Which Books Helped You Become an Atheist?

After having been raised for 18 years in a fundie church, you’d think that would be enough. But I had developed Battered Believer’s Syndrome. (It’s exactly like battered spouse syndrome, but with God.) It took the online book on this website http://www.godvsthebible.com/ to help me break free. It’s still a struggle, but I am growing each day.

It was a journey of many different books. It wasn’t just one book. Believe it or not, Bishop John Shelby Spong and Tom Harpur’s (both of the Episcopal Church) books helped. Acharya S’s books, Bob Price’s, and a few others too. Not only that, I’ve studied a variety of religions. They are all basically of the same template. Not a whole lot of difference in them, except some religions are older. Even worse, what is now myth (Egyptian, Babylonian, etc myths) they are basically the same thing too. It’s all rewritten fiction.

Why not Richard Dawkins? I’ve read the God Delusion and except for the science, he wrote what I already have thought and said for a long time now. It wasn’t any different.

The Bible, definitely. Although I’ve read a lot from atheists online, I was an atheist myself before that. In fact, I’ve only read two actual books by atheists. One was Richard Carrier’s Sense and Goodness Without God which, while good, tried to cover too much ground and so was a little thin in places. The other was David Mills’ Atheist Universe. I liked the latter fairly well, but Mills is too hyperbolic sometimes. Some people will dismiss what he’s got to say out of hand because of that.

I’m sure there are better ones out there. I’ll get around to them.

Actually it was the bible, but in the form of the Brick Testament. Somehow seeing the stories in short snips with legos illustrating the absolute absurdity really kick started my atheism. It is a fun one to pass along to lazily religious friends since they will be offended, assume the quotes are taken out of context and are distorted, but when they check the bible they find out that that craziness is really in there.

Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World did it for me. I read it and realized I’d been an atheist all along.

I was never a theist, but my atheism became much more explicit after reading The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, and Ayn Rand’s nonfiction. I don’t subscribe to Ayn Rand’s views, but they are thought-provoking books that promote atheism.

Those led me to more philosophy, including Dennett, then Dawkins, and a whole bunch more (including Mehta).

Dan Barkers “Losing Faith in Faith” and “Robert G. Ingersoll’s 44 Complete Lectures”. Both were instrumental. Before I read them I didn’t even know atheism was an option.

My parents never talked about religion or anything until I was about eight and my dad got it into his head (well, actually it was his best friend who had just gotten “saved” or “born again” or whatever the lingo is) that he should take my sister and I to church. By this time, I was a pretty heavy reader and was engrossed in anything about dinosaurs, history, and especially Greek mythology. So when I went to Sunday school for the first time, and this lady was talking about someone being in a whale for three days, I immediately thought, hey, thats just like Greek mythology. After returning home, I promptly explained to my parents that I didn’t believe any of that, it sounded perfectly ridiculous, and I wasn’t going to church anymore (plus I really hated waking up early and getting all dressed up). I didn’t know the word was atheist until later, but I guess I was one. And still going strong twenty years later. So, I guess the book that did it for me was a book about Greek mythology. Plus, how could God ever compete with Zues?

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.
The Holy Bible by …

I don’t remember if any books in particular led me down the path of unbelief (disbelief?), at least initially. I’ve always been skeptical of the existence of God (or any other gods) but I never actually called myself an atheist. I know I’m not the only one here, but it was The God Delusion that actually made me realize I’ve always been an atheist, at least in the terms that he puts it.

Technically I’m probably an agnostic, because I don’t think evidence really exists either way, but in my daily life, I’m an atheist. I live my life as if no god(s) exist. maybe they do, but I’m not gonna lose sleep over it.

For me, Julia Sweeney was the “straw that broke the camels back”. I first heard her on NPR and then went on to listen to her monologue, “Letting Go of God”.

She had a story very similar to mine, and made me feel like it was OK to let go of religion.

My progression from liberal Christianity to atheism was a gradual process. In many ways it was knowing other Christians and seeing their beliefs that moved me most toward atheism.

