Posted by Hemant Mehta in There are a variety of reasons for a religious person to question his or her beliefs: A friend’s reasoning, a personal tragedy, disillusionment with church, etc. Sometimes, this questioning leads to the person becoming an atheist.
For some of you, your flippage was hastened by a good book. (Maybe it was the Good Book.)
If there was a book or two that helped turn your religious beliefs upside-down, leave the name/author in the comments. A reason it helped you would be nice, too.
I’ll compile the list in another post later in the week.
[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]
The Bible. Read it cover to cover objectively and critically. Need I say more?
After having been raised for 18 years in a fundie church, you’d think that would be enough. But I had developed Battered Believer’s Syndrome. (It’s exactly like battered spouse syndrome, but with God.) It took the online book on this website http://www.godvsthebible.com/ to help me break free. It’s still a struggle, but I am growing each day.
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Although I have to say my faith was wavering and unstable for several years before reading it. I guess the book just took me over the edge towards atheism.
It was a journey of many different books. It wasn’t just one book. Believe it or not, Bishop John Shelby Spong and Tom Harpur’s (both of the Episcopal Church) books helped. Acharya S’s books, Bob Price’s, and a few others too. Not only that, I’ve studied a variety of religions. They are all basically of the same template. Not a whole lot of difference in them, except some religions are older. Even worse, what is now myth (Egyptian, Babylonian, etc myths) they are basically the same thing too. It’s all rewritten fiction.
Why not Richard Dawkins? I’ve read the God Delusion and except for the science, he wrote what I already have thought and said for a long time now. It wasn’t any different.
Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, some ten years ago. Also, his Beyond Good and Evil
The Bible, definitely. Although I’ve read a lot from atheists online, I was an atheist myself before that. In fact, I’ve only read two actual books by atheists. One was Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God which, while good, tried to cover too much ground and so was a little thin in places. The other was David Mills’ Atheist Universe. I liked the latter fairly well, but Mills is too hyperbolic sometimes. Some people will dismiss what he’s got to say out of hand because of that.
I’m sure there are better ones out there. I’ll get around to them.
Once I started asking questions and looking at what the Bible actually said, it pretty much killed Christianity for me. The Good Book was bad, very bad.
Along the way, I’ve gone through the standard atheistic library of today. One of the first sinful books I read that really showed me that my situation wasn’t unique at all was Losing Faith in Faith by Dan Barker.
Actually it was the bible, but in the form of the Brick Testament. Somehow seeing the stories in short snips with legos illustrating the absolute absurdity really kick started my atheism. It is a fun one to pass along to lazily religious friends since they will be offended, assume the quotes are taken out of context and are distorted, but when they check the bible they find out that that craziness is really in there.
buuuuuuh Dawkins’ God Delusion. I was fence-sitting and I pushed through it (the bit about atheists being more persecuted than gay people put me off a little) and from the first few pages I let go of my “it’s not for me, but if someone wants to believe in god then that doesn’t hurt me” philosophy.
Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World did it for me. I read it and realized I’d been an atheist all along.
Carl Sagan’s “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark” was enough to make me face it, although in retrospect I hadn’t been a believer for many years before that.
I was never a theist, but my atheism became much more explicit after reading The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Ayn Rand’s nonfiction. I don’t subscribe to Ayn Rand’s views, but they are thought-provoking books that promote atheism.
Those led me to more philosophy, including Dennett, then Dawkins, and a whole bunch more (including Mehta).
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (okay, yeah, that’s a TV series)
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
I didn’t read any of these with the audacious intention of “killing god”. They’re inherently interesting and full of information that my education had skipped over. They made a godless world make sense and seem complete and beautiful.
Dan Barkers “Losing Faith in Faith” and “Robert G. Ingersoll’s 44 Complete Lectures”. Both were instrumental. Before I read them I didn’t even know atheism was an option.
The Old Testament, many of John Shelby Spong’s books as well as some by Emerging Church authors such as Brian McClaren (the latter made me realize that although my liberal brand of Christianity was being validated, the liberty of their positions also enlightened me to see how much we all try to make any sacred text or book conform to the views we already hold).
