anti-religion

"Atheism: The Case Against God" by George H. Smith was pretty good. It doesn't try to disprove the bible, but theism in general.

I don't want to be rude or nit-picky, but did you even read this book? Roughly 2/3 of it are spent refuting the Bible and Christianity. Regardless, I agree it's an excellent choice.

I would also add:

The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach.

Atheism: A Reader edited by S.T. Joshi.

The Faith of a Heretic and Critique of Religion and Philosophy, both by Walter Kaufmann.

Kant pretty much destroys the arguments for the existence of God in his Critique of Pure Reason.

Nietzsche's Der Antichrist.

Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained is an anthropological study of religion which, of course, has adverse effects to the validity of religious views.

Some other authors to look for: Thomas Paine, Robert Ingersol, Bertrand Russell; and, frankly, just read up on atheism and agnosticism - pretty much the whole body of text is essentially anti-religious.

Regards.

On the same page as Kant, R. W. Emerson decries the necessitation of established religion in his "Nature" essay.

thanks
Thanks for your replies.

I was brought up by my parents within the "Jehovah's Witness" religion.

I knew from a young age that religion was just a form of control. I like to refer to it as psychological terrorism. In my opinion, all religion does is try to scare people into submission to a bunch of rules created by man.

However, I am not really looking for a book to disprove the existence of "God", but rather, I wish to have some good solid arguments to throw back at my parents.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

Re: thanks


Well, the point would be that the essence of religious conviction hinges on the essence of theological conviction: whether you're a theist or not is secondary to the information present in the atheist/agnostic literature. That is, you're not necessarily going to find much theistic anti-religious material; so the trick is to read the atheist stuff and form your own opinions around it.

got it
I hear ya. It's just that while I'm positively anti-religion, I have not made up my mind on spiritualistic views entirely.

I have done a lot of reading on meditation and use this practice regularly. There is something spiritual about meditation.

I tend to gravitate towards eastern philosophy and so I haven't made up my mind about "God" if you will, but religion is definitely in the shitter.

As you said though, if I am going to get some good points to use in my favour, I won't find them in any feel good philosophy books!

Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy you might associate with. It's about a rebellion against the Kingdom of Heaven to make it into a Republic of heaven. Well you get the theme the author is making here.

Although one can interpret the "dust"(big thing in the plot) in the book as the actual god. It seems ironically deistic, but the author did say that he's an agnostic...