Faith No More seeks to understand how and why people lose their faith, severtheir ties with religious organizations, and experience a secularizing transformation in their own personal lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 75 individuals from a variety of backgrounds and religious traditions, this book offers a rich and colorful exploration of the human journey from religiosity to secularity. During his 2009 inaugural speech, President Obama described the United States as a nation of "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus--and nonbelievers." It was the first time an American president had acknowledged the existence of this rapidly growing segment of the population in such a public forum. And yet the reasons why more and more people are turning away from religion are still poorly understood.In Faith No More, Phil Zuckerman draws on in-depth interviews with people whohave left religion to find out what's really behind the process of losing one's faith. According to a 2008 study, so many Americans claim no religion (15%,up from 8% in 1990) that this category now outranks every other religious group except Catholics and Baptists. Exploring the deeper stories within such survey data, Zuckerman shows that leaving one's faith is a highly personal, complex, and drawn-outprocess. And he finds that, rather than the clich of the angry, nihilistic atheist, apostates are life-affirming, courageous, highly intelligent and inquisitive, and deeply moral. Zuckerman predicts that this trend toward nonbelief will likely continue and argues that the sooner we recognize that religion isfrequently and freely rejected by all sorts of men and women, the sooner our understanding of the human condition will improve.The first book of its kind, Faith No More will appeal to anyone interested inthe "New Atheism" and indeed to anyone wishing to more fully understand our changing relationship to religious faith. IntroductionChapter One: Mother was an ExorcistChapter Two: Stopped Making SenseChapter Three: MisfortuneChapter Four: To be Mormon, or Not to BeChapter Five: Sex and SecularityChapter Six: OthersChapter Seven: Jail, Food Stamps, and AtheismChapter Eight: The Apostate WorldviewChapter Nine: All in the Family?Chapter Ten: How and Why People Reject ReligionConclusionAppendix: Research Methods and Sample CharacteristicsNotesReferencesIndex
- ISBN: 978-0-19-974001-7
- Editorial: Oxford University
- Encuadernacion: Cartoné
- Páginas: 240
- Fecha Publicación: 17/11/2011
- Nº Volúmenes: 1
- Idioma: Inglés