While I don’t agree with all of views, Sam Harris also allowed me to think critically.
My parents never talked about religion or anything until I was about eight and my dad got it into his head (well, actually it was his best friend who had just gotten “saved” or “born again” or whatever the lingo is) that he should take my sister and I to church. By this time, I was a pretty heavy reader and was engrossed in anything about dinosaurs, history, and especially Greek mythology. So when I went to Sunday school for the first time, and this lady was talking about someone being in a whale for three days, I immediately thought, hey, thats just like Greek mythology. After returning home, I promptly explained to my parents that I didn’t believe any of that, it sounded perfectly ridiculous, and I wasn’t going to church anymore (plus I really hated waking up early and getting all dressed up). I didn’t know the word was atheist until later, but I guess I was one. And still going strong twenty years later. So, I guess the book that did it for me was a book about Greek mythology. Plus, how could God ever compete with Zues?
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist by Norman Geisler & Frank Turek
Why Atheism? by George H. Smith
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
The Holy Bible by …
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. I have never read a better book in my life.
I don’t remember if any books in particular led me down the path of unbelief (disbelief?), at least initially. I’ve always been skeptical of the existence of God (or any other gods) but I never actually called myself an atheist. I know I’m not the only one here, but it was The God Delusion that actually made me realize I’ve always been an atheist, at least in the terms that he puts it.
Technically I’m probably an agnostic, because I don’t think evidence really exists either way, but in my daily life, I’m an atheist. I live my life as if no god(s) exist. maybe they do, but I’m not gonna lose sleep over it.
Atheist Universe by David Mills absolutely turned my world upside down, for the better of course. I definitely recommend it if you haven’t read it already.
For me, Julia Sweeney was the “straw that broke the camels back”. I first heard her on NPR and then went on to listen to her monologue, “Letting Go of God”.
She had a story very similar to mine, and made me feel like it was OK to let go of religion.
My experience is similar to Josh’s (Comment 2), with the god delusion by Richard Dawkins.
My progression from liberal Christianity to atheism was a gradual process. In many ways it was knowing other Christians and seeing their beliefs that moved me most toward atheism.
Someone mentioned John Spong, but while his stuff is anti-fundamentalism, it still advocates this neo-liberal theistic spirituality.
I think the books that will really challenge Christians are two by Bart Ehrman.
1. Misquoting Jesus
2. Lost Christianities
There weren’t any books that convinced me to be an atheist, I have been an atheist for about as long as I have had the capability to think about it clearly, ie. some time in high school. But I have become more vocal and open about it since reading The God Delusion.
Whatever science textbooks we had in 6-7th grade turned me from “wtf this can’t be true” to “ooohhh, so that’s what it really is…gotcha.”
I had rejected religion and god long ago. When I was three I figured out that Santa and company were all fake. What did it for me then was that if they were fake, then so was the easter bunny and therefore so was god. Still had to go to church and such because of my parents, but I always just fooled around. It was middle school science that turned me from knowing that christianity was wrong to knowing what the real answers were.
My moms a jehova’s witness and my dad is a recovering catholic, so religion in this house is just so much fun.
Hey! I’m not alone! KEWL!
I was raised in a conservative Christian family, and although I moved to a more liberal version of religion as a teenager, fear of hurting my parents stood in the way of even questioning whether there was a god.
Reading Sigmund Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion” made me realize that these beliefs weren’t based in reality. Somewhat ironically, because of my fundie upbringing, this meant the whole thing had to go.
“Misqouting Jesus” by Bart Ehrman. After I read that book, the questions naturally rolled out of my head. If our concept of God comes from the Bible, and it’s a well-proven fact that the Bible was edited and re-edited and in a lot of cases just made up, why do we even believe it? Why do we believe in a God that is probably… made… up…?
And that was it. At that point the Bible ceased to be a holy book and became a work of fiction.
A week or so ago I asked a similar (but more inclusive) question on my blog.
FWIW, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, though I’m still only 3/4 through it so far, has helped me question my agnosticism and really start to wonder if I’m not agnostic after all but atheist.
The Bible. Luckily I was an atheist before The God Delusion, so I was able to read it for enjoyment.
