Imagine there's no heaven
Subtitle: how atheism helped create the modern world
By: Mitchell Stephens
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 328
ISBN-13: 9781137002600
Subjects: Moderne; Atheismus; Influence; Aufklärung; Atheism; Historia; Ateism; Sociala aspekter; History
Other titles: Imagine there is no heaven
Description: "The historical achievements of religious belief have been large and well chronicled. But what about the accomplishments of those who have challenged religion? Traveling from classical Greece to twenty-first century America, Imagine There s No Heaven explores the role of disbelief in shaping Western civilization. At each juncture common themes emerge: by questioning the role of gods in the heavens or the role of a God in creating man on earth, nonbelievers help move science forward. By challenging the divine right of monarchs and the strictures of holy books, nonbelievers, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, help expand human liberties, and influence the early founding of the United States. Revolutions in science, in politics, in philosophy, in art, and in psychology have been led, on multiple occasions, by those who are free of the constraints of religious life. Mitchell Stephens tells the often-courageous tales of history s most important atheists -- like Denis Diderot and Salman Rushdie. Stephens makes a strong and original case for their importance not only to today s New Atheist movement but to the way many of us -- believers and nonbelievers -- now think and live."--Publisher's description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue. Everything must be examined; title: How can that be? Why disbelief; title: A clear understanding of what happened: disbelief and learning arrive together in Greece; title: They forbid rational speculation: disbelief and learning decline together in Christian Europe; title: Nothing but this visible world: Europe's return to reason; title: How Heaven goes: disbelief and science in the seventeenth century; title: Open your eyes: the beginnings of the Enlightenment; title: Bombs on the House of the Lord: the Enlightenment argument for atheism; title: The beast let loose: revolution in America and France; title: This glorious land of freedom: abolition, suffrage and freethinking; title: Free rovers on the broad, bright, breezy common of the universe: working-class atheism in nineteenth-century Britain; title: To wipe away the entire horizon: creating the twentieth century; title: The passions of this earth: living without gods; title: The gods are being driven from the earth: secularism in Europe and America; title: This breach of naïveté: religion unregarded; title: Epilogue. Above us only sky.