Belief in "clutchiness" is very similar to belief in gods. Never made that connection before.

My Biochemestry and Molecular Biology textbooks.
My faith died, but my love for science was born. (Still I didn't do that well on those subjects, but I passed both)

oh, for me, my parents warned me of the "worldly views and teachings" that college would offer, but because of the way this country is, you cant get a decent paycheck without a college degree so they forced me to go. Turns out they didn't warn me enough.

By telling its adherents that getting 'worldly' education was wrong? And would lead to being influenced by the devil?

The same way any other religion stops you from doing something?

TY, out of curiosity do you mind if I ask how exactly it stopped you from going to college?

In my case, my religious past stopped me from attending university after high school. I can attend university now, and plan to as soon as my wife has her graduate degree done, but it still means I can't get that time back I'd rather have spent in school.

"None of them would have made me so deliciously skeptical"

I'm sorry, but I just pictured the Lucky Charms leprechaun singing "He's Skeptically Delicious!"

I'm with the perspective of not wanting to give up my religious past.

A lot of different life paths could have played out for me. None of them would have made me so deliciously skeptical as the path of being scammed by a religion for so many years.

I wouldn't take back any of my religious past for a million bucks. I am the way i am now because of my past and i like the way i am now, though there is always room for improvement

I agree. I'd love to have back the years I wasted in religious pursuits.

Good point, missed that, but still more relevant than a book on baseball stats.

A big thing this site has taught me is that I was unusual (and lucky) in that I wasn't raised in a religion.

"Everyone else is citing things much more specifically tailored to atheism/skeptism"

Not everyone. The history books I was reading were not about atheism or skepticism.

What got the ball rolling for me was John Shelby Spong's "Jesus for the Non-Religious". If a former bishop was saying it was myth and folklore, then maybe I should take another look at what I believed.

I think "Losing My Religion" by Lobdell pushed me over the edge.

This definitely has told me a bit about the level of religious indoctrination most people got. Everyone else is citing things much more specifically tailored to atheism/skeptism, a book about baseball was all the push I needed to start questioning. Just seeing it laid out how the subjective tradition in baseball was ridiculously flawed got me applying it all over. If the conventional, historic, wisdom in something so quantifiable and with such clear incentives to do optimize as baseball, then the world is full of flawed subjectively rooted systems.

In a round-about way, the stories of HP Lovecraft did it for me. Lovecraft ripped the top off my world and showed me just how strange and frightening the unknown universe could be. It made me realize that if there was an entity of sufficient breadth and power that we could call it "God", it would be so alien to us as to be horrifying and sanity-breaking.

I probably would have ended up in the "God as Mystery" phase of liberal Christianity had I not read Lovecraft. I realized that the phrase "mystery" could include a whole range of things that most of my fellow happy-clappy Christians would never accept.

It's a shame I can't recommend him to others. But Lovecraft was so over-written, pseudo-British and racist that I just can't.

The Bible.

I began studying the Bible seriously due to thinking I might want to become a minister. I'm a pretty open-minded guy and somewhat of a critical thinker. It didn't take long for the doubts to start creeping in. The Bible is so full of problems it made my head swim trying to sort them all out. Eventually I realized it was because it was nonsense, so I started reading authors like Dawkins, Hitchens and Sam Harris (my favorite). "The End of Faith" is wonderful.

I said this in my intro post, but again... Douglas Adams' "The Salmon of Doubt" was a weirdly influential book for me when I was leaving Christianity- I think it confirmed the humanity of atheists to me. Here was a funny, brilliant, seemingly well-balanced and kind person who also was militantly atheistic; it baffled and intrigued me.

Also:
Remarkable Creatures by Sean B. Carroll
The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins
The Beak of the Finch by Jonathon Weiner
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
and last but not least, the Bible. Heh.

George H. Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God" has some of the most effective arguments against the existence of a god that I've ever seen.

Jonathan - Highlight all the particularly stupid/troubling phrases/questions, write unreasonablefaith.com in the margins, and go leave the book in a church. Or better yet, in a high school. Pay it Forward, is what I'm saying.

Perhaps I could do something like the Skeptic's Annotated Bible - but then I doubt Rick Warren's lawyers would like me very much.

