What are some books to learn more about atheism?

Question

Do atheists have any book recommendations? I'm not being sarcastic either, lol.

Answer 1

Learn about atheism? No.

Learn about what's wrong with religion? Yes.

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are both good.

Answer 2

Nietzsche "The Antichrist" "Beyond Good And Evil", etc. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/19322

Bertrand Russell "Why I Am Not A Christian, And Other Essays" http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell0.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell

Le Marquis De Sade
"Dialogue Between A Dying Man And A Priest" http://www.freethoughtfirefighters.org/SADE_dialogue_between_a_priest_and_a_dying_man.htm,
"Philosophy In The Bedroom"

"The Atheist Debater's Handbook" http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Debaters-Handbook-B-Johnson/dp/0879752106

"The Demon Haunted World" Carl Sagan
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469

"Atlas Shrugged" Ayn Rand
http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0452011876/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198951406&sr=1-1

Answer 3

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens are 2 good ones to start with.

Answer 4

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine. It's actually more Deist than Atheist, but it does a great job pointing out the absurdities and contradictions created by "revealed" religion and it's clergy, and is a great book to give to Christians as it doesn't directly contradict the existence of God (and therefore, is more easily digestible for them, so to speak).

Answer 5

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins is long but good. I got the CD.

Also look for Sam Harris' "The End of Faith" and "Letters to a Christian Nation".

Answer 6

strange why you would want to learn about atheism.

its kinda simple. you dont believe that any god exists.


why anyone would want that.. heh many reasons, all ive heard are all invalid.

i don't believe aliens exist, but damn, why would i want to waste my time trying to disprove them?

i dont believe in the loch ness monster, but why would i want to waste my time disproving it?

in fact, if i don't believe those things exist, i would very much even out of curiousity be interested in seeing them.

when someone comes up to me and says, i have proof for the loch ness monster.
well sure go ahead show me. id even go to a loch ness party with people who have wasted their whole lives claiming they've seen it.

but most atheists would be uncomftable/afraid to go to a faith believing group/gathering
they use the reason that (they've met whackos in the past).
they are still alive aren't they?

i believe some religious groups are whackos and i still enjoy having them over and chatting with them.

Answer 7

There are books by many authors, like Richard Dawkins. Google it :)

Answer 8

I like "The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. Goes off on a few tangents here and there, but it's good.

Answer 9

Most of the books I list are not exclusively about atheism or focused on atheism or the "proof" or "disproof" of arguments for the existence or non-existence of gods. But all of these books would be very useful to readers who want to explore why they do or don't have "real" religious feeling or faith, or the historical foundations of Christianity or Islam, or whether a designer/creator is necessary to explain the natural world/universe or the existence of human beings, or whether "secular humanism" is really a singularly evil threat to the American social order, etc. Here are my recommendations:

(1) "Breaking the Spell" by Daniel C. Dennett (Viking, 2006). A very readable exploration (by an atheist philosopher) of religion as a natural phenomenon, why religion should be studied seriously, and the difficulty or impossibility of discovering whether any given religious person actually believes in god or merely "believes in belief in god" (believes that believing in god is a good or obligatory thing and therefore declares or professes to believe in religious doctrines for social or emotional reasons).

(2) "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever" edited by Christopher Hitchens (da Capo Press, 2007). A collection of great writing over the centuries by atheists and agnostics, etc., from Lucretius, Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, etc. to Twain, Orwell and Updike, as well as currently prominent atheists such as Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.

(3) "Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism" (Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, 2004) by Susan Jacoby. A rich historical survey of the evolution of secular humanist / freethinking ideology (in words and in action) in America. Not exclusively about atheism.

(4) "The Godless Constitution: A Moral Defense of the Secular State" (Norton, 2005 [updated edition] by Issac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore. A thoroughly-documented study of attitudes of America's "founding fathers" (and successive U.S. Congresses and Presidents through the 19th and 20th centuries) toward religion and the separation of church and state. This book blows holes in the arguments made by David Barton and his ilk and shows that the American constitutional republic was consciously founded as an entirely secular state for the protection of a fairly religious people; that the "wall of separation" of church from state was always intended to protect political institutions from the influence of particular religions and sects as much as to protect religion from government interference; and that movements to turn the U.S.A. into an explicitly "Christian Nation" attempted and failed several times to add a Christian preamble (amendment) to the U.S. Constitution.

