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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.

Physical edition

Reason for price differences explained in my blog.

Update: Due to popular feedback, I decided to make split versions of the ebook edition for anyone who found 2554 pages too daunting but are still interested in reading my book. In case any of you are still interested.

Part I Only.

Part II Only.

Explanation on pricing can be read here.

Wonderment, visionary experiences, and shared insights can be quite magical, if not magic.

Paul Devereux, in his book, "The Long Trip: A Prehistory of Psychedelia", makes the case that much drug use is actually quite "natural", from a historical perspective.

Ronald K. Siegel, in his book, "Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances", makes the same claim from a more scientific perspective.

Are you sure you're not just focusing on the "straight-edge" part of modern culture?

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

Yes

This is an amazing book about that:
The Moral Animal

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.

While I agree with the article, I can't help but notice how well it's paralleling the release of Sam Harris's new book.

An easy and informative read of many such errors and additions is Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. I recommend you check it out if you haven't yet.

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.

Proving something on Fox wrong is like kicking the kid in the wheelchair over - this isn't worth much.

I'd like to see him and others address all of the issues raised in The Deniers

The roots of all American conspiracy theories are in this document - Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, the Birchers, the teabaggers, everything. Of course the ideas in the Protocols have their own pedigree but this is the nexus that explains much of modern America's delusional thinking.

Another really important document in this vein is William Guy Carr's Pawns in the Game. edit: oh man, don't miss the 5 star reviews at amazon.

I bet my dad that since I was bigger, I would fall into the pool before my younger brother did. He took a video camera out and recorded it, and we fell at the same time. I got mad and said that we had to do it again, so we did, and we both fell at the same speed. Then he explained gravity to me, and showed me Galileo's experiments off the leaning tower.

I don't recall ever having another understanding of the world that I believed so much, but turned out to be false - but this is a memory that's stuck with me for decades, so I think that in some way that experience did shape me.

Also, Lawrence Krauss has this book that is really good, although the subtitle question was not suitably answered for me.

Here's
a book that argues he definitely did not exist.