Someone mentioned John Spong, but while his stuff is anti-fundamentalism, it still advocates this neo-liberal theistic spirituality.

I think the books that will really challenge Christians are two by Bart Ehrman.
1. Misquoting Jesus
2. Lost Christianities

Whatever science textbooks we had in 6-7th grade turned me from “wtf this can’t be true” to “ooohhh, so that’s what it really is…gotcha.”

I had rejected religion and god long ago. When I was three I figured out that Santa and company were all fake. What did it for me then was that if they were fake, then so was the easter bunny and therefore so was god. Still had to go to church and such because of my parents, but I always just fooled around. It was middle school science that turned me from knowing that christianity was wrong to knowing what the real answers were.

My moms a jehova’s witness and my dad is a recovering catholic, so religion in this house is just so much fun.

I was raised in a conservative Christian family, and although I moved to a more liberal version of religion as a teenager, fear of hurting my parents stood in the way of even questioning whether there was a god.

Reading Sigmund Freud’s “The Future of an Illusion” made me realize that these beliefs weren’t based in reality. Somewhat ironically, because of my fundie upbringing, this meant the whole thing had to go.

A week or so ago I asked a similar (but more inclusive) question on my blog.

FWIW, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter, though I’m still only 3/4 through it so far, has helped me question my agnosticism and really start to wonder if I’m not agnostic after all but atheist.

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

It didn’t make me or help me question my religious beliefs, those had been fading for quite a while. It gave me permission to take that final step. The essay Is There an Artificial God?, taken from a speech he once gave, presented the idea of man’s invention of religion in such a wonderful way that it could simply not be denied. It let me finally discard those last connections to faith.

The Bible alone was enough for me to realize “I don’t believe in basically any of this crap.” But it was Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World that got me to be proud about my atheism and call it what it is.

Joseph Campbell’s “Myths to Live By” and Moyer’s “Power of Myth.” Plus, the Bible itself showed me all the contradictions I needed to see. Dawkins and “The God Delusion” was good, but I read it after I had become an atheist.

How To Read The Bible by James Kugel. Very thorough examination of Old Testament texts, and summaries of modern and classical (as well as Christian and Jewish) interpretations.

Two books I was reading around the same time in early 2006 – Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity and Dawkins’ God Delusion.

The former put in very plain terms what should have sunk in after spending three years studying Judaism and biblical history – god was nothing more than the ideal humanity separated from and elevated above its source, the human predicate being worshiped by its subject. True Religion, so to speak, was indistinguishable from Idolatry. Though a tad simplistic in his analysis, I thought (and think) Feuerbach’s basic anthropological impulse was spot on.

If Feuerbach helped destroy the trustworthiness of revelation beyond the scope of the community who produced it, Dawkins in turn helped ruin any belief at anything beyond a loose deism or a form of process thought. True, most of the theological arguments were surprisingly easy to overcome or critique, but when Dawkins began writing about the Argument from Design and the sufficiency of purely natural causes to produce this world (that was the first time I had read any of his works), something clicked. Appealing to an “outside” intelligence or power wasn’t necessary to explain the world. Though I really hadn’t been a practicing Christian for about a year at that point, it was when I finished that book that I stopped referring to myself as Christian and started calling myself an atheist.

The great CH’s God is Not Great.

And Sam Harris’ End of Faith.

Dawkins is great too but read the others first and my atheism was cemented by the time I read his God Delusion.

Setting the Captives Free by Austin Miles was a turning point for me– I realized I wasn’t alone.

The Faith Healers by James Randi was another that got through to me.

I became non-religious when i was flipping frantically through the Bible looking for passages that were sympathetic to same-sex relationships. It was then that i realized that people shouldn’t have to manipulate holy texts to fit their beliefs. And then i realized that you kind of HAVE to do that with the Bible, because there is so much that is just false, and that contradicts itself. So i put the Book down and gave up on organized religion. After that i flirted with Buddhism, but as i was young didn’t really “get” it, and then pantheism, but it took too long to explain to everyone, so i settled on the label of “atheist”.