I grew up Catholic, so I was practically discouraged from reading the Bible. Once I heard a few stories you don’t hear in church, it was just too much. Now my goal is to pass those stories on to my parents, because I’m sure they’ll have the same reaction I did. I’ve already told my mom that she should be stoning me to death, which was met with awkward silence.
The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams
It didn’t make me or help me question my religious beliefs, those had been fading for quite a while. It gave me permission to take that final step. The essay Is There an Artificial God?, taken from a speech he once gave, presented the idea of man’s invention of religion in such a wonderful way that it could simply not be denied. It let me finally discard those last connections to faith.
For me, it started with Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by JD Crossan. For the first time I thought about the stories in the bible critically instead of accepting them on faith (which was fairly strong at the time).
Also Huckleberry Finn (read as an adult - it didn’t mean much when I read it as a kid), Cosmos (Sagan), the Hitchhiker’s series (Adams), East of Eden (Steinbeck) - all provided a very humanist perspective on life, and were all influential.
I just finished The God Delusion last night, and was very impressed. While I had already accepted my new found Atheism, this book put into words many of the concepts that had been rattling around my head without any structure.
The Bible alone was enough for me to realize “I don’t believe in basically any of this crap.” But it was Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World that got me to be proud about my atheism and call it what it is.
I don’t think any books in particular influenced my atheism, but the ones that really made me think critically about religion’s role in society were Une saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel (A Season in the Life of Emmanuel) by Marie-Claire Blais, L’etranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus, and The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
Joseph Campbell’s “Myths to Live By” and Moyer’s “Power of Myth.” Plus, the Bible itself showed me all the contradictions I needed to see. Dawkins and “The God Delusion” was good, but I read it after I had become an atheist.
“Who Wrote the Bible” Richard Eliott Friedman.
My sincere gratitude to this guy. He woke me up without even trying to debunk the religion.
Beyond introducing me for the first time to JEPD theory, he really demonstrated using the text itself, the political objectives of the writers of various passages and books. By the time I finished, there was no way I could believe the Old Testament had been written by anyone but mere humans in a very local power struggle.
Ironic: I got the book from my mother’s Xian book collection.
Really Ironic: I was trying to get a deeper appreciation for the context of the Biblical passages in order to deepen my faith!
The next book I read (but I was already no longer a xian) was Thomas Paine’s “Age of Reason.” I couldn’t buy into Deism, however.
How To Read The Bible by James Kugel. Very thorough examination of Old Testament texts, and summaries of modern and classical (as well as Christian and Jewish) interpretations.
“The Bible as Literature: an Introduction.” I took a college course by one of the authors, and it was the first time that I had ever considered the Bible as anything outside the paradigm of divine inspiration. This book was an ultraviolet light that showed me all the human literary DNA splashed across its pages.
Two books I was reading around the same time in early 2006 - Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Dawkins’ God Delusion.
The former put in very plain terms what should have sunk in after spending three years studying Judaism and biblical history - god was nothing more than the ideal humanity separated from and elevated above its source, the human predicate being worshiped by its subject. True Religion, so to speak, was indistinguishable from Idolatry. Though a tad simplistic in his analysis, I thought (and think) Feuerbach’s basic anthropological impulse was spot on.
If Feuerbach helped destroy the trustworthiness of revelation beyond the scope of the community who produced it, Dawkins in turn helped ruin any belief at anything beyond a loose deism or a form of process thought. True, most of the theological arguments were surprisingly easy to overcome or critique, but when Dawkins began writing about the Argument from Design and the sufficiency of purely natural causes to produce this world (that was the first time I had read any of his works), something clicked. Appealing to an “outside” intelligence or power wasn’t necessary to explain the world. Though I really hadn’t been a practicing Christian for about a year at that point, it was when I finished that book that I stopped referring to myself as Christian and started calling myself an atheist.
When I was fifteen (in 1967!) a friend of mine loaned me a copy of Inherit the Wind. It crystalized a number of ideas I already had, and I decided I was indeed an atheist. My friend felt terrible when I later told him about my conversion. Now, forty years later, I teach Inherit the Wind to high school sophomores as part of our English curriculum. I’ve read hundreds of books on the subject since the 1960’s, but I’ve never found a reason to renounce atheism. Quite the opposite.
