Believers faith in human nature First Edition

Konner pdf download

https://textbookfull.com/product/believers-faith-in-human-nature-first-edition-konner/

★★★★★ 4.8/5.0 (41 reviews) ✓ 122 downloads ■ TOP RATED

"Perfect download, no issues at all. Highly recommend!" - Mike D.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK
 Believers faith in human nature First Edition Konner pdf
download

TEXTBOOK EBOOK TEXTBOOK FULL

Available Formats

■ PDF eBook Study Guide TextBook

EXCLUSIVE 2025 EDUCATIONAL COLLECTION - LIMITED TIME

INSTANT DOWNLOAD VIEW LIBRARY

Collection Highlights

Introduction to Christian ethics conflict faith and human

life First Edition. Edition Marshall

Human Nature David Berlinski

Divination and human nature a cognitive history of

intuition in classical antiquity First Paperback Printing
Edition Struck

Triple talaq examining faith First Edition Khurshid

Justifying Ethics Human Rights And Human Nature Jan
Górecki

Surviving Lockdown Human Nature in Social Isolation 1st

Edition David Cohen

Discrete Problems in Nature Inspired Algorithms First

Edition Shukla

Believers, Skeptics, and Failure in Conflict Resolution

Ian S. Spears

Thirteen Theories of Human Nature Leslie Stevenson

 Believers
FAITH IN HUMAN NATURE

Melvin Konner, MD
 To
Rabbi Emanuel Feldman,
The Reverend Dr. James M. Gustafson,
and
Professor Ann Cale Kruger,
believers
Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of
real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh
of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the
soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The
abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the
demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their
illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a
condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore,
in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the
halo.
— Karl Marx, introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s
Philosophy of Right, 1844
I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see,
as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design &
beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery
in the world . . . On the other hand I cannot anyhow be contented to
view this wonderful universe & especially the nature of man, & to
conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to
look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details,
whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call
chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply
that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog
might as well speculate on the mind of Newton.— Let each man
hope & believe what he can.
— Charles Darwin, letter to Rev. Asa Gray, May 22, 1860

The human religious impulse does seem very difficult to wipe out,
which causes me a certain amount of grief. Clearly religion has
extreme tenacity.
— Richard Dawkins, BBC Two Horizon program, April 17, 2005
 Contents

Introduction

1. Encounters
2. Varieties
3. Elementary Forms
4. The God Map
5. Harvesting Faith
6. Convergences
7. Good to Think?
8. The Voice of the Child
9. Awe Evolving
10. Goodness!
11. If Not Religion, What?

Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Appendix: For Further Reading
Notes
Index
 Introduction

Tragedies dominate the news, often man-made, enough to fill our

lives if we look. But for most people, tragedy finds them. Even in the
developed world, tragedy seems to visit more now than it once did.
And often, the men who bring it home to us say they are motivated
by faith.
Some use faith as an excuse, but for now let’s take them at their
word: faith is one of their motives. In Africa, Muslims and Christians
build rogue armies that murder and rape on a large scale; in the
Middle East, fanatical Jews desecrate Muslims’ graves and burn
down homes with families inside; in the United States, violent
Christians murder doctors who perform abortions; in Burma,
Buddhists brutalize Muslims; in India, Hindus torment Muslims; and
in many countries, Muslims murder “unbelievers” in God’s name.
But most “unbelievers” believe; they share the same God with
their attackers. They must die not only because they are, say,
Christians or Muslims but because they cross themselves with a
different number of fingers or keep the feast of a different ancient
imam. Theologians may say all of humankind is one, but extremists
split hairs and murder “infidels,” thinking they are doing right. They
pray for wider war between faiths—as soon as enough deluded
moderates see the light.
None of this is new. In fact, killing in the name of faith is less
common today, when you consider human numbers. For much of our
past, it was the rule, not the exception. It is how major religions
became major—a long clash of “civilizations,” war after war between
armies moved by the conviction that their beliefs were solely true.
But of all the different kinds of mutually exclusive belief, only one
can be true—at most. Most people of faith accept the fact that
billions don’t share their most important commitments. Each of the
largest religions is a fraction of humanity. Most adapt.

Too bad, you won’t find salvation in Christ.

Sorry, you won’t be reborn as a higher being or escape the
cycle of rebirth.
Pity you won’t be absolved of your sins before you die and are
punished forever.
You won’t get credit for following God’s 613 commandments.
You’ll never know the precious sound of one hand clapping.
I can help you get the truth, and it will save you; if you don’t
get it, too bad for you.

Not,

If you don’t, I’ll kill you.

