Wow! eBook
God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture
Author(s): Darrel W Ray (Author)
- Publisher: I P C Press
- Publication Date: 5 Dec. 2009
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 241 pages
- ISBN-10: 0970950519
- ISBN-13: 9780970950512
Book Description
Dr. Darrel Ray, psychologist and lifelong student of religion, discusses religious infection from the inside out. How does guilt play into religious infection? Why is sexual control so important to so many religions? What causes the anxiety and neuroticism around death and dying? How does religion inject itself into so many areas of life, culture, and politics? The author explores this and much more in his book The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture. This second-generation book takes the reader several steps beyond previous offerings and into the realm of the personal and emotional mechanisms that affect anyone who lives in a culture steeped in religion. Examples are used that anyone can relate to and the author gives real-world guidance in how to deal with and respond to people who are religious in our families, and among our friends and coworkers.
Editorial Reviews
From the Back Cover
Darrel Ray has made a marvelous contribution to our understanding of ourselves. The description of religion as a cultural virus is not new, Darrel is the first to put the virus on a slide and pull out the microscope. The God Virus goes beyond analogy, offering a fascinating and detailed look at the wiggling, maddening virus itself how it moves, how it survives, and how and why it continues to thrive. –Dale McGowan, Author/editor, Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers Harvard Humanist of the Year (2008) For those who are hungering for more after reading the books written by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris, Dr. Darrel Ray’s The God Virus is a logical and thought-provoking follow-up. By extending the metaphor of religion as a virus, the reader gets a better understanding of the incredible power religion can have on anyone’s way of thinking (Dr. Ray shows that even your IQ is negatively affected!). Lest anyone think this is just a put down of religion, the reader also gets excellent advice on how to live life without a God, from marriage to raising children. It’s a book that freethinkers will enjoy and religious readers can only dare to read. –Hemant Mehta author of I Sold My Soul On Ebay (Waterbrook Press, 2007) I am a religious person, a churchgoer. Nevertheless this one-of-a-kind book is a vital reminder of the fact that we need to look objectively at what religion does to us. –Frank Schaeffer author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back, DaCapo Press, 2007.
About the Author
Darrel Ray, Ed.D. is a psychologist and student of religion for over forty years. Raised in a fundamentalist home, he knows religion from the inside out. He left religion in his thirties, but continued to ask the question, How does religion work on the mind and behavior of those it infects? Because no other authors seemed to be answering this question, he wrote this book as a practical and theoretical guide to those who want to understand religions of all kinds and specifically how to eliminate it from our lives.
