Description: This resource goes a long way toward helping people understand the nature of violence generally, its complicated connections with religion, and how society in the future might avoid being blindsided by the worst aspects of human nature.
Review Quotes: ""This is an important contribution to understanding both the attraction and repulsion that religion conjures up among human beings. The author painstakingly and objectively covers the full spectrum of personal and mass violence associated with the whole gamut of the world's religions, past and present." -Barry A. Kosmin, director, Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture"You don't have to agree with every word of the author's argument to appreciate the complex and often troubling questions that Dr. Eller raises about the nature of religion, and the potential of so many faith traditions to produce violence, abuse and exploitation. Passionately written, Cruel Creeds, Virtuous Violence is a wide-ranging and obviously timely, text."-Philip Jenkins, author and Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities, Pennsylvania State University