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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
Letter to a Christian Nation
Book Description In response to The End of Faith, Sam Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in God. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. Using rational argument, Harris offers a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. In the course of his […]
Maybe Right, Maybe Wrong
A marvelous children’s book that discusses learning right from wrong, stressing such aspects as the difference between rules and principles and the importance of an individual’s rights.
Mostly Harmless
In the fifth volume of the Hitchhiker series, Random, the daughter of Arthur Dent, leaves her remote home planet on the edge of the universe to set out on a odyssey in search of her ancestors’ native planet.
Nonbelief and Evil
Nonbelief and Evil is a fascinating, thorough, and persuasive presentation of two arguments for the nonexistence of God: the arguments from evil and nonbelief. Moreover, Drange defends his arguments against virtually every theistic response imaginable.
Original Intent
Davis, an attorney and an associate editor of the Journal of Church and State, argues that Rehnquist’s interpretation of the First Amendment’s prohibition against an establishment of religion is at odds with what the framers had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment.
Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundation
Physicalism is a program for building a unified system of knowledge about the world on the basis of the view that everything is a manifestation of the physical aspects of existence. Jeffrey Poland presents a systematic and comprehensive exploration of the philosophical foundations of this program. He investigates the core ideas, motivating values, and presuppositions […]
Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen: Gender and American Atheism, 1865-1915
Calling themselves “Freethinkers,” self-proclaimed liberals organized across the United States after the Civil War to oppose endorsement of Christianity as the national religion. Heralding a trinity of science, rationalism, and progress, these atheists and agnostics advocated the complete separation of church and state. They were self-conscious prototypes of the modern, secular American and counted among […]
Religious Postures
Professor Wells examines such issues as fundamentalism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, David Friedrich Strauss, Wilhelm Tell, the evidence for miracles, the employment of Kantian and Hegelian metaphysics to defend religion, the alleged need for a religious foundation for ethics, the reasonableness of atheism, and the phenomenal success of religion in surviving its own refutation.
School Prayer: The Court, the Congress, and the First Amendment
Alley gives special attention to the highly controversial Engel v. Vitale decision in 1962, which banned the recitation of a prayer composed by the New York State Board of Regents in public schools. Extensive selections from the arguments on both sides of the controversy afford the reader a firsthand look into the many deliberations surrounding […]
Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
If God does not exist, then what does? Is there good and evil, and should we care? How do we know what’s true anyway? And can we make any sense of this universe, or our own lives? Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism answers all these questions in lavish detail, without […]
Sri Lanka: The Emerald Island
Historical outline of the history of Sri Lanka. Photos of Sri Lanka.
Tales from the ‘White Hart’
Long before Douglas Adams ever thought of a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, Arthur C. Clark brought off a successful marriage between humor and science fiction. Whereas Adams’ humor is broad, lowbrow, and slapstick, Clark’s is intelligent, dry, and refined.
The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right
The Antigay Agenda: Orthodox Vision and the Christian Right by Didi Herman is a smart, thorough, concise book describing why and how conservative Protestant evangelicals employ antigay rhetoric in politics, journalism, and worship. Herman–a legal scholar at Keele University in Great Britain–has a convincing mastery of sociology, theology, rhetoric, and politics, in addition to her […]
The Blind Watchmaker
Richard Dawkins is not a shy man. Edward Larson’s research shows that most scientists today are not formally religious, but Dawkins is an in-your-face atheist in the witty British style: I want to persuade the reader, not just that the Darwinian world-view happens to be true, but that it is the only known theory that […]
The Changing Faces of Jesus
In The Changing Faces of Jesus world renowned scholar Geza Vermes explores the New Testament writings about Jesus that have subsequently defined two millennia of Christian belief, worship and speculation. With unique authority and insight, Vermes treats these accounts as an authentic part of the first-century Jewish world, and so transforms our understanding of Jesus. […]
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is especially true of The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin’s second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of […]
The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom
The Science of Freedom completes Peter Gay’s brilliant reinterpretation of the Enlightenment of the philosophes begun in The Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Paganism. In that book, Mr. Gay analyzed the struggle in which the philosophes pitted classical pagan thought against their Christian heritage. In the present book, which can be read independently as a […]
The Fire Next Time
The Fire Next Time is a poignant, personal observation of the turbulent life for African-Americans during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Baldwin cuts right to the heart of the matter in this masterful book, suggesting that whites in America have historically operated under the illusion that they have something that black Americans must […]
The Green Hills of Earth
First published in 1951, this collection includes “Delilah and the Space-Rigger,” “Space-Jockey,” “The Long Watch,” “Gentlemen Be Seated,” “The Black Pits of Luna,” “It’s Great to Be Back,” “We Also Walk Dogs,” “Ordeal in Space,” “The Green Hills of Earth” and “Logic of Empire.”
The Impossibility of God
Most people, believers and nonbelievers alike, are unacquainted with the variety and force of arguments for the nonexistence of God. In fact, the very mention of such an argument is usually a source of amusement, if not derision. Indeed, how can there be a serious argument for the nonexistence of God, let alone for the […]
The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims
Description This book reveals how, for well over a millennium, across three continents—Asia, Africa, and Europe—non-Muslims who were vanquished by jihad wars, became forced tributaries (called dhimmi in Arabic), in lieu of being slain. Under the dhimmi religious caste system, non-Muslims were subjected to legal and financial oppression, as well as social isolation. Extensive primary […]
The Meme Machine
What is a meme? First coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 study The Selfish Gene, a meme is any idea, behavior, or skill that can be transferred from one person to another by imitation: stories, fashions, inventions, recipes, songs, and ways of plowing a field, throwing a baseball, or making a sculpture. It is […]
The Myth of Sisyphus
The Myth of Sisyphus is a philosophical essay that explores the themes first expressed in Camus’s novel The Stranger. Camus begins with an exposition of suicide to see if Tolstoy’s argument, “if God does not exist then we must kill ourselves” is sound advice. He finds that it is not and that we have a […]
The Origins of Agnosticism: Victorian Unbelief and the Limits of Knowledge
No description available.
The Problem of God
The Problem of God explores God as Completely Perfect, the Unmoved Mover, the Uncaused Cause, the Creator Ex Nihilo, the Necessary Being, the Cosmic Mind, and as All-Good and Omnipotent.
The Robots of Dawn
A puzzling case of “roboticide” takes interplanetary detective Elijah Baley from Earth to the planet Aurora – the self-styled World of the Dawn, where humans and robots coexist in seemingly perfect harmony. There, the most advanced robot in the Universe – an awesomely human machine – has been murdered. Only one man on Aurora had […]
The Square
Duras’ The Square is a short novella (published with three other stories in this edition) that explores the existentialist theme of what project one should choose for one’s life; ultimately, what do we do with ourselves?
The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything
Some books have a hard time living up to their titles, but The Universe, the Eleventh Dimension, and Everything does just fine. Physicist and writer Richard Morris seeks to explain the current state of knowledge in cosmology and subatomic physics; as if that weren’t enough, he goes on to give us his take on how […]
Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society
For those who have felt that other memetics sources were just teasers, your 20 year wait is over! Written by a scientist who independently discovered memetics when the field was less than 10% its present age, Thought Contagion explains movements ranging from Amish to Nazi, sexually transmitted beliefs to apocalyptic religion. The book earns advance […]
Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe
Suppose there is no God. This supposition implies that human life is meaningless, that there are no moral obligations and hence people can do whatever they want, and that the notions of virtue and vice, right and wrong, and good and evil have no place in the universe. Erik J. Wielenberg believes this view to […]