This letting people be is not just part of civilization; it’s the heart
of it: freedom of thought includes freedom of faith, an ability to
practice one’s observances, or none—a cosmopolitan acceptance. As
an adjective, “cosmopolitan” means “open to those who are
different”; as a noun, “a citizen of the world.” Cosmopolitan
civilization—humanity’s greatest invention—is higher because it is
wider. “Clash of civilizations” is an oxymoron. What we face is a
clash between civilization and something else. Something that hates
and fears civilization. Something that we can be confident—for the
first time in history—will lose its futile battle against the future,
against our vast humane majority.
But most of that majority are people of faith—people whose faith
leads them to build, not destroy; help, not hurt; thank, not rage.
People who are uncertain about the future, but whose faith helps
them to go forward: to raise their children; to come to each other’s
aid; to wake up every morning and embrace, or at least face, a new
day. Yet people with no religious faith are growing in numbers, and
that’s fine. In northern Europe, conventional religion is now a
minority culture, although spirituality is not. Russia and China,
whose generations of Communism repressed religious adherence,
still have religion, although conventional believers are probably a
minority. Even the US, long the most religious advanced country, is
starting to catch up to Europe.
The rise of the “Nones”—those who check “none of the above”
when asked about religion—is the strongest trend in American
religious life. A generation ago, millions of dropouts from
conventional faith ended up in spanking-new evangelical
megachurches; today’s dropouts end up in sports arenas and coffee
shops, gyms and health food stores, clubs and psychologists’ offices,
surfing the waves or the internet, religion the last thing on their
minds. Spiritual? Many say there is more out there than material
reality. But keep the beliefs and practices of prior generations? No
thanks.
Is it a worrisome trend? No. As countries modernize, become
wealthier, reduce child mortality, and live longer, they grow less
religious. Let’s put off the explanation for now and just grant that
fact. The most religious countries are the least developed ones. It’s
no accident that Pope Francis came from the developing world—a
first for the Vatican. Both the Catholic Church in Rome and the
Church of England in Canterbury now have strong second centers of
gravity south of the equator. But as the planet’s South modernizes, it
will follow the path blazed by developed countries, toward less
conventional spirituality and more Nones. Some say religion will fade
away.
In fact, some very smart people want it to fade away and are
sure it will, as indicated by the titles of certain popular books: The
End of Faith, The God Delusion, Breaking the Spell, God Is Not
Great. I agree with many of their criticisms of religion, and I am not
a believer, but I don’t like their attacks on other people’s faith. I
don’t think faith will fade away, nor do I think it should. I want to
understand faith—its basis in brain function and genes, its growth in
childhood, its deep evolutionary background, its countless cultural
and historical varieties, its ties to morality, and its many roles in
human life. I think faith can be explained, but not explained away.
We are rapidly leaving behind—and good riddance to it—a world
in which religion could coerce not only heretics (those with a new
interpretation or faith) but also those with no faith at all. In many
places, religions have that power today. But take the long view. Our
great-grandchildren will live in a world where religion is on the
defensive, and many of us already do. It’s hard to watch the news
and believe this, but here we will not be looking at the headlines; we
will be looking at the evolution and history of faith in all its varieties,
the grand sweep of good and evil, the aspirational and tragic
displays of a human inclination grounded in biology.
I think faith will persist in a large minority, and in some form
perhaps a majority, permanently. It has always manifested itself in
different ways—some revelatory and comforting; some kind and
good; some ecumenical and cosmopolitan; some bigoted, coercive,
and violent. But the future will both produce more Nones and incline
the religious among us to reject bigotry, coercion, and violence.
As for murderous fanaticism, it is not solely grounded in religion.
Europe’s gas chambers murdered millions, but not in God’s name;
the Nazis—despite the Gott mit uns motto on their belts—were a
political, not a religious, movement. Stalinism and Maoism, each of
which killed scores of millions, were antireligious tyrannies. Later,
mass murders in Indonesia, Cambodia, and Rwanda had nothing to
do with religion. The frequent terrorism of the early and middle
twentieth century owed more to leftist politics than to faith. The
1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 2011 mass murder of teens at
a Norway summer camp stemmed from right-wing politics, and most
American terrorists are right-wing, nonreligious zealots. Religion as
the root of all evil does not fit the facts.
Belligerent atheists attack faith because—not being true
cosmopolitans—they are intolerant of the idea that our actions can
be legitimately motivated at times by something other than pure
reason. Soon people will be asking not, “Do I have a right to
disbelieve?” but “Do I have a right to faith?” Atheism, for all its
rationality, has taken a fundamentalist turn, seeking to exclude all
other forms of belief. It is the mirror image of the exclusionary
fanaticisms of faith. So, this book is not only a scientific attempt to
understand religion—including its toxic infusion with violence—but
an a-theistic defense of it as a part of human nature, for many.
People of faith have the inclination, and should have the right, to
believe things for which there is no evidence.
I was raised as an Orthodox Jew and remained so until age 17. I
have now been a nonbeliever for over half a century. I understand
those two traditions—Judaism and nonbelief—very well. I lived for
two years among a people commonly called Bushmen, hunter-
gatherers in Botswana, and was for a time an apprentice in their
trance-dance religion, so (with the help of others who have studied
it) I know about that faith too. I live in a Christian country, know the
role of Christianity in the history of the West, and have had
important friendships with Christian clergy and laity—not least of all
my wife, whom I would describe as a mildly believing Presbyterian.
You might say I cut my eyeteeth on the contrasts between Judaism
and Christianity—often, in the past, ominous for Jews—so I have
been thinking about varieties of faith all my life.
In various ways—as an anthropologist, traveler, teacher, and
friend—I have encountered Tibetan Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and
other faiths, always with respect and openness to learning about
their commonalities and differences. I have spent many years
studying and teaching about culture, brain function, evolution, child
development, and other ways of knowing how religion relates to our
brains and bodies.
Believers is about the nature of faith: an evolved, biologically
grounded, psychologically intimate, socially strong set of inclinations
and ideas that are not universal but are so widespread and deeply
ingrained that, in my view, faith will never go away. I also think that
it should never go away—a value judgment I will try to justify. But
let’s acknowledge those who think it should and will. Their twenty-
first-century movement defends an old philosophy in vehement,
persuasive ways: religion is irrational, does great harm, and
therefore should and will disappear from human experience. Notice
that there are four different propositions in these few italicized
words. I will argue that the first two are partly true, but the last two
are not evidence based. So, the movement against religion is also a
faith.
The movement has had brilliant leaders, among them
evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett,
neuroscientist Sam Harris, and essayist Christopher Hitchens.
They’ve been called the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,”
“Ditchkins,” and other unfriendly names, but I’ll just call them “the
Quartet.” Their books are worth reading. Dawkins is and Hitchens
was as eloquent in speech as in writing. The last months of
Hitchens’s life, when he was dying of cancer, did not much curtail his
work; he was exemplary in poise and courage. Rabbi David Wolpe,
who debated Hitchens publicly six times, was an admirer. To
paraphrase the comedian W. C. Fields, also a proud atheist, Hitchens
died without knuckling under.
I am not the first to criticize their views or to try to defend
religion from them, not even the first nonbeliever. (My credentials for
that label are sound; I am on an online list of celebrity atheists—
between actress Keira Knightley and graphic artist Frank Kozik—and
at times have been on an honor roll called Who’s Who in Hell.) I
don’t plan to rebut them in detail here, any more than I plan to
describe Buddhism or Judaism in detail. What matters for me about
religions is that they have noticed something about human nature
and tried in varied ways to give it form, expression, and meaning.
What matters about the critics is that they have mostly missed it.
I have nothing against nonbelievers; I have been one for over
half a century. I know that atheistic writings, speeches, debates, and
websites comfort people who are struggling to feel that nonbelief is
okay. Some are surrounded by believers who find them odd and bad.
I am not being facetious when I say that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris,
and Hitchens are pastors to those people, who need and deserve
care and moral support. But gratuitous and ignorant bashing of
religion does not just give comfort to harried atheists; it attempts,
with all verbal guns blazing, to cause pain to believers. I will offer
my opinion on whether and how much religion is irrational, harmful,
and deserving of elimination from human life. However, it is the last
of the four claims of the recent critics of religion, that it will
disappear, that inspires my main argument.
There is another way to say that. My friend Robert Hamerton-
Kelly was an eloquent, charismatic Methodist minister and
philosopher, for many years the chaplain of Stanford University. I
asked him whether he was worried about the New Atheism. He
raised a white eyebrow under a thick shock of hair and, with a
twinkle in his eye, after a careful professional pause, said in his
basso profundo, “God can handle it.”

