Atheist Reading Suggestions

[Anatheist]

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.

[Angrboda]

David Hume is another good one to read for his writing on religion.

You can find all sorts of interesting stuff in the library at infidels.org

[Crossless2.0]

You might also check out Michael Martin's Atheism: A Philosophical Justification.

[downbeatplumb]

I think a great take on religious thinking is Small gods by Terry Pratchett.

This book is, as the title suggests, about gods. Where do they come from? Where do they go? What keeps them moving? Ordinarily, gods don't like this sort of question. People who think are not what gods look for in followers. Gods want people who believe. That's where their power comes from. Gods with many believers are stong, great gods. Armies of priests and worshipers attend to their every needs, the sacrifices are plentiful and their dominion is vast. A great God wants for nothing.

A god with no believers, however, is a small god, a mindless thought blistering through the firmament, searching with single-minded fervor for one thing: a believer.

What happens, then, when a Great God finds out that, while he wasn't looking, he lost all of his believers? That's the thrust of this tale, the story of the Great God Om and how he became a tortoise for three years. It's about the difference between what is real and what is believed in, and how much difference that can make at times. It's about fundamental and trivial truths, and how to tell them apart. It's about eagles and tortoises and how much they need each other.

Above all, it's something of, in my opinion, a statement of faith

Ruthlessly stolen from a review.

[Jericho]

I think a great take on religious thinking is Small gods by Terry Pratchett.

What's funny is that I actually got that book in a box of books that were sent here for troops. So, I already own it, but never read it. I will definitely look into it now.