Rachel Gold: books | marketing | play | enlightenment

Are there fundamentalist atheists?

In the past few months, I've had some very interesting conversations about religion with my friends, that span an enormous range of experience from a Christian friend politely asking if I wasn't concerned about ending up in hell to an atheist friend wondering how I could possibly defend religion. (Well, okay, the conversation got a lot more colorful than that, but that's another story). 

I confess I'm fascinated by the folks called "new atheists" for reasons I hope I can illustrate below. This second installment of my summaries of "The Case for God" by Karen Armstrong will take a quick glimpse at the history of atheism and a slightly longer look at the modern phenomenon of the "new atheists," plus some general goodies about religion, science and unknowing.

The value of value

Can more expensive services actually perform better? If we have a good product or service and are willing to express its value rather than lead with humility (which is an epidemic up here in Minnesota), recent studies show we may be doing our clients or customers a favor.

You know the placebo effect? It's well-documented that the human body can trigger the healing process, produce endorphins, opiates and other reactions based on our conscious and subconscious beliefs and expectations. In many studies people react positively to sugar pills, sometimes as much or more positively than to the medications the study is trying to test.

The Case for God - review #1

I'll start by saying that I love Karen Armstrong's books and I considered this one to be a personal favor to me, even though we've never met. With the rise in media coverage of the "new atheism," I was really hoping someone with rock solid credentials would come out with a brilliant and reasoned response. For that you really can't do any better than Karen Armstrong. Now I can have the deep joy of telling anyone who wants to argue religion with me that they should go read this book first.

This is a dense 332 page book with about 60 pages of notes and glossary so I'm going to summarize some of the points in this article, but will also pull out specific themes in later articles to explore in more detail.

Is your marketing copywriter is too heavy on the marketing and too light on the writing?

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