Deconversion Reading List

[DoubtingNate]

Here are a few books that were a catalyst for my deconversion.. I'd love to see what others have read as well.

 

1. Daniel Quinn - Ishmael, The Story of B.

While I'd been aware of the history and age of the earth, this book really got me thinking about the disconnect between the stories we tell ourselves, and the truth of how old the earth is, and the tiny fraction of that time we have been monotheists.  The 'metaphor for the agricultural revolution' interpretation of Genesis 1 was fascinating to me.  It seems speculative, I'm sure it is up for debate, but more than anything it made me realize that regardless of where Genesis came from, you simply can't have evolution AND original sin that necessitates divine atonement.

 

It was kind of random how I'd stumbled on this; shortly after Sandy Hook someone in another form posted a link to a chapter from 'Story of B', 

 

2. Mark Twain - Little Bessie Would Assist Providence

 

Everyone should do themselves a favor and read this right now.  It is hilarious and enlightening, and distills fundamental arguments against Christianity down to an argument between a precocious child and her exasperated mother.  Best way ever to kill 20 minutes or less.

 

3. J.T. Snodgrass - Genesis and the Rise of Civilization

 

He is a Bible scholar that read Quinn and did some really interesting scholarship to expand on his ideas.  This is some of the liveliest and funniest Bible commentary you will ever read, and thoroughly cited with a number of sources for anyone who wants to dig deeper.  He has two other books as well, and they are all available for the Kindle for 5 bucks or so.

 

4. Daniel Dennet - Breaking the Spell

 

of the New Athiest camp, he seems to be the most respectful and levelheaded.  Really interesting insights as to where religions came from and the adaptation mechanisms that have helped them to survive.  

 

5. Julia Sweeney - Letting Go of God

 

Not a book, but here Julia details her journey into atheism in a 2 hour talk that will make you laugh and cry.  This one tugged at my heartstrings as much or more than any of this other stuff.

 

The God Delusion by Dawkins and God is Not Great by Hitchens have also been helpful but I really enjoy Dawkins more for his science stuff as his understanding of the Bible seems a bit limited compared to others.

[WarriorPoet]

#1 on my deconversion reading list, the bible.

 

Once you allow yourself to read that book with an unbiased mind, there is no possible way to remain a believer in any judeo-christian mytholgogy.

[Cousin Ricky]

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As a Candle in the Dark. Chapter 10, “The Dragon in My Garage,” is key. It is ostensibly about space aliens, but once your mind substitutes “God” for “space aliens,” the cognitive dissonance is inevitable. De-conversion by stealth!
 
Bob Carroll, The Skeptic’s Dictionary. De-conversion is the gestalt of this work.
 

---

 
I did not read the following until after my de-conversion, but they provided confirmation that I’d come to the most reasonable conclusion.
 
Joseph McCabe, The Story of Religious Controversy. I first saw this book several months before my de-conversion, but put off reading it. I read it shortly after de-conversion, and it was a shock to learn what I had never been taught about Christian history.
 
Paul Tobin, The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: A Skeptic’s Guide to Christianity. This work portrays Christianity from outside the bubble, and gave me a fresh perspective on Christian doctrines. It also showed me for the first time (I shit you not) that my opposition to legal abortion was religious. (As a Christian, I was a staunch believer in secular government, but the Catholic Church had me believing that its opposition to legal abortion had a scientific basis.)
 
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. I was an atheist for a year and a half before I read this book, but the first segment of chapter 4, “The Ultimate Boeing 747,” was still a powerful epiphany. He took the popular apologetic of the tornado in a junkyard, and turned it devastatingly against the god hypothesis: What is the probability of a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling Almighty God? As for the critics of that book, I refer you to “The Courtier’s Reply.”

[thereisnoperfect]

Christian Smith, The Bible Made Impossible (on why the many, many different interpretations of the Bible make it impossible to consider it the perfect communication of god)

 

Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman, How God Changes Your Brain (neuroscience on the religious experiences affect the the brain: judgmental god concept=bad; loving god concept=good; meditation=good; yawning=good)

 

Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong (how and why we are wrong--little of it explicitly about religion, but much of it applicable, and often explains a lot about why people believe things falsely and insist on staying in that despite contradictions and problems)

[TheRedneckProfessor]

The God Virus by Darrel W. Ray.

