(February 10, 2016 at 5:14 am)SteelCurtain Wrote: The God Delusion does a great job and deconstructing the arguments for god and proposing arguments against.
When you're done with that, try god is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. It's a little more of a polemic, but Hitch was freaking amazing.
Dawkins "God Delusion" gives us the scientific explanation as to why humans make up god claims. It is gap filling based on our species notorious flawed perceptions. In his book he describes it as "the moth mistaking the light bulb for moonlight".
Christopher Hitchens is right that religion poisons our species global political discourse. It does, there is no polite way to put it. If any one religion were pure and unified there would be no different sects and no divisions in humanity. But without exception, there has never been a single religion worldwide in our entire species history that is immune to flaws and divisions.
But I keep having to add the two following books which need to be more widely read and valued.
1. Victor Stenger "The New Atheism", which says there is no splitting the baby trying to say that religion is separate but equal. That science DOES have something to say about the "unseen". And that our species morality is in us, not our labels.
2. Victor Stenger, "God The Failed Hypothesis", also goes into the scientific reasons why that "hypothesis" does not work.
But our theist members here should never read this and take that as a call to use force to end religion. There is no utopia, not even for atheists. Not even "atheist" is a moral code. These books are important as a challenge to give up on bad claims and the willingness to question without fear.