The great CH’s God is Not Great.
And Sam Harris’ End of Faith.
Dawkins is great too but read the others first and my atheism was cemented by the time I read his God Delusion.
One day I was watching the news and just got so disgusted by the civil war in Iraq, and suddenly it hit me that I was fed up with religion and felt it was mostly a bad thing. I read The God Delusion shortly after that and began to call myself an atheist, which felt strange. Even though I’d been brought up by an atheist and an agnostic, actually labeling myself an atheist was weird at first.
Setting the Captives Free by Austin Miles was a turning point for me– I realized I wasn’t alone.
The Faith Healers by James Randi was another that got through to me.
I grew up in a family that let me decide my own thoughts on religion, so I started out basically agnostic. The first time I called myself an atheist was about 7th grade. Of course, this is when I started meeting religious people, and wondering if God really did exist. I was pretty agnostic about the issue until I read The God Delusion my freshman year of college. It really didn’t change my thoughts at all, but solidified what I felt deep down.
I became non-religious when i was flipping frantically through the Bible looking for passages that were sympathetic to same-sex relationships. It was then that i realized that people shouldn’t have to manipulate holy texts to fit their beliefs. And then i realized that you kind of HAVE to do that with the Bible, because there is so much that is just false, and that contradicts itself. So i put the Book down and gave up on organized religion. After that i flirted with Buddhism, but as i was young didn’t really “get” it, and then pantheism, but it took too long to explain to everyone, so i settled on the label of “atheist”.
Orwell’s 1984. I read it while enrolled in confirmation class, and realized that a decent chunk of the “class activities” were propaganda not that far removed from brainwashing / mind control. Also felt strong parallels between the Inner Party and say, the hierarchy of the Catholic Church.
Got confirmed anyways, and was proud of it, but less than a year later I had pretty much decided it was all hogwash. My parents still don’t know, and probably never will (it’s been about 10 years now.)
The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams
A transcript of a speech he made was in it and his argument for evolution was amazing to my then doubtful Christian mind. I learned he was an atheist and that alone was reason enough to question my beliefs.
Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Carl Sagan. I was still in the throes of fundamentalism, but in a furious battle with reason. This book threw the facts into my face in an easy to read, thorough manner. Either Sagan was a brilliant liar or something was wrong with my thinking.
When I was a teen, I read a bunch of Isaac Asimov’s hard science books. Altogether, I suppose they had a lot to do with it.
GDad
The Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible by Robin Lane Fox. It’s not perfect, but it is one of the few honest popular-level critiques of the Bible out there.
I vaguely thought there was probably some kind of non-denominational god until I was 14, when I starting explicitly thinking there was a non-denominational deist god, but at the same time I also started becoming an implicit atheist, and then around the time I realized that the “god” I believed in was more like an absence of a god (a scientific deepness like Richard Dawkins and most other atheists have), I started reading atheist books. The first two atheist books I read, which immediately turned me into an explicit atheist, were David Mills’s Atheist Universe and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. (I should add that I have always been at least slightly agnostic about everything, as everyone should be, but I don’t think it’s necessary to point this out as very few atheists have the dogmatic certainty that most religionists have.)
Sam Harris’s book was, and still is, the most lucid, rational, and important book (in my opinion) that I have ever read. There is very little in that book that I don’t agree with. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t been fortunate enough to read it.
Very soon after that I read The God Delusion (Dawkins), God Is Not Great (Hitchens), Why I Am Not A Christian (Russell), Atheism: The Case Against God (Smith), Infidel (Hirsi Ali), Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris again), and some science books such as The Selfish Gene. I’m still working on Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Jacoby), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Dennett), The Demon-Haunted World (Sagan), and God: The Failed Hypothesis (Stenger). And there are a lot of books that I want to read eventually, including the Bible.
I am currently 17, and I continue to buy books like this with my own money. I also, of course, read the opinions of people I don’t already agree with, because (as every atheist should agree) there is always a chance that we might be wrong.