 

http://www.amazon.com/God-Virus-The-Religion-Infects/dp/0970950519

[Geezer]

I've read enough material to convince me the Bible is nothing more than a collection of myths, so that has settled that question for me. I have recently changed my focus and reading material to deal with the question of why people believe the bible is true, and why people are attracted to religion, as well as how religions survive and even flourish, but that would probably not be a topic that would interest people who are going through the de-conversion process.

[maxmaxmaxmax]

My top three:

 

1. Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene

 

This book really got me thinking about the concepts of sin and love. In my view it provides a robust scientific framework for understanding why animals including humans behave in some of the ways they do. In particular it explains why they might carry out acts of love, friendship, or altruism towards strangers when you might expect them to only think of themselves owing to the pressures of natural selection. Also, it reveals where these feelings might come from in the first place. Therefore after reading it I had less need to think my faith had any profound insight into these matters and that pushed my deconversion along.

 

2. Daniel Dennett - Breaking the Spell

 

In a similar vein, this book shows how religion might have come about in the first place. He gives fascinating examples of superstition in other animals, explains why it might have been advantageous to have a so-called 'agency bias' (ie. assuming that every rustle in the bushes is caused by a potential predator rather than the wind), and why humans might have wanted to create the superstructures of erroneous beliefs that we now call religion. Therefore, I didn't need to think that the only way christianity could have come about and grown to become so large was the influence of the holy spirit.

 

3. Wikipedia articles on the Flood, Adam and Prayer studies

 

Maybe a strange one for some people. But when I learnt that there is no scientific evidence for a global flood,  when there absolutely should be if it in fact happened, I felt very uncomfortable. Even though I was fine with treating certain parts of the OT as non-literal, I realised that if the flood was not global then it had serious theological implications. Because it would mean that God did not wipe out the whole of mankind. That's significant because the whole point is that the whole of humanity was sinful (except Noah), in the same way that God claims the the whole of humanity is essentially sinful today, until rescued by Christ. If they are not sinful, then it makes salvation and the cross pointless.

 

I had a similar thought regarding Adam. If there was no real Adam (which there certainly wasn't, because we evolved gradually so we can't point to a single person who suddenly had human faculties or the 'imago dei'), then sin was not introduced into the world by a real man. Therefore it did not need a real man, Jesus, to atone for that sin. The theology for this is outlined in Romans 4 or 5. Paul even says something like, Christ was a real man, just as Adam was a real man.

 

Finally, we know from peer-reviewed studies that there is no robust evidence that prayer definitely works every time. In fact, it has never been shown to work for certain key, easily testable outcomes, the most famous example of which is the healing of amputees. It may seem to work some of the time, but that's only for outcomes that were just as likely to occur without prayer. In other words it makes no difference. However, the Bible claims that 'seek and you shall find, knock and the door will be open to you, ask and it will be given to you', and that the faith of a mustard seed can move mountains. It can't.

[amateur]

"The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes completely explained why religion was created to my satisfaction.  The bicameral mind was the human brain when it was in the two separate hemispheres (like it still is) but there was no connection between them (like there is now).  So early humans heard things from one side of their brain that they didn't realize was coming from their own head, so they assumed the voice was coming from a chief or leader or eventually a god.  That explanation is my own quick description and probably totally sucks, but the book made total sense to me with all his examples of art and literature from past eras.  After reading that book, I was done with religion.

 

I must read Mark Twain's Little Bessie!  I don't have time right now, but should tomorrow!  Looking forward to it.

[seven77]

I read several of Jared Diamond's books. "Collapse" and "Guns, Germs and Steel" are my favorites.

 

I read a lot of Ingersoll.

 

I also read a lot of articles over at Science Based Medicine.

 

Those things, combined with lots of time listening to Stefan Molyneux, Dusty Smith, and the (Not So) Amazing Atheist over on youtube have sealed the deal.

[wyson]

For me, its an ongoing process. I am going to read a reader about the history of Christian Theology next.

 

Books / sources that helped alot:

Leaving the fold, by Marlene Winell and her youtube videos

- these set me to listen to myself and my desires / wants as opposed to looking out for signs from God, communing with the holy spirit for answers etc.

 

Then I needed an alternate world hypothesis which was provided by:

 

Public lecture podcasts from the London School of Economics

- a couple of doozies

1) The president if Lithuania, when asked what single thing would bring about world peace?

"As we live in an energy economy, and energy resources are concentrated in the hands of a few who can then ransom the rest of the world, a political means to distributing energy resources fairly." NOT the sweeping away of Satan through the second coming of Christ.

