Your reading list?

[Fi]

I need to read all of the standard Atheist reading. *picks it all out of this thread and adds it to her list* I haven't even read The God Delusion yet.

I just finished reading The Hunger Games and it made me have so many feelings. Too many feelings. I desperately need to read Catching Fire and Mockingjay now.

[Cecilie]

Well, I'm attempting to read One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest as I need to for school. I also attempted reading Don Quixote, but gave up because I felt it didn't go anywhere. I'm a very picky reader. Still, I should read more.

[Crocoduck]

I've started Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science by Lawrence M. Krauss

I find Richard Feynman fascinating. A few weeks ago I read Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character both written by Ralph Leighton. I also read Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life by Leonard Mlodinow. If I haven't gotten my fill of Feynman by then I have a copy of Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick waiting in the wings.

[Tank]

He was an amazing person.

[Crocoduck]

It's funny how we have such a stereotypical view of gifted people like Richard Feynman but he was almost the polar opposite of a nerd. Anyone who leaves their office at Caltech and heads to a strip club to do his work is alright with me.

[Tank]

Damn right. He really though and lived outside the box.

[Recusant]

I agree with all of the above regarding Feynman. He was one of the most inspiring people of the 20th century, in my opinion. To see him in action in the lecture hall, check out the Douglas Robb Memorial Lectures. Not great quality video, but a series of fine gems none the less.

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BooksCatsEtc, you were very gentle with the Schlessinger woman, in my opinion. The least offensive thing I could say about her is, "a real piece of work." Less diplomatic: a vile termagant

* * *

Right now I'm reading Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 by David Underdown. I've only read the first few chapters, but they certainly haven't improved my opinion of the Puritans.

[Sandra Craft]

BooksCatsEtc, you were very gentle with the Schlessinger woman, in my opinion. The least offensive thing I could say about her is, "a real piece of work." Less diplomatic: a vile termagant

I try to be tough, esp. on difficult people such as vile termagants, but I am innately a gentle person.  It's like a curse.

Right now I'm reading Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603-1660 by David Underdown. I've only read the first few chapters, but they certainly haven't improved my opinion of the Puritans.

My view of the Puritans started wobbling as soon as I began reading non-school-approved history books, and it was blown to smithereens by Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, her account of the history of Puritans in American and what it means to be "a Puritan nation".

[Melmoth]

I just read Karen Armstrong's A Case for God.

It's actually pretty interesting, at least as a history of religious attitudes goes, and a lot more honest and intelligent than the usual 'street' apology. Not exactly convincing, but interesting enough to be worth a read. Especially for me, who doesn't know much about theology or its development, because it provides a sort of overview.

[Sandra Craft]

I just read Karen Armstrong's A Case for God.

It's actually pretty interesting, at least as a history of religious attitudes goes, and a lot more honest and intelligent than the usual 'street' apology. Not exactly convincing, but interesting enough to be worth a read. Especially for me, who doesn't know much about theology or its development, because it provides a sort of overview.

Karen Armstrong is my favorite religious writer, I'll make a note to pick this book up.  Thanks!

[NHOJ]

Recently finished Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.
Now reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez.
Next up is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

[Sandra Craft]

Recently finished Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.
Now reading Daemon by Daniel Suarez.
Next up is The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco.

I love Urberto Eco, I think he's the funniest brilliant man I've ever read.  I recommend a collection of his essays and short stories called How to Travel with a Salmon.

I'm finally making headway on Carl Sagan's "The Varieties of Scientific Experience: a personal view of the search for god".  What I like about Sagan is that he has a kindness at heart for the religious, a sympathy even if he does not share their beliefs. In the lecture The Organic Universe he quotes a woman who wrote to him of her problems with the scientific view:

I want to close on a beautiful little piece of poetry written by a woman in rural Arkansas. Her name is Lillie Emery, and she is not a professional poet, but she writes for herself and she has written to me. And one of her poems has the following lines in it:

  My kind didn't really slither out of the tidal pool, did we?
  God, I need to believe you created me;
  we are so small down here.

I think there is a very general truth that Lillie Emery expresses in this poem. I believe everyone on some level recognizes that feeling. And yet, and yet, if we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing in here by atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

Maybe I'm one of the few, but I've never minded being "small", or even "insignificant". It does not cause my ego to collapse because I'm just matter swirling around for a very brief time in a universe where nearly everything is greater than I am. I feel flattered to be part of it.

In the lecture I'm currently reading, The God Hypothesis, gets into the real meat of arguments between theists and atheists, who or what is god?:

If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say "God". This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time.

Now there is a constellation of properties that we generally think of when we in the West, or more generally in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, think of God. The fundamental differences among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are trivial compared to their similarities. We think of some being who is omnipotent, omniscient, compassionate, who created the universe, is responsive to prayer, intervenes in human affairs, and so on.

But suppose there were definitive proof of some being who had some but not all of these properties. Suppose somehow it were demonstrated that there was a being who originated the universe but is indifferent to prayer . . . Or, worse, a god who was oblivious to the existence of humans. That's very much like Aristotle's god. Would that be God or not? Suppose it were someone who was omnipotent but not omniscient, or vice versa. Suppose this god understood all the consequences of his actions but there were many things he was unable to do, so he was condemned to a universe in which his desired ends could not be accomplished. These alternative kinds of gods are hardly ever thought about or discussed. A priori there is no reason they should not be as likely as the more conventional sorts of gods.

And the subject is further confused by the fact that prominent theologians such as Paul Tillich, for example, who gave the Gifford Lectures many years ago, explicitly denied God's existence, at least as a supernatural power. Well, if an esteemed theologian (and he's by no means the only one) denies that God is a supernatural being, the subject seems to me to be somewhat confused. The range of hypotheses that are seriously covered under the rubic "God" is immense. A naive Western View of God is an outsize, light-skinned male with a long white beard, who sits on a very large throne in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow.

Contrast this with a quite different vision of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein. And this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way. Einstein was constantly interpreting the world in terms of what God would or wouldn't do. But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature, as I have said earlier, that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow, Peking, Mars, Alpha Centauri, the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quasars known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us. It represents an unexpected regularity to the universe. It need not have been. It could have been that every province of the cosmos had its own laws of nature. It's not apparent from the start that the same laws have to apply everywhere.

Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable.

I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God. The former definition of god is more dubious. And there is a wide range of other sorts of gods. And in every case we have to ask, "What kind of god are you talking about, and what is the evidence that this god exists?"

I particularly like the way this lecture ends:

So, to conclude, I would like to quote from Protagoras in the fifteenth century B.C., the opening lines of his 'Essay on the Gods'

  About the gods I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist or what they are to look at. Many things prevent my knowing. Among others, the fact that they are never seen.

[Buddy]

Finally checked out The God Delusion from my local library yesterday. I'm planning on starting it on Saturday when I start on Christmas break.

[Crocoduck]

I remember reading Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. It was shortly after losing my faith and I found it a very good book.

[Tank]

Finally checked out The God Delusion from my local library yesterday. I'm planning on starting it on Saturday when I start on Christmas break.

What excellent timing!