The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams

A transcript of a speech he made was in it and his argument for evolution was amazing to my then doubtful Christian mind. I learned he was an atheist and that alone was reason enough to question my beliefs.

When I was a teen, I read a bunch of Isaac Asimov’s hard science books. Altogether, I suppose they had a lot to do with it.

GDad

I vaguely thought there was probably some kind of non-denominational god until I was 14, when I starting explicitly thinking there was a non-denominational deist god, but at the same time I also started becoming an implicit atheist, and then around the time I realized that the “god” I believed in was more like an absence of a god (a scientific deepness like Richard Dawkins and most other atheists have), I started reading atheist books. The first two atheist books I read, which immediately turned me into an explicit atheist, were David Mills’s Atheist Universe and Sam Harris’s The End of Faith. (I should add that I have always been at least slightly agnostic about everything, as everyone should be, but I don’t think it’s necessary to point this out as very few atheists have the dogmatic certainty that most religionists have.)

Sam Harris’s book was, and still is, the most lucid, rational, and important book (in my opinion) that I have ever read. There is very little in that book that I don’t agree with. I recommend it to anyone who hasn’t been fortunate enough to read it.

Very soon after that I read The God Delusion (Dawkins), God Is Not Great (Hitchens), Why I Am Not A Christian (Russell), Atheism: The Case Against God (Smith), Infidel (Hirsi Ali), Letter to a Christian Nation (Harris again), and some science books such as The Selfish Gene. I’m still working on Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (Jacoby), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Dennett), The Demon-Haunted World (Sagan), and God: The Failed Hypothesis (Stenger). And there are a lot of books that I want to read eventually, including the Bible.

I am currently 17, and I continue to buy books like this with my own money. I also, of course, read the opinions of people I don’t already agree with, because (as every atheist should agree) there is always a chance that we might be wrong.

I have found that the philosophers I am most like are Sam Harris, Bertrand Russell, and Epicurus.

Atheism and its related philosophies are one of the most important parts of my life, and I continue to think that the most important message that we can spread as atheists is that you can have hope, happiness, community, morality, and meaning without religion. (I call these “The Big 5”). All the good things that religion does, we can do without the bad things religion does.

Out of all those books, I would recommend The End of Faith, Atheism: The Case Against God, Infidel, God is Not Great, and The God Delusion the most.

I was raised Unitarian-Universalist, so I never had religion hammered into me and was never told “you have to have faith.” The movie Angels in the Outfield got me to believe in God and prayer, though not in angels; those were clearly fake. Through most of my childhood, I had a wishy-washy belief in God and ESP, but these beliefs weren’t really a big deal to me. I stopped believing in souls early on (maybe 5th grade) thanks to an article about the brain in National Geographic.

In 9th grade, I read Why People Believe Weird Things by Michael Shermer and The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. In the latter, there’s a chapter about unfalsifiable beliefs called “The Dragon In My Garage.” I realized that God was exactly like that. During that time, I was going through the Unitarian coming-of-age program, and we were supposed to think about a bunch of religious questions, including where we stood on the question of whether God exists or not. It was then that I declared myself an atheist.

The Bible. I studied it and poured over it’s contents as a teen, and later throughout my life as a confused believer. It was the contradictions – not the misquoted or typo type of contradictions, none of that nonsense. I’m talking the BIG contradictions. The contradictions that, should one believe in error, would send you into the Abyss with the Devil and his angels. I’m talking about the huge gaping holes of Christian doctrine:

Must one be baptized or not? Once saved, always saved – or not? Spiritual gifts for today, or past? Is there a burning fiery hell, or is it ‘separation from God’ only? Or Hell, is there even a Hell in the first place? Some teach that the unsaved are just, well, dead. What about Heaven? Is it a real place, or will the righteous inherit eternal life here on a renewed, Paradaisical earth? Is God One in Three persons or is He just one?

