Where Do I Start?

[Guest Emerson]

I was a xtian throughout most of my teen years and I pretty much quit in college. Anyway, all I ever read was christian literature, novels, apologetics and philosophy. Now I want to know what other people thought, believed, & said throughout the ages without the christian bias. I also want to learn about evolution, but dang where do I start...it just all seems so daunting.

 

Before I just used to go to a christian bookstore but now its much more hard to be discerning. I'm really not interested in more spirituality, rather, I am interested in books and arguments that have reason and are logical. Where science is used as evidence. So no books on Karma or spirit guides for me. I also loathe books that start out okay and look okay and then the writer reveals himself to be a christian and states what he believes, I'm not interested in that. I'm really not.

 

So I'd like a little help on what people to look up, what books to check out, etc.

[hatepirate]

For information on evolution, take a look at the archive at talkorigins.org. Wealth of information there.

 

If your looking for books on atheism (it's hard to tell what you're looking for; be more specific), I recommend reading Dan Barker, David Mills, and David Eller.

[Guest Emerson]

I'm pretty much looking for books on anything atheism, agnosticism, other beliefs besides the ones that we know of (islam, judaism, christianity). I've heard of Thomas Paine, but not sure what he believed so I am trying to find out more about him and other great thinkers besides Charles Darwin.

 

Thanks for the heads up & the link.

 

hmm, I don't think that I've expressed myself well of what I'm looking for. I wonder if there's a website out there that covers all the different religions and beliefs of the world? Something that more or less contains a neutral stance. I know of belief.net, but I haven't seen anything there that would cover deism, etc.

 

I'd also be interested in learning about different holy texts out in the world and what they have to say. Again, besides the judeo/christian/islam umbrella and no I'm not looking to converting. I'm just curious to see what's out there. Thanks.

[chefranden]

Read Durant's Story of Civilization. It is a good overview of history, culture, and religion. It will give you a base line to fit other findings into as you learn. Your library probably has it.

[Thurisaz]

Emerson, you might like www.creationtheory.org too. Don't let yourself be fooled by the name, it's an anti-cretinism site, and it's damn well-written if you ask me. In the process of ripping babblical cretinism to shreds Mr Wong also gives some nice explanations of what science really is about.

[LosingMyReligion]

I'll keep watching this thread as I am in the same boat as Emerson...

 

Please, no one suggest "The Purpose Driven Life" or anything by Joel Osteen...lol.

[pandora]

Keeping up with a fairly intellectual skeptical board would help, too... since you're an internet junkie (like me).

 

infidels.org has a good forum, and a fairly new forum that I like is skeptic.com's forum.

 

No offense, guys.... lots of us on here are smart (ALL of us), but we don't necessarily engage in scholarly debate very often. We just bullshit most of the time.

[white_raven23]

Emerson, have you looked at the articles available in conjunction with this forum? There are quite a few, and even offer links to essays and writings by folks like Thomas Paine. There is a LOT of stuff worthy of further consideration, and would give you a broad range of topics that you could decide for yourself which topics you want to know more about. Much more objective that way. The readings that help one Ex-Cer, might not do it for another. Just don't limit yourself.

 

Here's a shortcut to where I'm talking about. : http://exchristian.net/archived.php

[Guest GrewUpFundie]

I was a xtian throughout most of my teen years and I pretty much quit in college. Anyway, all I ever read was christian literature, novels, apologetics and philosophy. Now I want to know what other people thought, believed, & said throughout the ages without the christian bias. I also want to learn about evolution, but dang where do I start...it just all seems so daunting.

 

Before I just used to go to a christian bookstore but now its much more hard to be discerning. I'm really not interested in more spirituality, rather, I am interested in books and arguments that have reason and are logical. Where science is used as evidence. So no books on Karma or spirit guides for me. I also loathe books that start out okay and look okay and then the writer reveals himself to be a christian and states what he believes, I'm not interested in that. I'm really not.

 

So I'd like a little help on what people to look up, what books to check out, etc.

 

The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan would be a great place to start.

[greasemonkey]

I've always really liked religioustolerance.org for good unbiased material. The go pretty far out of their way to keep things level between everyone and have really good resources about almost any religion you can think of.

[Jedah]

This site makes me laugh. Its really only funny if you have debated apologists for a while because you know just how sadly true it is

 

http://web.archive.org/web/20040214100329/...-apologist.html

[Guest Emerson]

Thanks everyone! I love your replies, keep them coming.

[spamandham]

 

The Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan would be a great place to start.

 

 

Drat! Someone beat me to it. If there were such a thing as required reading for freethinkers, this book would be it. This is one of only a handfull of books I've read more than once, and look forward to reading again.

[HadouKen24]

If I were you, Emerson, I would try not to let books espousing one worldview--be it materialist atheism or Buddhism--to dominate your reading list.

 

Sacred-texts.com is a great place to find the holy writings of pretty much any religion you can think of. I recommend reading, at the very least, the Tao Te Ching, the most famous philosophical Taoist work. It's short, and almoest everyone I know who has read it failed to be at least provoked to thought.

 

I'd also get started on legit philosophy, too, if I were you. I recommend reading Plato's Apology for a (relatively) easy decent philosophical work. Your local library probably has a good introduction to general philosophy, too, which would definitely be worthwhile.

[futurekid]

I've just passed the six-month anniversary of my deconversion and you can believe I've been doing some serious reading. Here are a few sources I found of value in no particular order.

• Adherents.com - lots of facts about religions
  
• The First Immortal by James Halperin
  
• Einstein on God and Religion
  
• Richard Dawkins has written some excellent books explaining the materialist miracles we see around us including The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene
  
• David Brin is a Sci-Fi author who is firmly in in the enlightenment
  
• Mark Twain most definitely got it, although he tended to be a bit bitter towards the end of his life.
  
• Why Won't God Heal Amputees? is imporant enough I put it in my sig.
  
• I've saved the last place for a quote from the late Douglas Adams:
  

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let’s try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he’s begun to take a little charge of; he’s begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he’s made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we’ll come and we’ll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who’s a tool maker, doesn’t have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New York for heaven’s sake—and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn’t have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I’ll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in—mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest—it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water—water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth—mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, ‘well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in’ and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? — you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

 

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what’s supposed to be going to happen on the 1st of January 2000—let’s not pretend that we didn’t have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.

[Ouroboros]

Well, if you're interested in older books of any kind. Many religious text translated, other books like older philosophy, and even fiction: http://www.blackmask.com/

 

You can download as PDF or eBook or other formats. They have history books.

[Guest Emerson]

this is so irelevant to the topic, but Hansolo I like your avatar its so cute. btw, thanks for the link.

[Ouroboros]

Yes. That is very much out of line.