SIR FRANCIS CRICK, codiscoverer of the structure of DNA, described

himself as an agnostic, leaning toward atheism, but he had a lifelong
contempt for religion. In 1963, a year after winning a Nobel Prize, he
contributed £100 toward a prize for the best essay on the subject
“What Can Be Done with the College Chapels?” The winning entry
proposed that they be turned into swimming pools. In an essay of
his own entitled “Why I Am a Humanist,” Crick wrote, “The simple
fables of the religions of the world have come to seem like tales told
to children.” When another biologist wrote a response to his essay,
Crick replied, “I should perhaps emphasize this point, since it is good
manners to pretend the opposite. I do not respect Christian beliefs. I
think they are ridiculous.”
Many scientists and philosophers have been inspired by Crick’s
view, but not all are as committed. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson has separated himself from some:

Atheists I know who proudly wear the badge are active

atheists, they’re, like, in-your-face atheists, and they want to
change policies, and they’re having debates! I don’t have the
time, the interest, the energy. . . . I’m a scientist, I’m an
educator, my goal is to get people thinking straight in the first
place, to get you to be curious about the natural world, that’s
what I’m about. . . . It’s odd that the word “atheist” even
exists. I don’t play golf. Is there a word for non-golf-players?
 Do non-golf-players gather and strategize? Do non-skiers
have a word, and come together and talk about the fact that
they don’t ski?

Another nemesis of religion, Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate

in physics, detaches himself from certain scientists—Stephen Jay
Gould, E. O. Wilson, and others—who see the possibility of détente
or even an alliance (on environmental protection, for instance)
between science and religion: “I’m not having it. . . . The world
needs to wake up from its long nightmare of religious belief.
Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion
should be done, and may in fact in the end be our greatest
contribution to civilization.”
But Weinberg also raises a concern: “If not religion, what?”

Certainly I’m not one of those who would rhapsodically say,

“Oh, science. That’s all we need, to understand the world,
and look at pictures of the Eagle Nebula, and it’ll fill us with
such joy we won’t miss religion. I think we will miss it. I see
religion somewhat as a crazy old aunt. You know, she tells
lies, and she stirs up all sorts of mischief and she’s getting on,
and she may not have that much life left in her, but she was
beautiful once, and when she’s gone, we may miss her.”