Depending on what church you attend, holding one or the other of these beliefs could you put you in, or out, of the faith. Holding one belief in error could consign you to Hell, or save you and send you to Heaven. And to think that what you thought or were taught about these things was the hinge which would determine which way your personal door into eternity would swing.

I thought that Islam, or Buddhism, or [insert religion here] would be different. But after diligent study (many years worth of man hours spent reading and studying various texts) I realized they’re all the same. The only position left is the null position – atheism.

“End of Faith” by Sam Harris. It was like a light came on. I had been an atheist, I just didn’t know it till I read his book. Then I went ahead and read the Bible and that just reinforced my lack of belief.

The Mystique of Enlightenment by U. Gk. Krishnamurti.

I was reading the Bible – a little bit each day starting with page 1 – when a friend gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. By the time I finished both, I had gone through a very painful process. I replaced a philospohy based on myth with one based on reason. I recall the process actually physically producing pain. It was a real struggle – but well worth it in the end.

I think it was just reading in general. *

I grew up in one of the 19th century ‘prophetic’ sects. My first step was questioning the church’s prophet / doctrines after reading the Bible through. Then in (a church-run) college I read On the Origin of Species and it just made so much more sense to a budding physicist than the Biblical stuff.

* I was forbidden to read non-church-sponsored fiction as a kid, but being a voracious reader, every trip to the library was an adventure in smuggling things into my room.

The bible, specially the book of Job ^_^

It wasn’t one book, but scores of them, starting with the non-fiction of Isaac Asimov I discovered as a hoplelessly bookish 11 year-old boy.

But I’d like to mention two that made very deep and lasting footprints on my brain (although I was already an atheist when I read them):

The Light of Day by John Burroughs (not to be missed!)

A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by A. D. White

I’m sensing a theme here:

The Bible

I had grown up being a dedicated believer, but slowly started to have doubts. Then just one verse chanced everything: Judges 1:19. I stopped believing.

Then I read Bart Ehrman’s “Misquoting Jesus,” and the rest is history.

Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian was a big early influence in thinking critically about “received wisdom,” with Sagan and Einstein showing that a rational life didn’t suffer from a lack of awe and wonder.

A half-dozen or so of Bishop Spong’s books (Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, etc.) combined with some Ayn Rand (when I was younger and more naive), lots of Camus (when I was becoming less so), and many great discussions at a Unitarian-Universalist church I once attended did the rest…

Lately, I’ve enjoyed reading Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens, Onfray, Comte-Sponville, Stenger…even O’Hair. (So many books…)

Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain, Peirs Anthony books. I was reading these things as early as 5th grade. Like Santa and the Easter Bunny, great fantasy fiction made god seem like just another story.

Quran – reading it pushed me from Muslim to Agnosticism (no religious book claiming to be a moral guide can be this harsh towards women/nonmuslms, or have silly miracles)

God Delusion – Agnosticism to Atheism (or just made me concious that i was an atheist all along).

Mere Christianity. I was a 19 yr-old believer and I expected Lewis to at least confirm my faith, if not strengthen it. His arguments were so lame, that even I could see the fallacies. Well, I wanted to have a faith built on a rock and not in sand and so I started questioning everything I believed to see if it was from man or God. Three guesses what I found 😉

Good topic! There are so many books….

As a youngster, I’d say that Cosmos and the SF of Asimov, Heinlein, Niven, Adams, and others made taking religion literally impossible. But I was raised as a Christian, and I was always able to rationalize some form of faith.

In college and afterwards, probably the biggest factor was being exposed to arguments for god in philosophy and in lots of web-forums and mailings lists, and seeing how truly vapid such arguments always are. Also, being exposed to many “nature vs. nurture” debates in which the learned exponents of sociology and cultural anthropology didn’t know a single goddamn fact about basic evolution and what it implies about the brain helped convince me that, whatever else we are as human beings, we are our bodies.

But more books: The Masks of God, by Joseph Campbell. Also Sprach Zarathustra and The Genealogy of Morals by Nietzsche.

