Building One's Own Heaven: And Two Essays on Belief

This book is a collection of three essays written by a free-thinker about belief systems, encompassing beliefs in God, religions and science. The first essay, "Building One's Own Heaven" describes the possibility of building an individualized ideal society in the after-death world for non-believers. Believers' after-death world is heaven or hell; heaven is a boring place in which nothing is going on except praying and harp playing. Hell is an interesting place, but non-believers will have no chance to go there because death will erase them completely. The only choice for non-believers is an their after-death world which is imaginary, that they can build while they are alive. The essay will guide readers to the way to build such ideal societies.
The second essay, "Faith, Rationality, and an Ideal World" discusses the conflict between faith and rationality. Is a person of faith irrational? Some will say, "Yes" and others will insist that a person of faith also can be rational. The essay carefully examines arguments from both sides and concludes that both sides are correct. The source of the disagreement is a semantic problem of the words, "Rational" or "Rationality." The essay further investigates why people care about the answer to the question. The conclusion was that people have a deep seated desire to have an ideal world. This desire leads people to choose between faith or the rationality of science.
The last essay, "New Age Religions and the Inner Voice" deals with the essence of belief systems. People have been seeking for truth throughout human history, so far without result. Some believe in God as the source of truth and others ask science to provide the truth. There are still many people who are not satisfied with either approach. Some people from the last group are now flocking to New Age religions. Why do the New Age religions attract new believers? What is the difference between established Abrahamic religions and the New Age ones? New Age religions are similar to some Eastern religions. They are trying to find truth in the mind of individual believers. This method seems to be appealing to some Westerners unfamiliar with the Eastern approach of inner-voice-based truth seeking procedures such as meditation, Yoga, herb-induced trance, etc. However, the New Age religions have not yet demonstrated their superiority over other belief systems.