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Our selection of books and associated reviews. Each cover is an affiliate link to Amazon for purchase.
African-American Humanism: An Anthology
This book offers biographical sketches, essays, and interviews with prominent African-American humanists.
Appointment Denied: The Inquisition of Bertrand Russell
In the spring of 1940 amidst the Great Depression and the threat of world war a tempest in a teapot was brewing on the island of Manhattan, where the board of the City College of New York had just appointed the renowned philosopher Bertrand Russell to teach. with the appointment of this most celebrated of […]
Atheism, Morality, and Meaning
Despite the pluralism of contemporary American culture, the Judeo-Christian legacy still has a great deal of influence on the popular imagination. Thus it is not surprising that in this context atheism has a slightly scandalous ring, and unbelief is often associated with lack of morality and a meaningless existence. Distinguished philosopher and committed atheist Michael […]
Belief’s Own Ethics
The fundamental question of the ethics of belief is “What ought one to believe?” According to the traditional view of evidentialism, the strength of one’s beliefs should be proportionate to the evidence. Conventional ways of defending and challenging evidentialism rely on the idea that what one ought to believe is a matter of what it […]
Black Holes and Time Warps
In this masterfully written and brilliantly informed work, Dr. Thorne, the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech, leads readers through an elegant, always human, tapestry of interlocking themes, answering the great question: what principles control our universe and why do physicists think they know what they know? Subtitled “Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy,” and featuring an […]
Childhood’s End
The Overlords appeared suddenly over every city–intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind. Benevolent, they made few demands–unify Earth, eliminate poverty and end war. With little rebellion, mankind agreed, and a golden age began. But at what cost? To those who resisted the benign new alien rule, it became evident that the Overlords had an […]
Contemporary Materialism: A Reader
Contemporary Materialism presents an important collection of recent work on materialism in connection with metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and theories of value. This anthology charts the contemporary problems, positions and themes on the topic of materialism. It illuminates materialism’s complex intersection with related subjects such as cognition and psychology. By gathering a […]
Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature
The author argues that Darwinian biology supports an Aristotelian view of ethics as rooted in human nature. Defending a conception of “Darwinian natural right” based on the claim that the good is the desirable, the author documents at least twenty natural desires that are universal to all human societies because they are based in human […]
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion / Natural History of Religion
David Hume is the greatest and one of the most provocative philosophers in the English language. His sceptical accounts of the causes and consequences of religious belief, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion, are the most formidable attack upon the rationality of religious faith ever mounted by a philosopher. The Dialogues […]
Dreams of a Final Theory
Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Prize-winner in physics, imagines the shape of a final theory and the effect its discovery would have on the human spirit. He gives a defense of reductionism–the impulse to trace explanations of natural phenomena to deeper and deeper levels–and examines the curious relevance of beauty and symmetry in scientific theories. Weinberg […]
Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion
Book Description In the new mega-anthology from best-selling editor Russ Kick, more than fifty writers, reporters, and researchers–some of them freethinkers or nonbelievers who reveal a decidedly atheistic perspective, and some of them believers seeking reform, justice, or a better understanding of various negative aspects of different religions–invade the inner sanctum for an unrestrained look […]
Fantastic Voyage
Four men and a woman are reduced to a microscopic fraction of their original size, sent in a miniaturized atomic sub through a dying man’s carotid artery. Passing through the heart, entering the inner ear where even the slightest sound would destroy them, battling relentlessly into the cranium. Their objective… to reach a blood clot […]
Freethought on the American Frontier
A collection of memoirs, essays, political cartoons, songs, and poetry of the freethought movement during the 19th century. Essays by such social critics as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Mark Twain, Carl Sandburg, and Langston Hughes are included. Populist, Socialist, and labor-related issues are also presented. The book has good illustrations and political cartoons.
God Matters: Readings in the Philosophy of Religion
God Matters is a state-of-the-art, accessible anthology of the major issues in philosophy of religion. Its accessibility is due to its mix of classic readings and brand new readings about contemporary issues, commissioned specifically with an undergraduate student in mind. These commissioned readings make the difficult concepts of contemporary philosophy of religion easy to understand, […]
Harlan Ellison’s the City on the Edge of Forever
The controversy has raged for almost 30 years–now readers can judge for themselves. Harlan Ellison wrote the original award-winning teleplay for “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which was rewritten and became the most-loved Star Trek episode of all time. Ellison sued Paramount in protest and won. This book contains the teleplay and afterwords […]
How We Got to Be Human: Subjective Minds with Objective Bodies
Although the objective evidence of evolution has received considerable attention in many books over the years, very little has been written about the subjective experienced (mental) side of the lives of the creatures involved. This book is about how we evolved from four-legged mammals with simple minds, through semi-upright apes who are occasionally thoughtful, to […]
In Darwin’s Shadow: The Life and Science of Alfred Russel Wallace
Virtually unknown today, Alfred Russel Wallace was the codiscoverer of natural selection with Charles Darwin and an eminent scientist who stood out among his Victorian peers as a man of formidable mind and equally outsized personality. Now Michael Shermer rescues Wallace from the shadow of Darwin in this landmark biography. Here we see Wallace as […]
Invisible Man
First published in 1952, Invisible Man revealed the pain of a black man’s existence in a white world. It was shocking then, but remains important literature today. It is the story of a young man’s journey — through the Deep South to the streets of Harlem, through events and experiences that range from tortured to […]
Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years
Description The Fifth-Century Political Battles That Forever Changed the Church. In this fascinating account of the surprisingly violent fifth-century church, Jenkins describes in bloody detail the battles over “right belief” that had a far greater impact on the future of Christianity than the much-touted Council of Nicea convened by Constantine a century earlier. Jenkins argues […]
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.
