The Great Disconnect: Where Truth Meets Faith - Softcover

Abington, James

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798995270607

Publisher: Timeless Communications, Corp, 2026

Synopsis

Why does Christianity still command belief in an age of science and evidence?

The Great Disconnect examines how religion is inherited, reinforced, and protected—and how Christianity has used fear, authority, political power, and supernatural claims to survive for centuries.

For thousands of years, religion has shaped civilizations, inspired acts of extraordinary compassion, justified unimaginable cruelty, and answered humanity’s deepest questions about life, death, and purpose. Today, more than four billion people identify with a religion, and billions place their trust in beliefs they have never been asked to critically examine. The Great Disconnect invites readers to do exactly that.

Written by James Abington, this compelling work is not an attack on believers. It is an investigation into belief itself. Drawing upon history, archaeology, psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy, and the historical record, the book explores one of the most influential forces in human history: faith.

Rather than asking readers to abandon religion, The Great Disconnect asks a more fundamental question: Why do human beings believe what they believe?

The journey begins by examining the biological and psychological foundations that make religious belief so natural to the human mind. From childhood conditioning and cognitive biases to our innate search for meaning and pattern recognition, the book reveals how the brain can create certainty even in the absence of evidence.

From there, readers travel through history, exploring how religions evolved, how sacred texts were assembled, and how institutions gained authority over generations of believers. The book investigates topics often overlooked in traditional religious education, including the formation of biblical doctrine, the thousands of Christian denominations that claim exclusive truth, the political motivations behind many theological decisions, and the historical consequences of unquestioned faith.

Yet The Great Disconnect is far more than a history lesson. It also examines the emotional appeal of religion—why prayer feels comforting, why rituals produce genuine peace, and why sincere believers experience profound spiritual certainty. Rather than dismissing these experiences, James Abington explains how they emerge from normal human psychology without requiring supernatural explanations.

Throughout the book, difficult subjects are addressed with evidence rather than ridicule. The Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, the suppression of women, clerical abuse, and the manipulation of fear are explored alongside humanity’s remarkable capacity for reason, compassion, and moral progress. The goal is not to condemn individuals but to distinguish between the goodness of people and the claims of the institutions they inherit.

Ultimately, The Great Disconnect offers something many books in this field do not: hope. It argues that meaning, purpose, morality, love, awe, and community do not disappear when supernatural beliefs are questioned. Instead, they become grounded in something even more extraordinary—the natural world and the human experience itself.

Written in an engaging, accessible style for both believers and skeptics alike, The Great Disconnect challenges readers to ask questions they may have avoided for years while treating those questions with intellectual honesty and respect. Whether readers ultimately agree with its conclusions or not, they will come away with a deeper understanding of how beliefs are formed, why they endure, and what it truly means to pursue truth wherever the evidence leads.

The Great Disconnect is not simply a book about religion. It is a book about humanity, the search for truth, and the courage to follow evidence over tradition when the two are no longer the same

About this title

About the Author

James Abington is a successful businessman and a graduate of a major Midwestern university whose professional life has been built around a straightforward principle: claims should be supported by facts, assumptions should be tested, and conclusions should withstand scrutiny.Throughout his career, Abington built and managed enterprises in an environment where ideas are ultimately measured against results. Numbers have to add up. Strategies have to work. When evidence contradicts an assumption, the assumption-not the evidence-has to change.Over time, that same analytical curiosity led him beyond business and into a subject that had fascinated him for years: spirituality and its origins.He became increasingly interested in why human beings, across virtually every civilization and period of history, have looked beyond the physical world for explanations of existence, morality, suffering, death, and meaning. Where did our concepts of gods, an afterlife, divine judgment, prayer, sacrifice, and salvation originate? Were they revelations of something beyond ourselves-or were they ideas that developed gradually as human beings attempted to understand a world they could not yet scientifically explain?That curiosity led Abington to a broader examination of religion, particularly Christianity, and the extraordinary role religious belief has played in shaping civilization.Abington is not a theologian, minister, biblical scholar, or member of the clergy. He approaches these questions from a different direction: as a businessman, a student of human behavior, and an observer of how institutions develop, survive, and perpetuate themselves.Christianity became a particular focus because of its profound influence on Western society. For nearly two thousand years it has helped shape our laws, customs, morality, politics, education, families, attitudes toward sexuality, concepts of right and wrong, and even our understanding of life and death.Abington began asking a question that ultimately became central to his work: Why should religious claims be evaluated differently from every other claim we encounter in life?We demand evidence in medicine. We demand evidence in science. We expect evidence in a courtroom. Businesses make decisions based upon measurable results. Yet when the subject turns to religion, billions of people are asked to accept extraordinary claims primarily on the basis of faith, tradition, scripture, and teachings handed from one generation to another.That distinction fascinated him.Why are children introduced to concepts such as God, heaven, hell, sin, salvation, and eternal punishment before they are old enough to independently evaluate those ideas? Why do religious beliefs vary so dramatically according to geography and family? Why have thousands of religions and gods appeared throughout human history, while followers of each tradition have frequently believed that theirs alone represented ultimate truth?And perhaps most importantly: What happens when the beliefs we inherit are subjected to the same standards of evidence and reason we use everywhere else?These are the questions at the heart of The Great Disconnect: Where Truth Meets Faith, in which Abington examines many of Christianity's fundamental claims through the lenses of history, science, logic, evidence, and contemporary morality.Abington does not ask readers to exchange one unquestioned belief system for another. His premise is much simpler: no idea should be immune from examination merely because it is ancient, sacred, comforting, or widely believed.For Abington, questioning religion is not a rejection of the search for meaning. In many ways, it is an extension of it. His interest remains the same one that began the journey-the human search for spirituality, our desire to understand why we are here, and the remarkable stories mankind has created throughout history in its effort to answer questions that once seemed unanswerable.James Abington lives in the Midwest with

Edition details

• Publisher: Timeless Communications, Corp
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798995270607
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272
• Editor: Molinder Hogue Tere