Books regarding atheism

[Belacqua]

Sounds like another challenging book to read. Thanks for mentioning this book. When I'm done with the current one, I'm giving this one a read.

It is a good one. I don't know if you've read anything by the author before... He was a student of Isaiah Berlin, and has written several books on the history of ideas. Like Berlin, one of his main themes is that any sort of utopian project is unreasonable and bound to fail. He has written on the inherent contradictions of capitalism and of liberalism as an ideology. His book on animals, and how humans pretend we are different from them, aims to persuade us that we aren't that special at all. 

So I guess one of the things he does most often is to knock idols off of pedestals. 

His atheism book does that, in a way, also. Because he is so knowledgable about the history of ideas, he is able to describe the systems of thought which, in different times, made possible the rejection of religion. In each case the atheism that resulted was -- of course -- embedded in its time and place, and imagined within the limits of what could be thought at that time. 

When I read Dominion by Tom Holland I was hoping for something more like Gray's book. Dominion is about 95% stories about history, and then various conclusions about how many of the values that we hold today only came about due to a history of Christianity. But I thought it was light on the intellectual, rather than the anecdotal, back-up for those conclusions. Gray writes less about events and more about intellectual developments, and helps to clarify the underlying assumptions of various atheist movements. 

Some atheists today apparently want to deny that their thinking is inevitably embedded in their own time and place and culture, and therefore contains various contingencies. Some people seem to have the fantasy that to be an atheist today is a sort of purist view without a viewpoint, and that therefore their lack of belief rests on no assumptions and requires no justifications. It would be hard to sustain this fantasy after reading Gray's book. 

Because there are several very different writers with the same name, maybe I should disambiguate:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)

There are some good YouTube lectures, too.