Recommended Atheist Reading

This is kind of fun. Former atheist, now Catholic, scifi/fantasy writer John C. Wright offers his list of recommended atheist writers. It’s a bleak list for the most part, but if you are going to immerse yourself in the literature of negation, it’s better to read good writers, I suppose, than bag ladies screaming at the traffic like Dawkins.

I had the faith to be an atheist. It requires too huge an act of faith for me to look at the universe (and Jesus) and conclude “everything is soluble to me and my three pound piece of meat behind my eyes and it simple dogma that it’s all time, space, matter and energy”. But some people somehow manage, by sheer dint of will, to shut out the Mystery and embrace this supremely boring philosophy.

To be sure, many don’t know what they mean by “atheist” (20% of atheists say they believe in God) and many others make it pretty clear that they are furious at the God they say does not exist. But the Evangelical ones who manage to brass it past these obstacles are basically stuck with two boring negations they beat to death in short order. At some level, they seem to know this, so they typically pad the case with red herrings, non sequiturs and other fallacies to add some variety to the monotony. But the truth is, atheists will always be out at the end of the bell curve. The human person is built to worship something and even atheists can’t really resist the impulse for long. The choice is not whether, but what, you will worship.