(May 10, 2015 at 7:27 pm)Jericho Wrote:(May 10, 2015 at 7:13 pm)Anatheist Wrote: Well, do you have any particular arguments in mind that you'd like to strengthen? (Just trying to get towards something a bit more specific - there are so many books out there relevant to atheism/religion that it is tricky to know where to start without simply giving you a long list of my personal favourites!)
I wouldn't mind a list of your favorites. I intend to read a great many books about the subject.
Very good, then. Rather than specific books, let me suggest some people: Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. (The philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the last three of these the 'masters of suspicion'; I think Feuerbach also deserves to be amongst them.) These are the thinkers you should grapple with if you want to develop a serious atheistic perspective on religion, and particularly on Western Christianity. There are plenty of introductions out there to each of them that you can easily search for online, and a good introduction will point you towards some good places to start in terms of their original works. These four figures a far more interesting and insightful than the majority of the stuff that has been published more recently by Dawkins, Hitchens, et al.