2) Nelson Mandela when talking about the relatively peaceful transition to a black majority government.

"Some people say it was a miracle that there was such little bloodshed. No, it wasnt a miracle. It was every black South African deciding for themselves the take responsibility for their own actions, to decide on peace, not hatred and bloodshed". or words to that effect.

 

The Financial Times newspaper

New Scientist magazine

 

If the famous prominent politicans, businessmen, fianciers, nobel prize winning academics etc at the lse lectures started talking about Jesus and the Bible being the source of their inspiration, the solutions for the problems they face then I might have reconsidered. But in over 50 lectures I have seen, not a single one of them ever mentioned a Biblical Idea let alone a provided a personal confession of faith as being important. I could see the Bible, its teachings and the church exist outside the real world (except perhaps at a very abstract generalised level, a level of applicability that could well apply to fictional novels, or other religions or self help books etc, but nothing exclusively Christian).

 

Ditto for the Financial Times. No Christian ideas or solutions presented for any of the worlds problems.

 

Sometimes prominent Christian commenters such as the Pope and Rowan Williams sometimes write in the Financial Times. The Pope comes across as a nieve, wishful thinker. Rowan Williams is far more informed but again, oddly lacking in worldly sense.

 

It goes without saying biblical ideas are not taken seriously in New Scientist, which presents alternate hypothesis for how our minds and the world works.

[★ Citsonga ★]

Godless by Dan Barker (former minister, now an atheist involved with the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Clergy Project)

 

God vs. the Bible by John Armstrong (a deist who does a great job dismantling the Bible)

 

Why I Believed by Kenneth Daniels (former missionary offers well reasoned in-depth arguments)

 

Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne (geneticist completely obliterates creationism)

 

The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty (whether or not one agrees with his ultimate conclusions, the section dealing with historical evidence conclusively demonstrates how completely flimsy the evidence for Jesus really is)

[Blood]

Just reading Biblical scholarship with a critical mind is more helpful and substantive than all the atheist literature out there. 

[★ Citsonga ★]

#1 on my deconversion reading list, the bible.

 

Once you allow yourself to read that book with an unbiased mind, there is no possible way to remain a believer in any judeo-christian mytholgogy.

 

I must agree completely. Studying the Bible is what eventually opened my eyes. Other books then shed additional light, but the Bible really started it all.

[♦ ficino ♦]

Reading about the philosophy of Epicurus gave me a whole new perspective.  A good intro is Lucretius' On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura).  Epicurus' thesis that all that exists is atoms moving at random through the void, and that there are more than one universe, but the aggregate is eternal (multiverse?) made so much more sense.

 

I hadn't thought much about Bible contradictions until I started trolling the internet and looking into websites on them.  Secular Web was one of the earlier sites I came across, in addition to Ex-C!

 

 

[DoubtingNate]

 

Joseph McCabe, The Story of Religious Controversy. I first saw this book several months before my de-conversion, but put off reading it. I read it shortly after de-conversion, and it was a shock to learn what I had never been taught about Christian history.

 

I just started this and it is quite riveting!  Thanks everyone for sharing.  

[earthgypsy]

The bible  and  The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine were the two key books in my deconversion.

 

Supplemental books included

The Power of Myth by  Joseph Campbell

The Demon-Haunted World:  Science as a Candle in the Dark  by Carl Sagan

Women Who Run With The Wolves:  Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, PhD

[Blood]

Careful with McCabe. He was a brilliant polemicist, but not much of a scholar. Plus, he was writing a long time ago, relying on a great deal of outdated and spurious scholarship. 

[Cousin Ricky]

Careful with McCabe. He was a brilliant polemicist, but not much of a scholar. Plus, he was writing a long time ago, relying on a great deal of outdated and spurious scholarship. 

 

My bullshit meter did jump when the book promoted the luminiferous aether, a hypothesis that was called into question by Michelson-Morley and laid to rest by Einstein decades earlier. Relativity had passed its first test 10 years before the book was written, but not all scientists were convinced yet. I also don’t believe that there was a strong undercurrent of witchcraft in Renaissance Europe as argued by the book. Nevertheless, the book is a good wake-up call that Christian history isn’t what we were trained to believe.

 

We were fooled once (by Christianity), and we can be fooled again. McCabe should be vetted, like everyone else.

[DoubtingNate]

Careful with McCabe. He was a brilliant polemicist, but not much of a scholar. Plus, he was writing a long time ago, relying on a great deal of outdated and spurious scholarship. 