I have found that the philosophers I am most like are Sam Harris, Bertrand Russell, and Epicurus.
Atheism and its related philosophies are one of the most important parts of my life, and I continue to think that the most important message that we can spread as atheists is that you can have hope, happiness, community, morality, and meaning without religion. (I call these “The Big 5″). All the good things that religion does, we can do without the bad things religion does.
Out of all those books, I would recommend The End of Faith, Atheism: The Case Against God, Infidel, God is Not Great, and The God Delusion the most.
Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer. It didn’t directly confront anything I believed at the time; but it did lead me to accept the fact that otherwise intelligent people can genuinely, wholeheartedly believe things that are obviously and demonstrably wrong to most other people.
I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, so I never had religion hammered into me and was never told “you have to have faith.” The movie Angels in the Outfield got me to believe in God and prayer, though not in angels; those were clearly fake. Through most of my childhood, I had a wishy-washy belief in God and ESP, but these beliefs weren’t really a big deal to me. I stopped believing in souls early on (maybe 5th grade) thanks to an article about the brain in National Geographic.
In 9th grade, I read Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer and The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. In the latter, there’s a chapter about unfalsifiable beliefs called “The Dragon In My Garage.” I realized that God was exactly like that. During that time, I was going through the Unitarian coming-of-age program, and we were supposed to think about a bunch of religious questions, including where we stood on the question of whether God exists or not. It was then that I declared myself an atheist.
I read a lot over the 3-4 months it took me to go from theist to atheist. Among the ones I vaguely recall reading during this time are the following:
Science of Mind - despite the name has nothing to do with science. This is the textbook that my religion class studied and this (class) was the event that triggered the deconversion. I realized at this point that my entire religion was based on 1) the Bible, which I already considered a book of myths with bits of history 2) Emerson’s essays and 3) Ernest Holmes’ fantasies. Therefore, one had to conclude, it was all based on personal revelation and inspiration rather than evidence. Funny, it took me so many years to realize this.
The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus and the Lost Goddess - Although I wasn’t a Christian, these books helped me realize that all religions are manmade and that the Bible (which my own religious tradition relied on in good measure) was simply a book of myths with a long tradition that predated Christianity.
The Jesus Puzzle. - Ditto.
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man - Ditto.
Misquoting Jesus. - Ditto.
Sense and Goodness Without God - Carrier’s arguments against the Christian God applied to my own idea of god as well. For me, the problem of evil was central to the existence or non-existence of a benevolent god. His ideas about how one could live a moral life without a god were helpful to me in leaving religion behind.
Demon-Haunted World and Why People Believe Weird Things - both made me realize how much of my thinking was superstitious and irrational, and helped me overcome it.
Dying to Live - research on OBEs and NDEs which showed both are most likely artifacts of the stressed brain.
Several of Bertrand Russell’s books.
Ebonmuse’s website had a lot of good information, particularly the section on duality. Internet Infidels had some good articles.
I’ve read the recent popular books by Dawkins et al but they came after I had already deconverted.
It’s hard to reconstruct now but I’d say Carrier’s book and stuff I read online were probably the most influential, along with conversations with my husband and a lot of sleepless nights thinking about it all.
The Bible. I studied it and poured over it’s contents as a teen, and later throughout my life as a confused believer. It was the contradictions - not the misquoted or typo type of contradictions, none of that nonsense. I’m talking the BIG contradictions. The contradictions that, should one believe in error, would send you into the Abyss with the Devil and his angels. I’m talking about the huge gaping holes of Christian doctrine:
Must one be baptized or not? Once saved, always saved - or not? Spiritual gifts for today, or past? Is there a burning fiery hell, or is it ’separation from God’ only? Or Hell, is there even a Hell in the first place? Some teach that the unsaved are just, well, dead. What about Heaven? Is it a real place, or will the righteous inherit eternal life here on a renewed, Paradaisical earth? Is God One in Three persons or is He just one?
Depending on what church you attend, holding one or the other of these beliefs could you put you in, or out, of the faith. Holding one belief in error could consign you to Hell, or save you and send you to Heaven. And to think that what you thought or were taught about these things was the hinge which would determine which way your personal door into eternity would swing.