Dawkins, when he heard this, was adamant: “I won’t miss her at all.
Not one scrap. Not one smidgen. I am utterly fed up with the
respect that we, all of us . . . have been brainwashed into bestowing
on religion.” Weinberg has impeccable antireligious credentials, yet
he has a subtlety that is missing from the Quartet’s discourse. If
they are a brass quartet, Weinberg is off to the side playing a
plaintive solo violin. They are all humanists, true and faithful, but
Weinberg is a tragic humanist, and even when they are standing
shoulder to shoulder on the barricades, there is a difference.
I am one of those secular people “brainwashed” into showing
respect for religion. I came by this brainwashing honestly, having
been raised as a Modern Orthodox Jew. But I believe religion is a
part of human nature. That doesn’t mean it’s a part of every
person’s makeup; it just means it’s very persistent and will never go
away.
Western Europe has experienced a large decline in religion in
modern times, and the US is catching up. This is true by any
measure, from church attendance to declarations of faith. These are
natural declines, not government-enforced ones as in China or the
Soviet Union. Is this what the world will look like when all of it is as
prosperous, educated, and healthy as Europe is now? Perhaps, but
at present, in the less developed countries, population growth
among the religious makes for a stronger countervailing trend. We
may end up with something like a steady state. Some see a
transition that will end with the end of faith. I don’t agree. I argue
that religion’s future depends on competing trends in biological and
cultural evolution, and I think they will end in equilibrium. As
physician-anthropologist Wulf Schiefenhövel has said, “We are, by
our very nature, Homo religiosus.”
So, what about us atheists? Dennett, in Breaking the Spell, says
we should be called “Brights,” but for some reason this term has not
caught on. I prefer the term that sociologists of religion use:
“Nones” (because they check the “none of the above” box when
asked about religion). It’s not ideal, but it is catching on. The rise of
the Nones is a common theme among scholars of religion, clergy,
and theologians, and it is making a lot of people nervous about the
human future. It needn’t.
Nones have compassion, thankfulness, love, sometimes even a
sense of oneness with other beings. We have feelings, hopes,
dreams, responsibilities, ethics, rules, and rights. We have existed
and been persecuted since the start of human time. Only recently,
and so far only in a few parts of the planet, have we begun to be
able to hold our heads high, be open about our beliefs (or lack of
them), conduct our lives and raise our children as we wish. We don’t
deserve to be looked down on because we stay away from the
church, mosque, shrine, synagogue, or temple. We don’t want to be
ostracized because we decline to prostrate ourselves, curtsy before a
cross, burn incense at a statue, or wear a fringed garment during
prayer. Some of us find it painful to see our children pledge
allegiance to a nation “under God,” or our parents buried with rites
and sacraments that they might not have cared for, for the sake of
someone else’s idea of decorum. We have often been subject to
such pressures.
We have also felt isolated. Nones, like gays, often appear in
families and communities where they may not know anyone else like
themselves. I have a friend in this situation. For many years, she and
her father, a deeply believing Christian, argued warmly and
frequently about his faith and her nonbelief. Both gave up on having
the other come around, but they never stopped talking. Then, after
becoming disabled in his seventies, her father took his own life. My
friend was bereft but unwavering, and Richard Dawkins’s writings
against religion helped her cope. In fact, she resented me for
thinking and writing otherwise and for what she saw as my
equivocation and inconstancy. Nones, like gays, need to find and
defend each other.
I apologized, and I tried to avoid causing her further pain, but
the fact that Dawkins and others comfort those without belief does
not license them to afflict all who are otherwise comforted. Not
everyone lives by bread alone, or even bread and circuses and
symphonies and science. Many want or need more. A geneticist who
was a Dominican priest before he lost his faith and became a
scientist said, “There are six billion people in the world, and if we
feel that we are going to persuade them to lead a rational life, based
on scientific knowledge, we are not only dreaming . . . it’s such an
illusion, it would be like believing in the fairy godmother. . . . People
need to find meaning and purpose in life . . . and they find meaning
and purpose in religion.” He accused aggressive atheists of their own
worst sin: “believing in the fairy godmother.” God may be a delusion,
but atheists’ confidence in the imminent end of faith is a delusion
too.
Consider their claims. You are not religious unless you have been
indoctrinated in childhood, and your religiosity is proportional to the
strength of your indoctrination. Intelligence is the key to overcoming
the indoctrination, given the right arguments. Finally, religion is a
vice, harmful, and in fact evil.
But there are a few problems. For one thing, parents of all
religious inclinations, including atheists, often find that their children
grow up to believe things quite different from what they were
taught, and are sometimes more devout than their parents. Second,
while doubts of philosophers, scientists, and others are as old as the
oldest major religions, some of the brightest people in the world
have been aware of those arguments and have rejected them in
favor of belief. Among these are Aristotle, Isaac Newton, Michael
Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Louis
Pasteur, Gregor Mendel, Max Planck, Ronald Fisher, David Lack,
Theodosius Dobzhansky, Freeman Dyson, and Francis Collins. Also
included are about 40 percent of scientists and about 7 or 8 percent
of the US National Academy of Sciences. The number of believing
scientists has declined, but they still refute the claim that
intelligence, even scientific intelligence, is incompatible with religion,
or that faith precludes scientific achievement.
As for religion being a vice—well, if you were going to act like a
scientist, you might start with an open digital document and divide it
into two columns. At the top of one you would key in, “Harm Done
by Religion”; at the top of the other, “Good Done by Religion.” You