I also must credit two three enduring works of fantasy.

1. The Lord of the Rings. Because Tolkien’s made-up religion, despite it’s many faults, is far more beautiful than the religion he based it on, which proved to me in an unexpected way that religion is not only a product of human invention, but a bad product at that.

2. Fritz Leiber’s series about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, which gave me heroes who know how to laugh at the gods.

3. The Book of Common Prayer, wherein one finds the Nicene Creed. Repeating it every Sunday for years, and feeling it turn to ashes in my mouth, proved that I simply couldn’t believe the BS anymore.

Great topic!

Shermer’s “The Science of Good and Evil”

Bawer’s “Stealing Jesus: How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity”

Barker’s “Losing Faith in Faith”

Sweeney’s “Letting Go of God” – I saw the show in L.A. and was blown away.

Actually the most influential things for me were various websites that collect deconversion stories from former Christians (I related to so many of them) and “The God Who Wasn’t There,” a film by Brian Flemming. Richard Carrier is interviewed and he points out that all religious people report having personal spiritual experiences, therefore they are either all valid or none of them are. This had never occurred to me, and it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Genesis 1 + 2.
Genesis 3.
Genesis 4.

Was age 9 or so. (Must also credit parents for raising me w/o religion.)

Not one book in particular, really. But I realised I was an atheist, and willing to call me so (rather than “I don’t know”) after understanding the theory of evolution. That is, after having read “Ever since Darwin” by SJ Gould.

The Bible & Evangiles study.
Quite interesting, excellent mythology, full of self-contradictions and logical flaws. The very best way to doubt religion(s).

Don’t you know Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to lead to Satanism not Atheism. No one tell Jack Chick!

My 6th (or was that 7th?) grade social studies book.

I think it’s funny how I mostly hear religious objections to science books when it was my social studies book that led me to atheism. The two most important things that book taught me were that mythologies are really just religions that nobody believes in anymore and that all religions are equally implausible. Of course the book never said either of those things explicitly. But all the information I needed to come to those conclusions was in there.

Really though, that was only half of the equation. I had figured out what was wrong (religion) but hadn’t yet figured out what was right (science). It would be several years until I read The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan. I had plenty of science in school up to that point but never gave much thought to the underlying philosphy or methodology.

oop, I forgot one above (for the sake of Hemant’s compiled list)

Letter to a Christian Nation

great book…

Actually the Why Wont God Heal Amputees and God Is Imaginary websites were the biggest catalysts for myself.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Taught me to investigate and look for quality in everything. I found religion to be lacking.

While in AP English in High School, we read The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham. The protagonist of the story encouraged me to question everything. I followed his example by looking into Eastern Religions before finally accepting atheism as the one true -ism.

For me, like many who have replied to this thread, the tipping point for me was when I sat down and read the bible from cover to cover. It’s an incoherent, fantastic, unbelievable manifesto, calculated to maintain power for a bunch of ancient dictators, and it epitomizes the ignorance and evil.

If every Christian read it critically and actually thought about what it said, Christianity would shrink by one believer per reading.

I’ve always been a skeptic, and I’m not sure when, where, how the switch actually flipped where I began calling myself an atheist.

That being the case, I can’t peg it on any one text.

I will say that while not a book, the internet was probably the single biggest driver for me as I came of age in the mid 90’s. It was hard to miss alt.atheism if you were at all aware of usenet – and at the same time there were any number of early web sites that laid out many of the most common arguments. As such, I think that access to information is probably the biggest thing to consider, whether it comes from a web site or a book.

Other than that, I was a big reader of science fiction, and at the time I was just discovering the classics – Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, and perhaps most influential to me personally, Douglas Adams.

I don’t think any particular volume stands out, but science fiction does share a common world view. When religion is present, it’s usually presented as a human quirk, not any kind of truth. The characters, the plots, and the universes they occupy are all fundamentally rational. This caused me to look at the world in a scientific way – including religion.

Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

At first I resisted giving up faith completely and called myself a deist, but I finally gave in and became an athiest.

Not any one book in particular, as I fear those with “just one book.” Instead, for me, it was through the process of getting an education, taking lots of science classes, and reading lots of books in many areas that I gradually realized that the world didn’t work according to the worldview I was taught through the bible. The bible contradicted what I could observe and it even contradicted itself!

Books that have had the greatest influence in roughly the order read.

The Bible
various mythology & anthropology & science books
writings of Ingersoll

By this time I’m pretty skeptical of the whole thing, and then I discovered:

Free Inquiry, Skeptical Inquirer, and Skeptic magazines
infidels.org website

which pushed me over the edge (or rather, allowed me to jump by my own devices)

A few books I wish had been written earlier:

The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Sagan
Losing Faith in Faith, Barker
Misquoting Jesus, Ehrman

And this, from Robert Ingersoll helped me get through that, “OMFSM, I’m not a Christian, I’m going to hell!” phase. (Has anyone else gone through that?)

“When I became convinced that the Universe is natural — that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave.”

(the rest of the piece is wonderful — you should be able to find it online.)

“OMFSM, I’m not a Christian, I’m going to hell!” phase. (Has anyone else gone through that?)

Oh sure. I think all ex-fundies go through that. 😉

It’s scary. Fortunately for most, it only lasts a couple of months. Once you realize you haven’t been struck by lightning and your family hasn’t been cut down by exotic diseases, hell starts to sound more silly and less scary.

if I’m not the first to mention this one then shame on everyone else for not mentioning it and if I’m not the first then I second or third or fifth,

Robert G. Ingersoll’s “The Gods and Other Lectures”

Well, the Bible itself was a strong start. God comes off as such a completely insane tyrant that it’s hard to take this figure seriously, especially when he is also being touted as our “loving father.” Abusiveness is BAD, whether in a spouse, a parent, or whatever.

Also, there was the fact that I read Greek and Norse mythology, Aesop’s fables, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales in grade school and couldn’t help but notice that the stories of the Bible (especially Old Testament, but some of the Gospels as well) were pretty indistinguishable in form and content from these stories that everyone acknowledged were completely baseless hokum. I hadn’t had any particularly strong belief in the Bible’s literal historicity before that point anyway, but that just sealed the deal for me — and that’s before I knew just how wildly wrong (or at least “reality-challenged”) so many things in the Bible are.

~David D.G.

First I read an article in Wired magazine (don’t know when it was published, sorry!) that started me thinking, for the first time in my life, that atheism didn’t sound too evil. Then Chris Hitchens’ book God is Not Great pushed me over the fence I was teetering on.

By the way, just now I accidentally typed Christ Hitchens. 🙂

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It was the first book (or anything or anyone) I ever read that explained in a satisfactory way how life could have come about with out God.

The old James Randi educational foundation website and discussion board did it for me.

My “conversion” was a very naive one, when I still had many years of elementary school to go (I can’t remember anymore precisely than that). Back before I even knew the word “atheism”, before I ever read the books or heard the words of heretics to the Christian orthodox, and before I even knew there were other religions besides Christianity, one night I simply told myself after prayer (which I had been doing for some time), that it actually wasn’t working, and therefore that God wasn’t real. Did I give mention to my naivete?

And that was that; I don’t recall giving further thought to the matter until several years later.

My mom wasn’t a very passionate and informed believer, but she certainly believed. She took me to church every Sunday, would eventually enroll me to Catholic school, used to host some religious gatherings in our apartment, and lead prayer at home before bed every night. There are several Bibles in our house.

As the quotation marks around the word “conversion” at the start of my post meant to imply, reflecting on this past I don’t consider it much of a conversion because, although I certainly chose to believe in Him, I knew very little about Him and the faith.

I never came back into the Christian fold.

