Author: Andrew Newberg File Type: mobi WHY DO YOU BELIEVE THE THINGS YOU BELIEVE? Do you remember events differently from how they really happened? Where do your superstitions come from? How do morals evolve? Why are some people religious and others nonreligious? Everyone has thoughts and questions like these, and now Andrew Newberg and Mark Waldman expose, for the first time, how our complex views emerge from the neural activities of the brain. Bridging science, psychology, and religion, they demonstrate, in simple terminology, how the brain perceives reality and transforms it into an extraordinary range of personal, ethical, and creative premises that we use to build meaning, value, spirituality, and truth into our lives. When you come to understand this remarkable process, it will change forever the way you look at the world and yourself. Supported by groundbreaking research, including brain scans of people as they pray, meditate, and even speak in tongues, Newberg and Waldman propose a new model for how deep convictions emerge and influence our lives. You will even glimpse how the mind of an atheist works when contemplating God. Using personal stories, moral paradoxes, and optical illusions, the authors demonstrate how our brains construct our fondest assumptions about reality, offering recommendations for exercising your most important muscle in order to develop a more life-affirming, flexible range of attitudes. Youll discover how to Recognize when your beliefs are altered by othersGuard against mental traps and prejudicial thinkingDistinguish between destructive and constructive beliefsCultivate spiritual and ethical ideals Ultimately, we must always return to our beliefs. From the ordinary to the extraordinary, they give meaning to the mysteries of life, providing us with our individual uniqueness and the ability to fill our lives with joy. Most important, though, they give us inspiration and hope, beacons to guide us through the light and dark corners of the soul.

Author: Jack Goldsmith File Type: epub The surprising truth behind Barack Obamas decision to continue many of his predecessors counterterrorism policies. Conventional wisdom holds that 911 sounded the death knell for presidential accountability. In fact, the opposite is true. The novel powers that our post-911 commanders in chief assumedendless detentions, military commissions, state secrets, broad surveillance, and moreare the culmination of a two-century expansion of presidential authority. But these new powers have been met with thousands of barely visible legal and political constraintsenforced by congressional committees, government lawyers, courts, and the mediathat have transformed our unprecedentedly powerful presidency into one that is also unprecedentedly accountable. These constraints are the key to understanding why Obama continued the Bush counterterrorism program, and in this light, the events of the last decade should be seen as a victory, not a failure, of American constitutional government. We have actually preserved the framers original idea of a balanced constitution, despite the vast increase in presidential power made necessary by this age of permanent emergency.