there are two books i would greatly recommend to everyone. regardless of your religion, or lack of it. it doesnt hurt to think further into things, does it. ultimately, the biggest mistake would be the closed-belief trap. what benefits are there in stubbornly refusing to consider the other point of view? you dont have to believe either authors for you surely have your own opinions on things.


1) God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens

2)The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel

i wont go into details (because then i wont be able to finish typing the post EVER). but here's a basic outline. Hitchen's book is more like our GP essays. with facts and events, evidence, opinions, evaluations and blah. while it concludes that religion is more hazardous than the good it's supposed to do, it does recognises that there ARE good things that stems from it. and believe me, they sure make you think HARD. Strobel's book is more scientific. it goes very much into the more science-based evidence like DNA, physics, cosmology and such. if that's your kind of thing, go for it.

personally, i prefer Hitchen's book. (yes, i'm biased) here's an excerpt:

"The ARGUMENT THAT RELIGIOUS BELIEFS IMPROVES PEOPLE or that it helps civilize society, is one that people tend to bring up when they have exhausted the rest of their case. Very well, they seem to say, we cease to insist on the Exodius, or the Virgin Birth or even the Resurrection. But where would people be without faith? Would they not abandon themselve to everykind of license and selfishness? Is it not true, as G. K. Chesterton once famously said, that if people cease to believe in god, they do not believe in nothing but in anything?

The first thing to be said is that virtuous behavior by a believer is no proof at all of - indeed it's not even an argument for - the truth of his belief. I might, just for the sake of argument, act more charitably if i believed that Lord Buddha was born from a slit in his mother's side. But would not this make my charitable impulse dependent on something rather tenuous? By the same token, I do not say that if I catch a buddhist abbot stealing all the offerings left by the simple folk at his temple, Buddhism is then discredited. And we forget in any case just how contingent all this is.

Of the thousand of possible desert religions there were, one branche happened to take root and grow. Passing through its jewish mutations to its Christian form, it was eventually adopted for political reasons by the Emperor Constantine. As for Islam, it became the ideology of a highly successful conquest that was adopted by successful ruling dynasties, codified and set down in its turn, and promulgated as law of the land.

One or two military victories turned the other way, we could have become the votaries of another belief altogether. Perhaps a Hindu, an Aztec or a Confucian (would Germany now be a Jewish country if Hitler was stopped in time?). In which case, we would be told that, strictly true or not, it nonetheless helped teached children from right and wrong.

In other words, to believe in a god is in one way to express a willingness to believe in anything. Whereas to reject the belief is by no means to profess belief in nothing."