I thought that Islam, or Buddhism, or [insert religion here] would be different. But after diligent study (many years worth of man hours spent reading and studying various texts) I realized they’re all the same. The only position left is the null position - atheism.
I had already deconverted before I read any “atheist” book. The first one I got was David Mills “Atheist Universe”. The whole time I was like, “holy crap…I thought I was the only one who thought this way!”
Though I have heard a lot of criticism about the book and about David from fellow atheists, of all the atheist books I’ve read, this one will always stand out.
Although I have more in common with Dan Barker’s deconversion story, I would highly recommend Mills’ book as an atheist primer.
“End of Faith” by Sam Harris. It was like a light came on. I had been an atheist, I just didn’t know it till I read his book. Then I went ahead and read the Bible and that just reinforced my lack of belief.
Terry Pratchetts Discworld books helped me along the way.
Him and Douglas Adams are great at highlighting just how ridiculous religious beleif systems really are.
The Mystique of Enlightenment by U. Gk. Krishnamurti.
God Delusion.
I have been an agnostic for most of my life (now 42). But I finally realized that I was sitting on the fence because I didn’t want to take the plunge. Atheism seemed, well, so extreme. But after reading the God Delusion, I realized that all along I had been a closet atheist.
It may seem lame, but Richard Dawkin’s liberated me from my agnosticism. I now see the world much more clearly.
I was reading the Bible - a little bit each day starting with page 1 - when a friend gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. By the time I finished both, I had gone through a very painful process. I replaced a philospohy based on myth with one based on reason. I recall the process actually physically producing pain. It was a real struggle - but well worth it in the end.
My experience as a history major really started my questioning the existence of god. I was raised very devoutly so it wasnt until college and reading about and studying the past, reading of all the atrocities that have happened throughout history that made me realize that I wouldnt want to believe in a god who would allow such things. My thoughts slowly went on from there until I read the God Delusion and it solidified my thoughts that I was, indeed, an affirmed atheist.
I think it was just reading in general. *
I grew up in one of the 19th century ‘prophetic’ sects. My first step was questioning the church’s prophet / doctrines after reading the Bible through. Then in (a church-run) college I read On the Origin of Species and it just made so much more sense to a budding physicist than the Biblical stuff.
* I was forbidden to read non-church-sponsored fiction as a kid, but being a voracious reader, every trip to the library was an adventure in smuggling things into my room.
1- Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney (the TAL essay, specifically)
2- The Brick Testament
3- then a flurry of other books including I Sold My Soul On Ebay, The God Delusion, The End of Faith, and God is not Great.
The bible, specially the book of Job ^_^
The Case for Christmas by Lee Strobel. A poor apologetic can work wonders.
Problem of The Soul by Owen Flanagan. Soul/Body dualism died here.
Betraying Spinoza by Rebecca Goldsein. Spinoza deduced himself into a modern philosophy.
It wasn’t one book, but scores of them, starting with the non-fiction of Isaac Asimov I discovered as a hoplelessly bookish 11 year-old boy.
But I’d like to mention two that made very deep and lasting footprints on my brain (although I was already an atheist when I read them):
The Light of Day by John Burroughs (not to be missed!)
A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by A. D. White
One day our company brought in “The Secret”. It was so terrible that it got me thinking about other things people believe. I was always a bit wishy washy on faith so I decided to read the bible (really hoping to understand what everyone else seemed to). Needless to say that didn’t go well.
So then I read:
- Letting Go of God, Julia Sweeny (audiobook really)
- The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
- God is not Great, Christopher Hitchens
- Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris
- Why I am Not a Christian, Bertrand Russel
The later books pretty much just re-affirmed what I already was feeling after reading the bible.
I’m sensing a theme here:
The Bible
I had grown up being a dedicated believer, but slowly started to have doubts. Then just one verse chanced everything: Judges 1:19. I stopped believing.
Then I read Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus,” and the rest is history.