Although I maintained my disbelief, it was only as recently as probably two years ago that I became confident in referring to myself as an atheist. At that time, I had still not read any atheist or skeptic books. The earliest notable influence from other people I remember that helped my disbelief lose its naivete and become informed and intellectual was a few Internet message board members, particularly Brad Johnson and Karim Temple, who go by the user name “Saint” and “X”, respectively. Their debates with others and with each other involving topics that touch on religion influenced me when I read them at Project-Ion (a forum that no longer exists), and even more recently and to this day at my own forum, The Infinity Program.

Another Internet message board member who’s influenced me, but this one later and much more significantly, is Michael Wong, who goes by the user name Darth Wong at his forum, StarDestroyer.net. His are among several websites I still remember that have most strengthened and informed my disbelief, and further decreased the probability of me returning to the Christian (or any other religion’s) fold. Those websites are as follows:

Paul Tobin’s The Rejection of Pascal’s Wager: A Skeptic’s Guide To Christianity His essays that argue for the evolutionary basis of morality and for the choosing of the label “atheism” over “agnosticism” in his “Atheism: FAQ” contained in that site was among the most influential material I read. That argument that morality has an evolutionary basis is especially important to me. I’ve not heard much more on that since Michael Wong advocated it in some posts on his forum. The essays influenced my recent decision to put Frans B. M. de Waal’s Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals and Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal: Why We Are, The Way We Are, The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology on my Wish List.

Michael Wong’s Creationism versus Science. I also recommend looking for threads that touch on religion at his aforementioned Internet message board.
Steven Dutch’s Science, Pseudoscience, and Irrationalism. He’s agnostic, and he has a good article that argues for the label “agnosticism” over “atheism” (with such force I’ve not read since I read Robert Ingersoll’s essays), but his many essays influenced my non-belief notably.

Ed and Michael Buckner’s damning list of quotations, “Quotations that Support the Separation of Church and State“. The U.S. Founding Fathers, among other notables, with very damning and insightful quotations.

Some time after I started reading the above websites, I started becoming interested in books and started reading a lot for leisure. And I’ve picked up a lot of books that touch on religion since then. I’ve read

Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. This book didn’t really resonate with me. Much of what he talked about I already read about with detail on the Internet. I found his The Blind Watchmaker more influential towards my disbelief.

Sam Harris’ The End of Faith. Also didn’t really resonate with me.

Susan Jacoby’s Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. This one struck me. A book on America’s heretics to the Christian orthodox and the important role they’ve played throughout our nation’s history. Heck yes! And to think I got it on accident, just not wanting to leave the B&N before it closes with just one book, though I never thought I’d ever come across an entire book on this subject.

Hemant Mehta’s I Sold My Soul on eBay: Viewing Faith through an Atheist’s Eye. I didn’t care too much for the parts about atheism, but I very much liked his descriptions of his church-going experiences. Well worth the price for that, and was glad to help the author of this very interesting blog.

Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark. I liked this one.

Bart D. Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus. This one quite influenced me. I found it humorous that a fundamentalist Christian contact I had, soon after I had revealed to him I read it, would post a thorough review on his own blog, having not read it, but assuring me that he had done well enough instead by reading reviews on it (not just on a bunch of apologists sites, or otherwise with a certain demographic in mind, I’m sure), and read some other book by him that, he says, is pretty much just the same thing (makes me wonder why he didn’t just review that one then).

Richard Carrier’s Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism.

Mark Twain’s Letters From The Earth. The first few stories are a harsh parody about Christianity. And yes, from the Mark Twain.

Christian apologetics I’ve read are

The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics
Michael J. Wilkins and J.P. Moreland’s Jesus Under Fire
Lee Strobel’s The Case For Christ

… and I’ve already read the Bible.

Books I plan to read

Lee Strobel’s The Case For Faith
Bertrand Russel’s Why I Am Not A Christian
Richard E. Friedman’s Who Wrote The Bible?
William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study of Human Nature
Bart D. Ehrman’s Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and The Faiths We Never Knew
Bart D. Ehrman’s God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails To Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer
Robert M. Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder, eds., The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond The Grave
William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith