The search for a republican morality provides an exciting new study of an important event in the French Revolution and a defining moment in the career of its principal actor, Maximilien Robespierre, the Festival of the Supreme Being. This day of national celebration was held to inaugurate the new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, and whilst traditionally it has been dismissed as a compulsory political event, this book redefines its importance as a hugely popular national event. Hitherto unused or disregarded source material is used to offer new perspective to the national reaction to Robespierre's creation of the Festival and of his search for a new republican morality. It is the first ever detailed study in English of this area of French Revolutionary history, the first in any language since 1988 and will be welcomed by scholars and students of this period.

I began my quest for the Supreme Being over 2000 years ago. I was a famous conqueror in that life. I loved only one thing then: myself. Life gave me one success after another, and I thought I would conquer eternity. I was seen as the favored of the gods. In the end came the encounter with Truth. I was humbled by death. My eyes opened. I realized there is a Supreme Reality that no one can conquer. I surrendered to it. The quest for the true began in me. I lived many lives after that in this quest. I meditated in complete devotion, spent many hours in introspection, explored the mysteries of Creation, reasoned, surrendered to Great Masters and received guidance and blessings. Finally the Supreme Being revealed itself. I awakened to the Supreme Reality. I found the ultimate freedom and joy. This book was revealed during my experiences with the Supreme Being. The purpose of the book is to reveal about the Supreme Being and the Supreme Reality. It will remind the Self about its original quest. After reading it, no Self can be the same again -- no Self can avoid falling in love with the True Reality. It shares about the true relationship of the Self with the Supreme Being, as well as about the purpose of life, bondage of the mind, the path to experience the Supreme Being, and true living. Knowing the Ultimate has remained the innermost quest of every human being since the beginning: Mystics, Philosophers, Emperors, Kings, Conquerors, Scientists, Explorers and Discoverers all wanted to arrive there. The mind cannot come to rest without this knowledge. Deep within, we seek a heaven. We have imagined it with the ultimate in everything we want: beauty, power, security, knowing, peace, happiness, contentment. We seek to know about it and find a path going there. We wish to experience it while living. We love life. We never want it to end. So we have to live it for the reason we are here. To know it, we have to know The Truth. From a grain of sand, a blade of grass, a drop of water to many distant stars, we have come to know something about the world. We think we will arrive at an ultimate knowing by dividing and microscopically looking into things in the infinitely vast physical Universe. We ignore the fact that this visible Universe is itself an infinitesimal speck in the unknowable vastness beyond. We think we will analyze data, theorize, and understand The Whole, And once we have ultimate knowing we will have power over everything in Creation -- even life and death. But all we are doing is growing a very knowledgeable, confused, complicated, doubtful, disordered, unhappy, discontented, and restless mind. And its center we perceive as our "I." Our present Self-identity is an illusion, and impermanent. Our experience is incomplete because it is relative, partial, and extremely limited. The new reveals itself every day but our Ultimate Truth remains elusive. Why? Because there is one domain we have never entered: the search for our source and our true "I." It is in this realm we will experience what we are actually seeking: spontaneous knowing, uncaused happiness, everlasting identity, and infinite living!

When the Supreme Being and his son decide that being supreme isn't for them any more, it's inevitable that things get a bit of a shake-up. It soon becomes apparent that our new owners, the Venturi brothers, have a very different perspective on all sorts of things. Take Good and Evil, for example. For them, it's an outdated concept that never worked particularly well in the first place. Unfortunately, the sudden disappearance of right and wrong, while welcomed by some, raises certain concerns amongst those still attached to the previous team's management style. In particular, there's one of the old gods who didn't move out with the others. A reclusive chap, he lives somewhere up north, and only a handful even believe in him. But he's watching. And he really does need to know if you've been naughty or nice.

"Messenger Elijah Muhammad Propagation Society"--Cover.

Spinoza's thought is at the centre of an ever growing interest. Spinoza's moral philosophy, in particular, points to a radical way of understanding how human beings can become free and enjoy supreme happiness. And yet, there is still much disagreement about how exactly Spinoza's recipe is supposed to work. For long time, Spinoza has been presented as an arch rationalist who would identify in the purely intellectual cultivation of reason the key for ethical progress. Andrea Sangiacomo offers a new understanding of Spinoza's project, by showing how he himself struggled during his career to develop a moral philosophy that could speak to human beings as they actually are (imperfect, passionate, often not very rational). Spinoza's views significantly evolved over time. In his early writings, Spinoza's account of ethical progress towards the Supreme Good relies mostly on the idea that the mind can build on its innate knowledge to resist the power of the passions. Although appropriate social conditions may support the individual's pursuit of the Supreme Good, achieving it does not depend essentially on social factors. In Spinoza's later writings, however, the emphasis shifts towards the mind's need to rely on appropriate forms of social cooperation. Reason becomes the mental expression of the way the human body interacts with external causes on the basis of some degree of agreement in nature with them. The greater the agreement, the greater the power of reason to adequately understand universal features as well as more specific traits of the external causes. In the case of human beings, certain kinds of social cooperation are crucial for the development of reason. This view has crucial ramifications for Spinoza's account of how individuals can progress towards the Supreme Good and how a political science based on Spinoza's principles can contribute to this goal.

Western theology has long regarded 'Being' as a category pre-eminently applicable to God, the supreme Being who is also the source of all existence. This idea was challenged in the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger and identified with the position he called 'ontotheology'. Heidegger's critique was repeated and radicalized in so-called postmodern thought, to the point that many theologians and philosophers of religion now want to talk instead of God as 'beyond Being' or 'without Being'. Against this background, God and Being attempts to look again at why the ideas of God and Being got associated in the first place and to investigate whether the critique of ontotheology really does require us to abandon this link. After exploring how this apparently abstract idea has informed Christian views of salvation and of the relationship between God and world, George Pattison examines how such categories as time, space, language, human relationships and embodiment affect our understanding of God and Being. Pattison concludes that whilst Heidegger's critique has considerable force, it remains legitimate to speak of God as Being under certain restricted conditions. The most important of these is that God is better conceived in terms of purely possible Being rather than (as in classic Christian theology) 'actual' Being. This leaves open possibilities of dialogue with, e.g., non-theistic religious traditions and with science that are foreclosed by traditional conceptions. Ultimately, however, all basic religious ideas must issue from and be seen to serve the requirements of embodied love.