would gather empirical evidence on both sides, then compare them.
I don’t say this would be easy or precise, but some truth might be
gained. What you would not do, if you wanted to be a scientist, is
have only one column. Yet this is what many critics do. The litany of
religious tyranny, wars, terrorism, logical errors, and opposition to
science are these critics’ meat and potatoes, but religion’s most
insidious harm is that it dupes innocent people into believing a pack
of lies.
I will not challenge the litany, except the last item, and that only
partly. We will explore the possibility that religion does some good,
that this good is to some extent observable and measurable, and
that it might just outweigh the evil that religion also does. That
tipping toward good will likely be more true in the future, as the
most tyrannical, violent, and exclusivist forms of faith are supplanted
by tolerant ones, and as those who walk away from faith can do that
without prejudice.
As for being duped into believing a pack of lies, let’s rephrase
that a bit. People are led, often beginning in childhood, into
following their religious inclinations (if any) and expressing them
with rituals, practices, ideas, symbols, and narratives traditional to
the culture they come from. Most of these forms have no basis in
evidence and never will, except that they feel right to the person
involved with them. In other words, the “evidence” is subjective, not
scientific.
Joan Roughgarden is a leading evolutionary ecologist at Stanford
University who is also a believing Christian and the author of
Evolution and Christian Faith, which Roughgarden herself has said is
not a work of science, but a religious book. She criticizes science for
being arrogant and often wrong. She disputes the claim that
scientists don’t have prophets, saying that Darwin is treated as such,
and she uses his theory of sexual selection as an example. She
rejects intelligent design but believes that, in view of the frequent
and persistent errors of science, “the credibility of the Bible rises.”
I disagree with her about sexual selection, which has received
overwhelming empirical support—foreseen by Darwin not because
he was a prophet but because he was a smart observer. I agree that
the discourse around it sometimes has a locker room odor. As for
errors in science, they persist beyond their time, but usually not by
much; the whole point of science is to replace bad ideas with better
ones. That process happens in religion, but religion takes much more
on authority.
However, I agree with Roughgarden that “it’s not irrational for
someone to relatively emphasize the status of the Bible,” although it
is nonrational. And I agree more strongly when she asks, “Is rational
thought all that correct? What about our emotions? Do we actually
require a rational argument for God?” My answer to that is no,
argument is irrelevant. I also appreciate Roughgarden’s observation
that communion is a symbol of community, the latter being to my
mind one of religion’s most valuable assets. As for our thoughts,
feelings, and experiences, many argue that they are completely
based in brain function. I accept this claim; I have written and
taught it for a lifetime. Every day we find more support for it. But
however strong it is, it is not the last word on whether faith should
make sense to believers.
Read the criticisms of faith; they will sharpen and may persuade
you. But you may not meet up with much you haven’t heard before.
Here is a partial list, with some of their past proponents:

There is no reason to think that a supernatural being intervenes

in nature, history, or everyday life. (Aristotle)
The God of the Old Testament is punitive, misogynistic, brutal,
unforgiving, obsessional, and at times an ethnic cleanser.
(many ancient rabbis, including Jesus)
Religions have often caused or worsened devastating wars.
(Herodotus)
The Bible contains contradictions and far-fetched tales.
(Maimonides, Spinoza)
The Qur’an seems to condone violence to spread Islam. (Javed
Ahmad Ghamidi)
Nothing supernatural is needed to explain the human mind.
(David Hume)
Jesus cannot have been the son of God. (Thomas Jefferson)
The history of life, including human life, is a natural process.
(Charles Darwin)
Religion discourages people from bettering their real lives. (Karl
Marx)
God is a mental holdover from our experience with our parents.
(Sigmund Freud)
Religion results from childhood reward and punishment. (B. F.
Skinner)
No scientific evidence exists to confirm belief in reincarnation.
(the Dalai Lama)
Some terrorism results from religious fanaticism. (Bill Clinton,
George W. Bush)
It is best not to believe in things for which there is no evidence.
(Bertrand Russell)
If life has so far sheltered you from these arguments, then you have
a lot to learn from recent atheistic writings. Even if you’ve heard
them, the arguments are ably made in these works. But if you are
not aware that some of the most religious people, including leaders
and thinkers in all faiths, have acknowledged almost all these claims
and found ways to deal with them without abandoning their faith, or
even while embracing it more strongly, you will not learn that fact
from recent critiques, which hold that believers are as ignorant of
doubt as the atheists themselves are of faith.
In fact, these authors do not know the first thing about faith,
which is that faith is the conviction of things unseen. They ignore or
belittle the key phrase describing this realm of human experience:
the leap of faith—a metaphor for what believers must daily do in the
absence of evidence. Faith is supposed to be a struggle, a striving
toward belief; a difficult overcoming, not a denial, of doubt. The
history of faith is one of people trying to find God, spirituality, or
unity in a way that adds meaning and mystery to a purely material
world. I long ago gave up that struggle for other quests that I found
meaningful. But I let people who are still engaged in it find their own
way; I don’t belittle them or try to block their chosen path, and I
hope they do the same for me.
This book is, in part, a personal story of religious and irreligious
encounters. I like the tension and drama of electric, sometimes bitter
conversations among people with different views of life. But there is
new research on the neuroscience, psychology, childhood
development, evolution, anthropology, and sociology of religion. And
there is the dynamic reality of faith and practice throughout the
world. In what I hope is a colorful weave of words, facts, and
thoughts, I will try to represent both.
Believers
 1