I became an atheist way back in the 1970’s. I remember that the following books had an influence on me back then (in high school). H.L. Mencken’s “Treatise on the Gods” and Mark Twain’s “Letters from the Earth” (both written quite some time ago). I also like most of the recent books on atheism. Its good to see so many new books coming out and so well received.
Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian was a big early influence in thinking critically about “received wisdom,” with Sagan and Einstein showing that a rational life didn’t suffer from a lack of awe and wonder.
A half-dozen or so of Bishop Spong’s books (Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, etc.) combined with some Ayn Rand (when I was younger and more naive), lots of Camus (when I was becoming less so), and many great discussions at a Unitarian-Universalist church I once attended did the rest…
Lately, I’ve enjoyed reading Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Onfray, Comte-Sponville, Stenger…even O’Hair. (So many books…)
I had been teetering on the edge for some time. The book that tipped me over was Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith.”
Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, Peirs Anthony books. I was reading these things as early as 5th grade. Like Santa and the Easter Bunny, great fantasy fiction made god seem like just another story.
Hmm. I think my comment disappeared. I said GEB by Douglas Hofstatder. Too much wine to rewrite my original comment, sorry.
Quran - reading it pushed me from Muslim to Agnosticism (no religious book claiming to be a moral guide can be this harsh towards women/nonmuslms, or have silly miracles)
God Delusion - Agnosticism to Atheism (or just made me concious that i was an atheist all along).
Many books over a period of time but what first got me thinking was:
Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero With A Thousand Faces”
For the first time it made me think about the Bible as mythology and how really alike it is to all the other mythologies of the world. Then I started to question everything.
Mere Christianity. I was a 19 yr-old believer and I expected Lewis to at least confirm my faith, if not strengthen it. His arguments were so lame, that even I could see the fallacies. Well, I wanted to have a faith built on a rock and not in sand and so I started questioning everything I believed to see if it was from man or God. Three guesses what I found
My favorite was “Atheism: The Case Against God” by George H. Smith. The demonstration that the definition of God was completely meaningless was especially powerful for me.
Good topic! There are so many books….
As a youngster, I’d say that Cosmos and the SF of Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Adams, and others made taking religion literally impossible. But I was raised as a Christian, and I was always able to rationalize some form of faith.
In college and afterwards, probably the biggest factor was being exposed to arguments for god in philosophy and in lots of web-forums and mailings lists, and seeing how truly vapid such arguments always are. Also, being exposed to many “nature vs. nurture” debates in which the learned exponents of sociology and cultural anthropology didn’t know a single goddamn fact about basic evolution and what it implies about the brain helped convince me that, whatever else we are as human beings, we are our bodies.
But more books: The Masks of God, by Joseph Campbell. Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche.
I also must credit
twothree enduring works of fantasy.1. The Lord of the Rings. Because Tolkien’s made-up religion, despite it’s many faults, is far more beautiful than the religion he based it on, which proved to me in an unexpected way that religion is not only a product of human invention, but a bad product at that.
2. Fritz Leiber’s series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, which gave me heroes who know how to laugh at the gods.
3. The Book of Common Prayer, wherein one finds the Nicene Creed. Repeating it every Sunday for years, and feeling it turn to ashes in my mouth, proved that I simply couldn’t believe the BS anymore.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who started on the path to atheism via science fiction, particularly Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land and Revolt in 2100 in particular); everyone seems to be getting deconverted by such intellectual heavyweights I was feeling a little inadequate *grin*.
I was literally afraid to accept my growing atheism functionally living Pascal’s Wager, but managed to avoid getting confirmed at a teenager, so I think I must have known even then. After a deist period I accepted that I was agnostic, and thought myself superior to atheists since “you can’t know for sure” means “there’s a 50/50 chance” and atheists were as absolutely sure as the fundie religionists, right? The God Delusion fixed that flaw in my logic.
I’ll also put in a plug for Dennett’s Breaking the Spell. I thought The Blind Watchmaker would be OK for non-scientists but I got nothing out of it. The Selfish Gene is a much better book to understand evolutionary theory and why there is no need for supernatural powers to have what we see in our world every day. And yes, I think the world and my life is more beautiful, wondrous, and especially precious than ever since it is the only one I’ll ever have.
Great topic!
