained in various earth sciences and within the pages of the Bible, Our World: God's Visible Language reveals a congruency between these two avenues to Truth, that the visible Creation repeatedly declares the glory and mystery of the invisible God, and that science is not an enemy to faith. Informative and written with imagination and personal anecdotes, these pages provide readers an opportunity to better understand the invisible God and His written Word, nudging us toward a loftier context in which life can be lived and enjoyed with hope and purpose.

This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places--and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world.