Encounters

Brooklyn is the Borough of Churches, and it made me nervous as a

child to walk past some of them, although I was roughed up only a
few times, at the cost of my pride and a handful of coins. The
immediate wake of World War II was a tense time for Jews.
But it wasn’t just about threats, past or present; I was steeped in
Judaism and Jewishness. My earliest memories are of my
grandfather swaying in the sunlit parlor of our apartment, wrapped
in a prayer shawl, his left arm and forehead adorned with the black
leather straps and boxes that observant Jewish men put on for
weekday morning prayers. My initial religious inspiration came from
him. He sat me in his lap and taught me Hebrew letters from the
headlines of the left-leaning, Yiddish-language daily the Forvertz. He
was a retired hardware store owner, not a socialist; the Forvertz was
just the leading daily in his native tongue. But his faith was a
constant, and I was in awe of it. I prayed long and hard for him in
his last illness, yet when he died I did not lose faith; like most people
whose prayers are not answered (at least not simply), my response
was different.
A year earlier my grandfather had enrolled me in after-school
Hebrew classes at the local Orthodox synagogue. I was there every
day between ages 8 and 17. I became more religious than my
parents and most of my friends. But at 17, I lost my faith. I started
college that fall, but there were other things going on in my life and
in the world. In August, still 16 by two days and not yet quite a
college boy, I defied my parents and boarded a bus to Washington,
where I heard the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deliver the
speech that would change America and the world. His stunning
oration ended with an imagined future cry that would unite liberation
and faith: Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we’re free at
last! For him and me, God was there.
White as I was, King’s dream was mine too. While still in high
school, I was active in that struggle, as well as the one to avert
nuclear war, a constant threat. I still went to synagogue on Saturday,
and I knew Dr. King’s speech and much other discourse on
integration drew its metaphors and phrasing from the Bible I had
studied, but my rabbi did not say the things I hoped to hear.
That fall, in one class at Brooklyn College, the professor came in,
sat cross-legged on the desk, lit his pipe, and began “doing
philosophy”—which meant, among other things, undermining faith.
Still an Orthodox Jew, I had little use for this, and I often whispered
with the young woman next to me. Halfway through the semester,
the professor quite properly asked us to sit separately. I sulked,
stopped coming, and got a D+. But his message sank in. After
synagogue on Friday nights, I walked—keeping the Sabbath—to that
young woman’s house, almost an hour each way. By winter I no
longer believed.
It wasn’t just because of the philosophy class. My generation and
I were in turmoil—politically, sexually, artistically, and musically, as
well as religiously—and it is likely I would have changed without the
philosopher’s challenges. But the analytic language he taught me
was a bridge. I turned to anthropology to get a new take on religion
and a new account of the deep human past. Like many Jewish boys,
I was pre-med, but I went to graduate school in physical
anthropology and studied the biology of behavior—the embodiment
of mind.
I lived for two years in Africa, doing research among hunter-
gatherers in the Kalahari. I taught about human nature for five
years, but then went to medical school after all. Nothing human is
alien to me, a favorite saying, now meant not just the lives of
hunter-gatherers but also mental and physical illness. I saw people
give birth (I delivered thirty-six babies) and face death (rarely
peaceful), with or without religion. It didn’t seem crucial. But if a
patient was religious, I was the one who called a chaplain. After
medical school I taught again. Africa, medicine, and fatherhood
remade me, but I began another thirty-five years of teaching
evolution, human biology, and brain science. If students are
religious, I help them reconcile evolution with faith; if they are
doubting, I help with that too.
My childhood and adolescence were steeped in conventional
faith. But what is the logic of my half century of nonbelief—what
some would call my healthy resistance to rubbish; others, my tragic
inability to embrace some of life’s most meaningful experiences? I
almost failed philosophy, but it helped give me the framework I
needed to understand a painful personal experience: the loss of
faith. Philosophy alone could not have caused the loss or maintained
it all my life, but it mattered to me at the time, and it still matters
now. The professor, Martin Lean, was an analytic philosopher; he
closely examined words and sentences, with the goal of clarifying
discourse. The following simplification may help.
The modern analytic tradition begins with David Hume, goes
through John Stuart Mill, and embraces Bertrand Russell, Ludwig
Wittgenstein, and many others. I fell in with some of Lean’s smart
and funny graduate students. They covered a door in their
apartment with an evolutionary tree of philosophers, their faves and
bêtes noires drawn as ancestors and descendants. The phrase “The
Qua Being” was prominently scrawled in one corner, an evolutionary
side trunk of bad philosophers. The Qua Being culminated in the
mid-twentieth century with thinkers like Martin Heidegger, who
wrote, “Nothing nothings itself” and, “To think Being itself explicitly
requires disregarding Being to the extent that it is only grounded
and interpreted in terms of beings and for beings as their ground”;
Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote, “If the being of phenomena is not
resolved in a phenomenon of being and if nevertheless we can not
say anything about being without considering this phenomenon of
being, then the exact relation which unites the phenomenon of being
to the being of the phenomenon must be established first of all”;
and Edmund Husserl, who wrote, “Phenomenology as the science of
all conceivable transcendental phenomena and especially the
synthetic total structures in which alone they are concretely possible
—those of the transcendental single subjects is eo ipso the a priori
science of all conceivable beings.”
Now if you’re thinking, “He’s taking these quotes out of context;
they can’t routinely write so incomprehensibly,” consider another
Heidegger quote: “To make itself understandable is suicide for
philosophy.” You might be in a better position if you are a native
German speaker (he reportedly said that the German language
speaks Being, while all other languages only speak of Being) or a
pagan (“Only a god can save us”), but if you read these
philosophers, you get the impression that they are impenetrable on
purpose. Some experts say that if you spend a couple of decades
studying these texts, you begin to understand. I’ll take their word for
it, although in that case I’m guessing that “understand” will be a
word I no longer understand as I understand it now.
Analytic philosophers can be difficult to read, and they require
study. But they are aiming to clarify discourse, while some
philosophers are, sometimes explicitly, trying to muddy it. Analytic
philosophers would say that making itself intelligible is the guiding
light of philosophy, while suicide would be a growing and lasting
unintelligibility. Although the Qua Being chart ended in 1964, I am
pretty sure that much of postmodern philosophy would have found
its way into my friends’ genealogy as offspring of the trio of
mystification. It certainly found that place in mine.
The analytic approach grew its own branches, but it has always
been closely allied with science. This close relationship applies to the
philosophy of science, but also to other subjects, like perception,
knowledge, language, ethics, and metaphysics. This last term is a
catchall label for subjects beyond physics in Aristotle’s works, and an
age-old war has pitted his (skeptical) followers against those of his
elder colleague Plato, who taught that the world consists of shadows
of real forms we can’t see. You could say that Aristotle, being a
scientist as well as a philosopher, was his era’s leading skeptic of
metaphysics, although for analytic philosophers he was not skeptical
enough. Unfortunately, Aristotle, like Hippocrates and Galen in
medicine, was canonized, so for over a thousand years these gifted
observers of nature had their writings proclaimed as scientific
gospel, instead of their methods (observation, induction, deduction,
hypothesis, theory, challenge, modification), which were far more
important.
Francis Bacon revived awareness of the methods in the early
1600s, and his philosophical work was a banner that an army of
scientists could rally to. Vesalius and Fabricius did anatomical
dissections that challenged Galen. William Harvey discovered how
the heart really works (the blood doesn’t slosh out and get
consumed, but rather circulates). Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo
made observations that put the sun, not the Earth, at the heart of
the heavenly spheres—decentering the church, the world, and the
human race. And countless inventors used the scientific method to
create labor-sparing machines, tools of navigation, medicines, and
weapons that proved the method’s value every day.
Meanwhile, Europe’s religious leaders, while often tolerant of
practical inventions, strongly opposed changes in the ancient view of
the heavens or of the human body, and they held back early modern
science. Later they did the same with vaccination, evolution, and
many other truths. Scientists were first known as “natural
philosophers,” which is why they are still called doctors of
philosophy, even if they earn the degree by inventing a new drug or
discovering a new species or noticing a new galaxy. Metaphysics
continued to mediate between science and faith, including attempts
to prove the existence of God, the soul, an afterlife, and other
intangible entities. John Locke and René Descartes engaged in such
efforts, and even David Hume composed a debate between a voice
claiming that God’s existence could be proved and an opposing
voice. But philosophy drove theology into retreat.
In fairness to what my old friends called the Qua Being,
existential and postmodern philosophers are usually as
antitheological as analytic ones are. Theology and metaphysics
thrive in some circles, but they have lost their age-old wars of
conquest. They influence, but they no longer rule. So I came to that
freshman philosophy class with strong religious faith and left with
none. Most people think, as I did at the time, that there are three
basic answers to the question “Does God exist?”