Shermer’s “The Science of Good and Evil”
Bawer’s “Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity”
Barker’s “Losing Faith in Faith”
Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God” - I saw the show in L.A. and was blown away.
Actually the most influential things for me were various websites that collect deconversion stories from former Christians (I related to so many of them) and “The God Who Wasn’t There,” a film by Brian Flemming. Richard Carrier is interviewed and he points out that all religious people report having personal spiritual experiences, therefore they are either all valid or none of them are. This had never occurred to me, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.
The Bible led to my giving up Christianity but I wasn’t willing to give up religion completely that easily. I read several more books, like the Qu’ran; several popular books on Wicca, Druidry, and other Neo-Paganisms; Conversion to Judaism by Lawrence Epstein; A History of God by Karen Armstrong; The Satanic Bible by Anton Lavey… well, it was a several-year process for me, but by the time I got to any non-Satanic atheist books I had already chosen that path.
Genesis 1 + 2.
Genesis 3.
Genesis 4.
Was age 9 or so. (Must also credit parents for raising me w/o religion.)
Pretty much everything I’ve ever read, but mostly the Bible and many apologetics books.
Not one book in particular, really. But I realised I was an atheist, and willing to call me so (rather than “I don’t know”) after understanding the theory of evolution. That is, after having read “Ever since Darwin” by SJ Gould.
James, you might like the website wiki.ironchariots.org
The Bible & Evangiles study.
Quite interesting, excellent mythology, full of self-contradictions and logical flaws. The very best way to doubt religion(s).
Dungeons and Dragons (as well as all the speculative fiction that underpins D&D) probably did more to lean me towards Agnosticism as a teenager than anything else.
Then I read “Afterman” and Man Afterman” by Dougal Dixon as a young adult and his vividly illustrated explanation of how evolution works opened my eyes up to how wonderful a world could be without any gods at all.
Don’t you know Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to lead to Satanism not Atheism. No one tell Jack Chick!
The bible itself did it for me. I had heard all the stories in Sunday school and that was all well and good, but when I reached college and actually sat down and read the New Testament, there was no turning back. Four accounts that hardly agree on a single detail and then there’s Paul - I can’t stand Paul. To go from a messiah who (in some accounts) allows women to see that he has resurrected before any men to Paul who claims that I should just keep my mouth shut in public and ask my husband if I have any questions is ridiculous.
As a woman, Paul excluded me from Christianity. I couldn’t find my place in that worldview anymore, so I left.
My 6th (or was that 7th?) grade social studies book.
I think it’s funny how I mostly hear religious objections to science books when it was my social studies book that led me to atheism. The two most important things that book taught me were that mythologies are really just religions that nobody believes in anymore and that all religions are equally implausible. Of course the book never said either of those things explicitly. But all the information I needed to come to those conclusions was in there.
Really though, that was only half of the equation. I had figured out what was wrong (religion) but hadn’t yet figured out what was right (science). It would be several years until I read The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. I had plenty of science in school up to that point but never gave much thought to the underlying philosphy or methodology.
In order of my reading them
The bible
The Ascent of Man - Jacob Bronowski
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
The Hitchhikers Trilogy
Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke.
Every science and math book I ever read in school
College: Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems - Galileo, Relativity - Albert Einstein, The Confessions of Saint Augustine.
And later, after I had finished figuring out that “god is Santa Claus for grownups”:
Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, GEB,
Joseph Campbell - The Power of Myth, and The Masks of God, Stephen Jay Gould - especially Wonderful Life, The Origin of Species, more Sagan, The Nag Hammadi Library, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens.
Now I’m working on the Koran.
I notice that NOT ONE of these responses has mentioned Harry Potter. I think the Fundies are trying to ban the wrong books!
oop, I forgot one above (for the sake of Hemant’s compiled list)
Letter to a Christian Nation
great book…
The Bible. Specifically the Book of Job. Had to read it for school and although I was always a skeptic, that basically killed all chances for Christianity. I will always be grateful to my 7th grade English teacher for putting it on the curriculum
Actually the Why Wont God Heal Amputees and God Is Imaginary websites were the biggest catalysts for myself.
Mostly