Manipulations of the Public Mind
By Blair Alan Gadsby
A road map for civic pluralism in a nation healing from politically-inflicted religious wounds
Americans would be shocked to understand just how their religious beliefs have been used against them in the political elitesÖ efforts to engineer society and public policy. In this historical overview of key moments in American religious history, Gadsby demonstrates that what we are commonly-taught in our education systems, mass-media and the political world about religion's role in any number of events, is anything but.
In the spirit of Lies My Teacher Told Me, Religious Delusions American Style discusses eight areas in American history ranging from turn-of-the-nineteenth-century eugenics and the Scopes Monkey Trial, to the mind-control program known as Jonestown, to the implausible two-planes-three-buildings-straight-down operation called 9/11, we have been deceived in a big way about what has been done in the name of religion.
From the Introduction: ...the social consequences for populations holding religious delusions can range from benign (by being ignored and therefore un-influential), to bad (by inciting stereotypes and phobias about individuals or groups), to worse (by encouraging or extolling actions based in those stereotypes and phobias by means of discrimination, exclusion and persecution), and even to disastrous (by fomenting genocidal physical conflicts and wars).
Blair Alan Gadsby is a graduate of the University of Toronto’s Centre for Religious Studies (M.A., 1992) and is currently Adjunct Faculty of Religious Studies at Maricopa County Community College District in Arizona teaching World Religions, among other courses. He is also researching the religious pluralism on the east African coast in the city of Mombasa in Kenya, where he lived in the 1980’s and witnessed firsthand the multi-religious civic harmony that can be achieved in a dominantly Islamic region.
HISTORY
364 PAGES, 6 X 9
FORMATS: TRADE PAPER, EPUB, MOBIPOCKET
TRADE PAPER, $19.95 (US $19.95) (CA $26.95)
PUBLICATION DATE: MARCH 2020
ISBN 9781634242837
RIGHTS: WOR
TRINE DAY (MAR 2020)
