This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Modern Works on Religion gathers eight nineteenth and twentieth century works that examine or argue about religion from outside any scripture or church teaching office.
Two make a case for religion from nature and design. Paley's Natural Theology of 1802 opens with a walker finding a watch on a heath and reasons from its contrivance to a maker, the most widely read English statement of the argument from design; Darwin read it as a student and later called it admired, part of why the Origin of Species reads as a reply to it. Emerson's Nature, published anonymously in 1836, argues that nature is a direct route to the divine without the mediation of church or tradition, and is usually treated as the founding statement of American Transcendentalism. Thoreau's Walden, drawn from two years at Walden Pond on Emerson's own land, presents simplified living as spiritual discipline and draws openly on the Bhagavad Gita.
Two study religious experience itself. James's The Varieties of Religious Experience, built from his 1901 to 1902 Gifford Lectures, takes first hand accounts of conversion and mystical states as evidence rather than doctrine. Otto's The Idea of the Holy, published in 1917, coined the numinous for an encounter with something wholly other.
Two apply psychoanalysis to religion's origins. Freud's Totem and Taboo of 1913 traces religion to a primal act of parricide, a reconstruction anthropologists rejected almost immediately; his Future of an Illusion of 1927 argues belief is a wish fulfilling illusion rooted in childhood helplessness.
Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth of 1970, the odd one chronologically, reads Cold War geopolitics as fulfillment of biblical prophecy and sold in the tens of millions.