The Soul Of Doubt

Histories of unbelief typically emphasise external challenges to religious faith, such as the natural sciences, historical criticism, or changes in social conditions and lifestyle. This study accepts much of the chronology of the traditional account of 'secularization' but it proposes a very different cause: conscience. Tracing the liberation and expansion of the Protestant conscience from Martin Luther to Karl Marx, this book argues that Christian concepts of moral equity and personal freedom have consistently acted as the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy.

From Freud to the new atheists, it is widely assumed that science is the enemy of religious faith. The idea is so pervasive that whole industries of religious apologetics converge around the challenge of Darwin, evolution, and the "secular worldview." This book challenges such assumptions by proposing a different cause of unbelief in the West: the Christian conscience. Tracing a history of doubt and unbelief from the Reformation to the age of Darwin and Karl Marx, 'The soul of doubt' argues that the most powerful solvents of religious orthodoxy have been concepts of moral equity and personal freedom generated by Christianity itself. The book demonstrates that the radical criticism of philosophers as influential as Spinoza, Voltaire and Ludwig Feuerbach was not the product of science. It emerged from a collision between religious values and religious practices, preeminently acts of persecution. This study offers a bold interpretation of the Enlightenment as a movement of vigorous spirituality, and it turns on its head conventional wisdom about the impact of Darwin and scientific naturalism.0The "nemesis of faith" was not science or secular reason: it was an ethical intuition that a dangerous God cannot be real.

Is there a way to walk faithfully through doubt and come out the other side with a deeper love for Jesus, the church, and its tradition? Can we question our faith without losing it? Award-winning author, pastor, and professor A. J. Swoboda has witnessed many young people wrestle with their core Christian beliefs. Too often, what begins as a set of critical and important questions turns to resentment and faith abandonment. Unfortunately, the church has largely ignored its task of serving people along their journey of questioning. The local church must walk alongside those who are deconstructing their faith and show them how to reconstruct it. Drawing on his own experience of deconstruction, Swoboda offers tools to help emerging adults navigate their faith in a hostile landscape. Doubt is a part of our natural spiritual journey, says Swoboda, and deconstruction is a legitimate space to encounter the living God. After Doubt offers a hopeful, practical vision of spiritual formation for those in the process of faith deconstruction and those who serve them. Foreword by pastor and author John Mark Comer.

In 2016, suicide and depression are at an epidemic high in the United States. The World Health Organization predicts that by 2020 depression will be the most diagnosed medical problem in the world second to heart disease. Little, if anything, is being done to battle this disaster by our government or health leaders. Medicine, science and psychology cannot answer why this is happening but Author and Psychotherapist, Leo Battenhausen has a theory. America has Soul Doubt on God. People are seeking assistance to feel better in all the wrong places as belief in God keeps getting ignored by society and the media causing catastrophic effects. Battenhausen combines the field of psychology with the healthy SOUL to demonstrate how people can feel better again if they allow God into their lives and simply BELIEVE! A compelling read for the believer and non-believer alike. Soul Doubt illustrates the decline of morality in America today brought about by technology, social media and a government that has virtually kicked God out of society and institutions and had allowed evil forces to dominate our lives and minds. Where science, medicine and psychology have hit a brick wall when it comes to WHY, Soul Doubt breaks through with solution-focused answers and PROVEN ways to battle depression and suicide.

Long before philosophers started making the case for atheism, powerful, affectively laden cultural currents were sowing doubt in Europe. Alec Ryrie looks to the history of the Reformation and argues that emotions—anger at priestly corruption and anxieties attending the erosion of time-honored certainties—were the handmaidens of atheism.

Amir Ahmad Nasr is a young Muslim man with something explosive in his hands: a computer connected to the Internet. And it has the power to help ignite a revolution and blow apart the structures of ignorance and politicized indoctrination that too often still imprison the Muslim mind. Part memoir, part passionate call for liberty, reason and doing work that matters, My Isl@m tells the tale of how the internet opened the eyes and heart of a once fearful young Muslim to a world beyond the dogmatism of his upbringing, and recounts his transformation into a defiant digital activist. In his honest, provocative, and courageous debut, Nasr–a popular Afro-Arab Sudanese blogger–steps out from behind the curtain of anonymity and emerges as a voice of a new generation of tech-savvy liberal Muslims. Set in war-ravaged Sudan, oil-rich Qatar, multi-cultural Malaysia, the United States, Turkey and the new frontiers of cyberspace, My Isl@m is a fascinating prelude to the Arab Spring and a disarming and uplifting tale of doubt, soul-searching, Islam, and finding freedom in the Middle East and the rest of the Muslim world. A poignant, honest, and uplifting memoir of how blogging and the internet opened the eyes and heart of one young Muslim man to a world beyond his religious fundamentalist upbringing.

An invitation not to a faith certain of everything but, rather, to a faith that welcomes the discomforting questions. Religious zealotry plagues the world. It drives susceptible people to believe they have all the truth, all the wisdom, all the divine favor. And in some cases it even moves them to murder people who, they have concluded, are enemies of God. In The Value of Doubt, veteran journalist Bill Tammeus draws deeply on his own Protestant experience of doubt and faith and, in a series of reflections, contends that the road to a rich, dynamic, healthy faith inevitably must run through the valley of the shadow of doubt. The opposite of faith, he says, is not doubt; rather, the opposite of faith is false certitude. Tammeus argues in favor of recognizing our mortality, of adopting the Benedictine virtue of humility and of realizing that we live by metaphor, by allegory, by myth. It's the willingness to question, to reconsider, to be comfortable with ambiguity and paradox that will save faith from the hands of those who seem to know all the answers before they ever hear the questions. This lively and challenging look at the religious life is for anyone seeking to build and enrich an authentic faith and courageous enough to see doubt as an essential part of it.

A devotional for those who struggle with normal Christianity.