I propose we have a similar book for FSM followers: the Pasta Driven Life.

Jonathan - Highlight all the particularly stupid/troubling phrases/questions, write unreasonablefaith.com in the margins, and go leave the book in a church. Or better yet, in a high school. Pay it Forward, is what I'm saying.

I can't think of any individual titles right now, but I went through a Babylonian history kick for a while. Babylonian and Persian history tell you where all the Jesus myths originated. Christianity, like everything else, borrowed like crazy from its predecessors.

Short Version: Carl Zimmer's "evolution: the Triumph of an Idea" turned me atheist.

Long version:

As I alluded to in another thread, the book that turned me atheist was Carl Zimmer's "evolution: the Triumph of an Idea"

Before that, I believed evolution to be only the best theory so far for the origin of life. I put a lot of stock in the criticisms of the theory, believing at the time that evolution was only possible with the help of a God, to get around the obvious problems (that I believed existed) with the theory.

Being an avid science fiction fan and active Mormon, I had to come to this interpretation to reconcile my faith-based beliefs and my fact-based science self-education.

At a certain point, I wanted to learn more about the scientific side of evolution theory. I knew that it wouldn't upset my faith to learn more about science, so I did a few searches on the internet for a good introduction to evolutionary theory, and came up with Zimmer's book.

While the book ended up teaching me that God was not at all necessary for evolution, the most shocking thing to me was that the arguments against evolution were all formulated within a few years of Darwin's book coming out.

What this told me was that while the theory of evolution itself had been rapidly expanding and improving, the arguments against were stale, and basically unimproved since the beginning.

I had been under the false impression that there was an 'active dialog' on the validity of evolutionary theory. "evolution" removed that idea entirely.

Now, the book did give some time to religion at the end, and due to that concession, I ended up really enjoying the book.

Still, I knew now that God was no longer strictly necessary to explain life, and that ended up turning me atheist within a year.

Keep it, since it helped you so much. :)

Bizarrely, Rick Warren's Purpose Driven cesspool did a lot to convince me that it was a load of superstitious, irrelevant nonsense. I'm tempted to send the book back to him for a refund.

American Fascists by Chris Hedges, he pretty much convinced me that the bible is not divine but he said it in a way that sounded sincere and it didn't feel that i was being attacked. Thats what started it for me. Sartre also made me question things about the idea of god as well.

Good for you Travis!

Perhaps the most fascinating thing for me, in retrospect, was how much Christianity must have changed over the years. I niavely expected to be able to essentially understand Christianity by reading the 'manual', and so I did that first without much exposure to Christian theology. After I was done, I had some idea about what I expected Christianity to be like - and was in for a shock when I started comparing that idea to what Christianity actually is today.

I am doing the same thing currently, Comassion. I decided to systematically go through each book of the Bible from an objective standpoint, and write down my honest gut reactions, things that don't quite make sense to me, and other questions or observations. Its amazing how many gaps I had previously let my faith or the "mystery of God" fill.

Its a great way to increase Biblical knowledge (or perhaps "knowledge of the Bible" is less oxymoronic) and have sufficient skeptic grounds to stand on when I have to discuss why I am now an atheist with my Christian friends.

The Bible. Reading it myself was very revealing (though I never deconverted from Christianity - I read it as an agnostic while trying to decide if Christianity was true or not).

Also, while I read it after my skepticism was well founded, I highly reccommend Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World". It's one of my favorite books now.

Ok, I got several. While I was still within the church, Lee Strobel's "The Case for Faith" did more to push me out than anything. The "No Spin", "Fair and Balanced", blatantly propagandistic tone of the book made me instinctively want to argue with the author, even though I was ostensibly on the same side of the argument as him. To his credit, Mr. Strobel DOES "ask the hard questions" that he promises to ask, but he only asks them to professional apologists, and never asks a nonbeliever's opinion on anything. The lack of follow-up was deafening, throughout.

"Misquoting Jesus" came next, and a lot of wikipedia, and a book called "When Jesus became God" by a secular Jew whose name I cannot recall right now, about the Arian/Athanasian battles over the basic tenets of Christian theology.