Breaking the Spell - Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

If nowhere else, the dead live on in our brain cells, not just as memories but as programs--computerlike models compiled over the years capturing how the dearly departed behaved when they were alive. These simulations can be remarkably faithful. In even the craziest dreams the people we know may remain eerily in character, acting as we would expect them to in the real world. Even after the simulation outlasts the simulated, we continue to sense the strong presence of a living being. Sitting beside a gravestone, we might speak and think for a moment that we hear a reply.

In the 21st century, cybernetic metaphors provide a rational grip on what prehistoric people had every reason to think of as ghosts, voices of the dead. And that may have been the beginning of religion. If the deceased was a father or a village elder, it would have been natural to ask for advice--which way to go to find wateror the best trails for a hunt.

মহাবিশ্বে প্রান ও বুদ্ধিমত্তার খোঁজে

এই বইটি প্রাণের উৎপত্তি নিয়ে প্রাঞ্জল ভাষায় লেখা একটি বৈজ্ঞানিক গ্রন্থ। সাড়ে চারশ কোটি বছর আগেকার উত্তপ্ত পৃথিবী একসময় ঠান্ডা হয়ে কিভাবে প্রাণের স্ফুরণ ঘটার মত পরিবেশ তৈরি করেছিলো তার ধারাবাহিক উপাখ্যান পাওয়া যাবে এই গ্রন্থে। শুধু তাই নয় এই পৃথিবীর বাইরেও অন্য কোন গ্রহে কিংবা গ্রহানুপুঞ্জে প্রাণের বিকাশ ঘটেছে কিনা কিংবা এর সম্ভাব্যতাই বা কতটুকু সম্বন্ধেও একটি ধারনা পাবেন পাঠকেরা অবসর প্রকাশনা থেকে প্রকাশিত এই গ্রন্থ থেকে।

God Wants You Dead

This book is about the past, present, and future evolution of human ideas. Its primary emphasis is on parasitic collectivist ideologies. It examines where such ideas come from, how they harm us, and how we can remove them from our own minds and from the culture around us. Finally, it tells us the amazing things that will become possible for humanity when they are gone. Not only religions, but also nation states, racial groups, corporations and other collectives are targeted for observation and criticism.
This book will probably offend you, if you hold any icons to be sacred or are a
believer in any ideology that encourages group loyalty and action. When you get
to a part criticizing your favorite ideology, please just try to remember that we are
actually trying to be helpful.

Atheism - The Case Against God

This book is a hard hitting attack against belief in the Christian God as well as all other supernatural beings (called 'gods' in the book). Intended primarily for laymen and consequently relatively free from technical philosophical argument and jargon, this book might well be used in a beginning course in the philosophy of religion as a fair representation of contemporary atheistic thought. Students would, I believe, find it more provocative and challenging, than some other treatment that may be technically more sophisticated. The author's direct and forceful way of making his points has great appeal; clearly, it is a book written with deep intellectual passion.

However, there are some limitations to the book as an introduction to atheism and teachers of philosophy might wish to supplement it with other works. First, Smith's critical treatment of the standard arguments for the existence of God is incomplete. Variants of the cosmological and technological arguments are critically evaluated, but the ontological

Primates and Philosophers How Morality Evolved

It was not until a year and a half after his voyage on board the Beagle that Charles Darwin first came face to face with an ape. He was standing by the giraffe house at the London Zoo on a warm day in late March of 1838. The zoo had just acquired an orangutan named Jenny. One of the keepers was teasing her—showing her an apple, refusing to hand it over. Poor Jenny "threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child," Darwin wrote in a letter to his sister. In the secret notebooks that he kept after the voyage, Darwin was speculating about evolution from every angle, including the emotional, and he was fascinated by Jenny’s tantrum. What is it like to be an ape? Does an orangutan’s frustration feel a lot like ours? Might she cherish some sense of right and wrong? Will an ape despair because her keeper is breaking the rules—because he is just not playing fair? Our own species has been talking, volubly and passionately, for at least 50,000 years, and it’s a fair guess that arguments about right and wrong were prominent in our conversation pretty much from the beginning. We started writing things down 5,000 years ago, and some of our first texts were