RE: Book Recommendations
July 19, 2020 at 2:01 pm
(This post was last modified: July 19, 2020 at 2:02 pm by Simon Moon.)
(July 18, 2020 at 11:55 am)Gnomey Wrote: Hey folks - hit me with all your favourite atheist books! Here's some I've read or are on my list already:
Mom, Dad, I'm am Atheist by David G McAfee
Godless by Dan Barker
God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The Happy Atheist by PZ Myers
Not exactly an atheist book, but God dies or is the bad guy or something (and my parents didn't want me reading it as a kid) so I wanna read The Golden Compass. And subsequent books.
What else you all got?
- Gnomey
I've read quite a few of the usual 'atheist' books, and they all have good refutations of theist arguments. While they might all point out the same flaws and fallacies that theist arguments contain*, doing so with different explanations, metaphors and examples, may help someone understand, where another version of the same refutation may not have.
It is my opinion, that atheism is just the logical, rational outcome of skepticism, when applied to the god claim**.
So, some of the best 'atheist' books are not specifically atheist books. For example, Carl Sagan's book, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". While this book is not specifically an atheist book, what it does is provide one with a sort of "BS detection tool kit", so when confronted with existential claims (gods, alien abductions, bigfoot, ghosts, ESP etc), one has the tools to determine if said claim has sufficient: demonstrable evidence, reasoned argument, and valid and sound logic to support it.
Michael Shermer's "Why People Believe Weird Things" is also quite good.
*ALL theist arguments are flawed and fallacious. Arguments from design (teleological), Kalam cosmological argument, Ontological arguments, etc.
**I can't count how many theists I've encountered, that disbelieve: alien abductions, the existence of bigfoot, ESP, etc, for all the right reasons (lack of evidence and reasoned argument), but fail to apply the same level of skepticism to their god beliefs.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