 

It's a really interesting window into what skeptics were thinking just on the cusp of WW2.  I definitely agree that there is plenty of BS in the world of counter-apologetics - some (not all) of the Christ/myth stuff for example, has been largely discredited, despite being really interesting and fun to speculate about.

[seven77]

I agree that it is interesting to see what skeptics were thinking in earlier times. That's why I fell in deep like with Ingersoll for awhile early on in my deconversion. He was expressing a lot of the ideas that are seen in The Lion's Den in the late 1800s. I also like that he was very engaging and thorough in his rebuttals and takedowns and didn't pander to the theists who wanted toned down, spiritualist friendly arguments. He just went in, said his peace and used their Holey Bible against them.

 

He also did a lot of speaking and debating on politics and other topics, but his works against the faith and in favor of reason are my favorites.

 

-About the Holy Bible

 

Excerpt from Introduction:

"...There are many millions of people who believe the Bible to be the inspired word of God — millions who think that this book is staff and guide, counselor and consoler; that it fills the present with peace and the future with hope — millions who believe that it is the fountain of law, Justice and mercy, and that to its wise and benign teachings the world is indebted for its liberty, wealth and civilization — millions who imagine that this book is a revelation from the wisdom and love of God to the brain and heart of man — millions who regard this book as a torch that conquers the darkness of death, and pours its radiance on another world — a world without a tear.

 

They forget its ignorance and savagery, its hatred of liberty, its religious persecution; they remember heaven, but they forget the dungeon of eternal pain. They forget that it imprisons the brain and corrupts the heart. They forget that it is the enemy of intellectual freedom. Liberty is my religion. Liberty of hand and brain — of thought and labor, liberty is a word hated by kings — loathed by popes...."

 

Powerful stuff, imho. This was written in 1894!

 

-The Devil, 1899

 

Excerpt from Chapter 2, "The Atlas of Christianity is the Devil" (emphasis mine):

 

"...Those who believe the Scriptures are compelled to say that this Devil was created by God, and that God knew when he created him just what he would do — the exact measure of his success; knew that he would be a successful rival; knew that he would deceive and corrupt the children of men; knew that, by reason of this Devil, countless millions of human beings would suffer eternal torment in the prison of pain. And this God also knew when he created the Devil, that he, God, would be compelled to leave his throne, to be born a babe in Palestine, and to suffer a cruel death. All this he knew when he created the Devil. Why did he create him?

 

It is no answer to say that this Devil was once an angel of light and fell from his high estate because he was free. God knew what he would do with his freedom when he made him and gave him liberty of action, and as a matter of fact must have made him with the intention that he should rebel; that he should fall; that he should become a devil; that he should tempt and corrupt the father and mother of the human race; that he should make hell a necessity, and that, in consequence of his creation, countless millions of the children of men would suffer eternal pain. Why did he create him?

 

Admit that God is infinitely wise. Has he ingenuity enough to frame an excuse for the creation of the Devil?..."

 

Pretty heavy stuff and I find it amazing that many skeptics and nonbelievers today are discussing these same issues, some 100+ years later. The answer is the same: Logic has not yet penetrated into the strongholds of faith. Stories, anecdotes, and emotions still rule the masses and doubt is still frowned upon by those who prefer to live in the demon haunted world. Mythology and stories still rule the land, it seems.

[milesaway]

The catalyst for my deconversion was seeing the horrific behavior coming from xtians towards others in general. On a more personal level, there was the outrageously shitty behavior they gave me at pretty much every church I visited for any length of time. I'd had enough of getting stabbed in the back, shot down, and getting smacked around at every turn, and I'd had enough of their dismissive attitude towards me and the questions I tried to come to them with.

 

After I left that hellhole once and for all, I read Leaving the Fold, God is Not Great, and The God Delusion. I read as much as I could of The Demon Haunted World before I had to return it to the library, lol. I also read some websites I found along the way.

http://godisimaginary.com/index.htm

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

http://loudsignal.com/

http://jdstone.org/cr/index.html (as a heads-up, you'll wanna turn your speakers down for this one)

[TheRedneckProfessor]

The catalyst for my deconversion was seeing the horrific behavior coming from xtians towards others in general. On a more personal level, there was the outrageously shitty behavior they gave me at pretty much every church I visited for any length of time. I'd had enough of getting stabbed in the back, shot down, and getting smacked around at every turn, and I'd had enough of their dismissive attitude towards me and the questions I tried to come to them with.

A-fucking-men!