Essential Reading for Theists (A book recommendation thread)

[Clueless Morgan]

Recommended religious material for thesist would be...other holy books.

Not to mention reading their own cover to cover at one go preferably in a respectable scholarly translation and not one geared to your own sect.  Christians really should read a good Jewish translation of the OT.   Pay close attention when you get to the parts referenced in the NT.  You might understand why the Jews don't see the prophecies the way you do.

I was going to write back that this wouldn't really work with a Mormon, but the BOM has had some pretty significant edits...   Maybe if you got them to read a first edition and do a side-by-side comparison with their personal BOM... 

If the point is to turn them away from religion they might start with the bible.

Except my OP exempts the bible - that one is so obvious that I'm interested in hearing what you might recommend besides the bible.  

It really would depend on the thiest, their background and their level of intelligence.

For a Christian of a reasonable level of understanding I might turn to something like Some Mistakes of Moses by Robert Ingersoll, as for a Mormon I might recommend any one of several biography's of Joseph Smiths life not penned by a Mormon.

There isn't one be all and end all, it has to be tailored to fit the target. If I had to pick one though? Fields of Blood by Karen Armstrong, it's not an explicitly  Atheistic work, in fact it tries to defend religion against the idea that it alone is the cause of violence. What it does though very gently is detail the theory that they all draw from much older non-religious events and traditions with a wide range of evidence.

An openly atheist work tends to make the barriers rise up in defense, but a rather more ambiguous Pantheistic one makes for creating a starting point.

I haven't heard of that particular Karen Armstrong book, I might have to add it to my own book queue...

As for JS biographies, the trick with a Mormon is getting them to actually read something directly critical of the LDS church.  I wouldn't choose a direct attack on their beliefs as the first book recommendation for a Mormon, it would be too confrontational for most of them to handle.  Of the Ex-Mos I've talked to, most have to be doubting pretty seriously to even consider reading such a book, let alone to read it while being a true believer.  I might, instead, go for a book on critical thinking first.

And I agree that the book choice needs to be tailored to the individual.  In a thread like this, though, one need assume some sort of generic believer.