201 Billion Galaxies

This is a book written for the 1.1 billion human beings who are searching for something secular, agnostic or nonreligious "In the woman's dream, the spirit had come to her and had given her a message that she could not ignore. The black-chicken spirit had told her to found a religion, one based upon in individual and communal worship, one that included the building or your own church where only you could go." This is a book of true first-hand stories and insights that address religious beliefs - where they come from and where they might be going. It confronts the difficulties between age-old human beliefs and modern scientific discoveries, discussing the impacts and discontinuities that result. Violence, permission, sex, the afterlife are all here, but not in the usual way. Who will actually be on the Starship Enterprise? How many sentient beings are there in the universe? What is a soul, really? What does "holy" actually mean? These are a few of the issues that are dealt with through the stories. Of course the biggy, and indicated by the title of the book, is exactly where do we and our religions fit in a universe of billion trillion stars, and an unimaginable number life-sustaining planets?