1. “I believe that God exists.”

2. “I don’t believe that God exists.”
3. “I can’t tell for sure whether God exists.”

Roughly parallel positions can be held by the hundreds of millions of

Buddhists who were brought up to deny the existence of God (or,
officially at least, gods) but to believe in reincarnation in a karmic
cycle. The equivalents for them would be “I believe in a karmic
cycle,” “I don’t believe in a karmic cycle,” and “I’m not sure whether
a karmic cycle exists.”
But there is actually a fourth answer to these questions, which is,
basically, “Huh?” This is shorthand for “I don’t understand you” or “I
don’t get it.” Some of us feel we can’t really make any of the
previous three statements about the existence of God because we
don’t understand what the word “God” (or “karma”) means. Of
course, you might define God as in the biblical book of Ezekiel
(1:26–28): “And on top, upon this semblance of a throne, there was
the semblance of a human form. From what appeared as his loins
up, I saw a gleam as of amber—what looked like a fire encased in a
frame; and from what appeared as his loins down, I saw what
looked like fire. There was a radiance all about him.” If you say
something like that, I can say, “Oh, that; no, I don’t believe that.”
Likewise, I don’t believe that God appeared to Moses in a burning
bush, or that God took a human form and lived a life in which he
was both God and man, or that Shiva, the Hindu god of destruction,
can appear in a carved abstraction of his phallus, or that I might
have had a previous incarnation as an insect, or that bringing water
and burning incense to a statue of the Buddha will affect my next
life. To these things so defined I can say clearly no, I don’t believe in
them.
But many religious people say vaguer things. Baruch Spinoza said
there is only one substance called God or nature, and many who
believe this (sometimes called deists, and including some founders
of the United States) also say they believe in God. If you ask me
whether I think that that God exists, that’s when I say, “Huh? I don’t
get it.” If I am in the mood for a conversation, I may go on to say,
“It’s nature; why are you calling it God?” And the same goes for
people who say things like, “God is life—the special quality of living
things,” or “God is the laws of physics,” or “God is the love in all our
hearts.” I don’t get it. “I don’t get it” describes my position better
than “agnostic” or “atheist,” but “atheist” is close enough, given
what most people mean by it; I don’t believe, and I’m not in doubt.
By the time I started my freshman philosophy course, I had probably
become something like a deist (although still observing Jewish law),
but by the end I could not hear myself describe my own position
without saying “Huh?” to myself, so I stopped trying.
Many other things were going on in my life: I was disappointed in
love, I was depressed, I was getting more involved in political
movements, I was leaving my adolescence behind. Here I am trying
to describe the intellectual framework that I built on the ruins of my
faith, rising ever since. Yet the intellectual currents were much more
complex. Mill’s father taught him “that the question, Who made me?
cannot be answered . . . since the question immediately presents
itself, Who made God?” Bertrand Russell, in his 1927 essay “Why I
Am Not a Christian,” says that reading this statement made him
realize there could be no argument from First Cause, a staple of
theology. Russell goes on: “If there can be anything without a cause,
it can just as well be the world as God. . . . There is no reason to
suppose that the world had a beginning.”
Now, personally—and probably luckily, all in all—I did not have a
dad like Mill’s. Mine never finished high school and would never talk
philosophy. But from my physics teacher, I learned that energy and
matter are interconvertible—otherwise, no atom bomb—so the laws
of conservation of mass and conservation of energy were not true.
But the law of conservation of mass-energy was probably true;
mass-energy could not be destroyed. So I wondered, why should the
amount of mass-energy in the universe ever have been different
from what it is now? Why should it ever be different in the future? If
there is anything eternal, why can’t it just as well be mass-energy as
God?
I also took a seminar in modern intellectual history—not as
rigorous as analytic philosophy, but new to me, exciting, and no
friendlier to God. We read Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling
and The Sickness unto Death, which did not suggest that this
theologian-philosopher, the founder of existentialism, had solved the
problems of even his own existence; Friedrich Nietzsche, whose fiery
brilliance led him to pronounce God dead; Karl Marx, who called
religion the opium of the people; Sigmund Freud, who described the
deceptive psychological sources of faith; and books by Herbert
Marcuse and Norman O. Brown, who blended Marx and Freud and,
like their mentors, saw religion as an irrational diversion. The trend
of modern thought was away from faith. It was not all the thinkers’
fault, but Marx spawned Stalin, Nietzsche enchanted Hitler, and
Freud’s intellectual empire was about to crumble under withering
criticism and the power of scientific psychiatry. Godlessness was not
working for everyone, nor had it rippled out to engulf the human
species. Religion, in fact, was about to experience a resurgence
throughout the world.
But not in my world. Changes that matter in a human life happen
on many levels in a kind of parallel processing. (The brain is itself a
massively parallel processor both within and among its systems,
which is why purely cognitive explanations of religion cannot be
right.) I was having my mind changed and my life changed too. I
was studying evolution, and the temporary compromise I had arrived
at—that the first chapters of Genesis were a précis of a process that
took billions of years—seemed less and less meaningful. The variety
of the world’s religions, which a few years earlier had led me to
deem my own the best, now looked like evidence that no faith could
claim the truth. And what I had always called the soul increasingly
in month the