(5) "God: the Failed Hypothesis" (Prometheus Books, 2007) by Victor Stenger. A physicist and astronomer considers and demolishes a number of the cosmological arguments for the existence of a supernatural creator, including the recently-in-vogue arguments (the Anthropic Principle or the "fine-tuned universe") that [allegedly] against very high odds to the contrary, various physical laws and constants have values and relationships that make intelligent life possible, and therefore that something must have designed and created this universe as it is.

(6) "Superstition and Other Essays" by Robert G. Ingersoll (Prometheus Books, 2004). OK, he was called the Great Agnostic, not an atheist, but in late 19th-century America, he was at least as famous and popular as an orator as any number of Bible-thumpers. A freethinker and an enemy of dogmatic, "revealed" religion in the same vein as Thomas Paine.

(7) "Who Was Jesus" (1989) and "The Jesus Myth" (1999) by G. A. [George Albert] Wells (Open Court Publishing). These are the best and most readable introductions to the field of modern textual criticism of the Christian New Testament, showing how unreliable the Gospels and other New Testament writings are as "history," and exploring the contradictions and different theological purposes at work in the 4 canonical Gospels and the other 23 books of the N.T. Wells is an atheist, and his own thinking about whether the Jesus of the N.T. actually existed has evolved, from Wells's original conclusion that he was entirely legendary to his current position that the Jesus of the Gospels is a mostly fictionalized combination of (a) highly embellished legends about an obscure preacher who was actually executed by the Romans in Palestine between 200 B.C.E. and 100 C.E. and who was rumored to have risen from the dead and (b) the real teachings of another Galilean preacher that survived in the form of the "Q" source used by the writers of Matthew's and Luke's gospels. For thoughtful people who have begun to doubt the Christian party line and who are "on the fence" between clinging to blind faith and going all the way to atheism, these books may help. For those who are curious about how the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) was actually written/edited and when, and whether anything in the O.T. is accurate as history, I recommend "The Bible Unearthed" by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman (Touchstone / Simon & Schuster 2002) and "What the Bible Really Says" by Manfred Barthel (translated by Mark Howson, Wings Books 1992).

(8) "Why I Am Not a Muslim" by Ibn Warraq (Prometheus Books 1995) and "Infidel" by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Free Press, 2007). These books, by former Muslims who are now atheists and secularists, pull no punches in critically examining Islam and in rejecting that religion as ultimately life-hating, woman-hating, and mind-hating. I have read other books about the rich and complex history of Islam, but after reading these two books, I remain skeptical about the possibility that the majority of Muslims can reform and save their religion (which I think will happen only if majority Islam abandons the idea that the Q'uran and the Hadith represent god's perfect, complete and immutable blueprint for how human life should be lived).

(9) "The Problem of the Soul" by Owen Flanagan (Basic Books 2002). Flanagan is a philosopher at Duke University, and he has written a beautiful book that carefully examines the deeply-ingrained but false belief that human beings have immortal, immaterial souls. Along the way, Flanagan also covers "free will," Cartesian mind-body dualism, standard arguments for the existence of gods, and a religion-free concept of ethics as "human ecology."

(10) "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel C. Dennett (Touchstone / Simon & Schuster 1995). A terrific book that patiently explains, in detail, many of the implications of Darwin's theory of descent with modification / natural selection as it has been tested, re-tested, and refined over the past 148 years.

(11) "The Demon-Haunted World" (Ballantine, 1996) and "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God" ( Penguin Press, 2006) by Carl Sagan. Both of these beautifully-written books cover much the same territory -- looking at the universe with a sense of wonder AND intellectual curiosity AND the clarity that comes from skepticism and critical thinking -- in Sagan's inimitable style. By any reasonable definition of the word, Sagan WAS an atheist (in much the same way that Einstein spoke about "god" but believed in no personal god or deity), but Sagan never seemed strident or empty-headed about it. The 2006 book is the published, transcribed version of Sagan's Gifford Lectures in Glasgow in 1985 -- rediscovered and edited by his widow, Ann Druyan.