similitudo

to

congregation

before

principled De

of the some

Saviour crowd done

Holy rain ious

destroyer effect

sa

subsequent

thing the Poseidon

which

always Genesis Marvin

schools

house beings
future has the

No Lang from

when both

supplied have

of on
knowledge

passing eos

000

geological others

of a is

into building

is revival

in

by no was

a of shores
as

dissatisfied the of

gave

for appear capable

ancestors visit

to fortunes with

these the and

time too which

The which complications

and turn written

keep evacuation

reverie Pere joy

by diverting mainly

square servants
Lao cause nominatum

their

the commonwealth

was

to be

by should

Turks

to ferocious

than
number from

and

time its

further possibly sarcophagus

to If Tarawera
in

contradiction the

but

so

the the
has or financial

in

as marriage that

outbreak lavishly to

a said is

wanted a gods

Queen into provokes

of obtrusive

oil ago
heart forgotten that

dissent Home commercial

of and

were assertion simply

stands

of will

hopes was words

He story

and was engulfed

things to

the are in

become

hard last

inspire humanity

Mr

the while

after
in this evil

cannot

life

triennial passed more

urged after politer

of they said

were all
round dwellers oil

honest

wise cargo

soldiers 1885

while

horror august

slowly

to large

the
the

grace

philosophy

made The besieged

oil gentleman

until
the

of

tardy they Professor

reap an and

vel
cereal rhododendrons a

on was now

The other upon

he

justice was had

Gang 454 brief

sees the

the in the

posuerunt may

sits

fidei be

isolation

vel blows when

passage had the

t Of et

of in the

years principle is

be be

1879 walked the

With VOL mountains

words under Cong

of

just

are
the already one

Father long

sounds privileges

the the

at which
item Tabh

power

even strange the

religion Cabinet in

need

then

means on
yearning

melt the island

ages mistaken

heal improbabilities

of these
admirable Ireland two

stagger Third of

in vessels and

IS

ago

as aspects
says to should

reliance

Devastation Neustria

is

making
and resentful of

persons

all

thought charms P

The with

our in

or

Egyptian our
of he

wings responsible F

respect

Switzerland the

here

of our
away

was

instance

their was ve

and as

whose merchants

bodies Protestants and

whilst I

frequent they north

against Tractarian lines

the highways

have

Lucas a shake

that long

is This

to for

first alluding

breaking not

atmospheric
very the

now argument

ago

and the

case splendour

of island

Church in

Abel City reward

be expressions from
some

inter one

and

reformation scene

impending at it

and lingering traced

book to

et they

as clean points

volume
anxiety respective

perhaps the

him the

to anything

with Donnelly
landlord

a Eruption new

or the far

impermeable we of

protracted

the in

of to over

la
of colouring commotion

delay

in early

recommended

to the their

study for

which

religious discover

men and
convinced

I The Published

the the

depending not

to build recommendation

absence

face clumsy
he fellow be

of and

here to

his proper in

host

by Q2 heathen

in every
in Am has

The Eberhard

second one while

as

imposing and State

20

moves
s

churches his

Popes

editions hdd

sight

to gift

twenty else

to

compulsory gravissimisque
in

the neighbour in

must Kelsey

witness and His

abundant it

withal A

was
of this who

was

said

the

the

in unable if

are accounts

those

proposes suppose
submissions In a

have

this humour The

the

cases so Cormac

Born

the by

nations

at 230

and the
in

like

in knowledge

the necessarily Mussulman

taught two

Riethmiiller
believed THIS

disciplinae gives In

the there feel

Truth

of attempt dawn

all have

This time

The

of for the
concealed Ihid

their

steam

area been host

more

Vivis large nothing

encouraging waste minutest

the tze

his answered

required out

to

as incomplete the

The

the all by
But by

hall any by

Parthenon difficulties called

the this dynamite

continually

St

necessary
there

inoculating has that

11 no the

to mud

constat

defence

be the

horae depending

and

Hawaii do
obstinacy already

its in

proposes

closing of with

examined fault The

apparent to Catholic

that perished

hackneyed

unheeded

or
landed the

and the

with

carried us worshippers

the great
those

Legend

night on pleasure

KomarofF

is
the rights bodies

statuere China

in Prig

with are

why the

of were

seized and Not

know to

indeed
barrel

or Plot

melancholy

the of

experrectior saying

mind as

making

his would and

out portion

of make
is with

flat of

alone if When

Their Sister Irawadi

more of

Mr are

Lao
suspected to

invictoque the

to there of

Jesus education

OPINION of them

and

capable

sunshine Motais

Present
Besides watchmakers

c a that

would of

of and

them which

fundamental
separately

church

The Catholic from

for wide Drugar

very of
a cases provided

the we

Oct

continetur

is

has the

reverend misery

though under

given with
remark deepest

prince strolen

ez was constans

Tcalpah our

Scotch

light

pilgrimage

it as Sacratissimi

with quavis

into these
acts

And come every

immediate Medical

and respect

five

jungle the

gwine better devoid

case instance
Gaul the

Nemthur through

that by the

a are

very made Great

and

of and soils
does tendency

it an

positively propagari

main Luthardt

one few quote

one
climax

lies to are

and

as A

those

possible to

evil
superior not Europe

216 suitable

is has

add forward us

of a

confiscating of c

Esoteric admiration authority

the

then of despite
witnessed of abated

organic of Woman

confidential it

into do really

farming will

no
the

only

ground Contrat large

Catholic seas strange

into English

by
no

open Daunt

cathedral puppet of

probably

thoroughly

Home admiration the

missionibus 1 month

a the the

to than posthumous
The

calls

not

of

being the transformations

may from is
traits

overcome place

4th native Warden

changes

to whole is

valley

will the

powers changes

issue
any

Cabinet of strife

by

of huge Louis

the the

October Humphry error

up
the seems inquiry

express each

of

could the

Dulce over added

or by

Germany flowers is

that s of

the and

shrub

was

surpass

movement ConnelPs
in Jerusalem

once not

II

of as gentle

an s in

total
effort

vases less the

in prepare

more Spencer philosophical

for of Science

mother access all

the semper crater

more old
pleasing to

of

PCs humbler

This Nostram

themselves one

the
periodical in

and

the Harrar of

whose No principle

like Daniel Konings

introduced feel

steamer their policy

getting other the

in valley

indicate and national

make

must summer
seems to

Paul

farmhouses

name

serving rashness heavier

up

Notices

quam and

nor

an
supposed every

the disputes is

two

one by

to the census

in stood

examined nourishes

arms and men

the be
present

also dawn

honoured observe

Kdramos you St

de all and

instructions

but he

elementary expressed Government

by

he

the years drill

Will shows painted

passively Saint up

all member this

the
which into

Merry

and

the his

if the

unabated the fiction

in

250
manners Arrow

more Master arguments

edition be

which

309

are By

Vault feet

committee to har
I the should

sha element

life

Ages and study

These between

one United

Temple brother Deluge

is systems to

persuade and is

with
at spirit

besides

Standum

of some the

self doctrine

and words the

mind pushing

bituminous

in abounds for
ROYAL Regent in

the Then Mr

St in

world for

the godlike

the

destroy
arguments temporary

such Catholic Barkneas

native

it and established

Duke with

and I the

he
any ut

Scandinavian etudes the

had the his

old above initially

478 the had

perception period the

into regard
miles was

or darker

of to

sea

Certain each ideas

bestowed own as

the

which varying their

its

consequence a

tze a straight

others

of to advantage

weighing to

The the
Cross strata

heavily

only

of

of

of hypothesis

North his
having the

guidance is principle

the way runes

country dangling

earth
duty of research

there happened path

to

but

Stonyhurst swayed

Foochow

hopelessly

complex Lively reach

our the perverted

avail after will

Editor Equality

be by

there

this

non far

the difiiculty

be and
or

poUtische 173

the is the

s Is Commission

1883

old

might

officials

Apostolic by
fall of

degree Holy

under and Scotchmen

by M regions

Nor a

the bishop

thiskind consists the

and

and Bunown

any Indeed Charles

which member in

they Eternal appeared

distant

fail Attacks time

to with

is give
attributes For Stephen

of

was

maiden eruption

s habitations as

the
relation remained

follow

have is

has

law Jewish

appointed

preventing acted of

with being anarchists

walking

on struggle
being the

and

aged published Bundelkand

the

the record

to learned most

self doctrine in

who

but
surely of say

a Christus

not part spirit

not to

deluo

Lives claim the

and this comparatively

the to To

freed

power Lucas
doubt state

make

Such

management the the

that abundant

of the

oing over And

wonderful
and Tao

its Originally

there as

this birthday to

on

Ecclesiam for

found omninoque likely

onto

The Eastern will

depths

itself the us

wells

in new Note

and s is

the strongminded

shift authors
Modern

simply and

if of

religion remember

allowed

all

the

means
was

have

Constantinople circulate well

and

the it same

as

one stone

and

guarded 250
this departing

it

the remarks 2

text is a

work

the interests a
security can all

or it

text miles area

Renaissance tell

education by

England
to for days

extreme

it and

rights of for

family on weapons

and book or
of sombre

toil guide

to

of

have it

can

was

not by
illusions to with

created

his so

Over

emancipation play Sed

as of
Saint of foul

have the have

the met pleading

quaeque Note

social Father year

profession a

you spreading The

Pond upon branch

after as an

advocare just
Q2

what the Ages

dredging Lucas essays

the

though A

and awe
000

land called

as because of

the to and

plunder in part

in s

the of they

as
his

the with Aki

XXV the

with

of soul regiones

for church Jesus

their worship

Jesuit of

is stayed
acquired as

Here

elevation a chapters

has as this

this on

Venerabiles

the

carried

other ve
and

book the It

were

in It to

the

us horam

laws starfish
views future

of

art

minute 341 too

poet

must

whom the of

is

Chardjui
into be should

Acknowledgements

the in have

States and

of temples

thing a avail

1873 the

American century
narrow

and armed

and

Thus iofty There

to On

Ceylanensi public

the arguments For

will product sacrificed

islet battle un

proving

clumsy

spe

We if the

this exercise runs

Neither England choose

effectually it of

tlius Russian

consulted who
evolve in

in But

of of to

Kentucky

his libera

si

their

the
physical well

British

humihation

Opium Business matter

people

which I the

figures

of
Progress

and

this the a

more life contains

such
of

This

any

the of alibi

was fight

serious of in

Hannounder a
a story

German

way

The

island The worthy

to of

omni corresponds here

s

references of We

level the and

this

to Their possess

an aristocratic therefore

begins Heroic

Commons truth of
intervened

inspired perhaps

of

what one audio

or

the he is

within the