An Atheist Book That Doesn’t Shy Away From the Word

Kindle. It’s the only book store I care about. And I shall have PZ’s book and I shall read the hell out of it (heh).

And here would be a good spot to plug MY book…

“Letters from an ATHEIST Nation” (<—not shy)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005PJKWUY 

Let your local book seller know that you’ll be there in person to buy it on day one. That way they’ll be encouraged to have some in stock and on display instead of referring you to their on line ordering system.

Pfft.  You can keep your Kindle.

“Gee, that looks like a good book you’re reading on your Kindle.  Could I borrow it after you’re done?  No?”

“Here, would you like to borrow MY book?  Oops, I dropped it!  It’s okay, let me pick it up.  I’m so clumsy like that!  Could I HOLD your Kindle for a minute?  No?”

“I like to use a highlighter in my favorite books.  Could I do that with your Kindle?  No?”

“Whoops, there I go, dropping my book again, this time in WATER.  Oh well, I’m only out a couple bucks.  Could I hold your Kindle over here, by this puddle? No?”

“I know some kids that like coloring books, and pop-up books.  Kindle have anything like that?  No?”

Oh well, technology can’t do EVERYTHING.

And, unfortunately, no one Googled it.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/72117

He is as much a new atheist as it goes.

Probably not.  I must admit I stopped reading his blog ages ago.  If I want to be preached at, have people try to re-define words to suit themselves and tell me how they think I should act around women then I’ll go to church.

Like Paddy Reddin, I stopped reading his blog a long time ago. I have no desire to read any book of his.

Hey, you forgot the Atheist’s Guide to Christmas!

Beware the wrath of the PZ sycophants!  Heretic!

PZ is happy?  I think he is a very angry small man.

Some interesting comments above. I still read PZ’s blog. His posts on biology are usually well worth reading, and he occasionally references some event/happening I’d not otherwise know about that I find interesting.

But… I’m getting just a tad tired of Celebrity Atheism, and of a now apparently endless series of  meetings, conferences, assemblies, etc. at which the same speakers appear over and over again, saying mostly the same things,  and which PZ’s reports on invariably focus on the the even more famous celebrity atheists he met/ate/drank with and how much beer he downed on any given night.   Kind of cute the first hundred times.   After that, not so much.  

Still worth reading, but I’m a little uneasy about his becoming more of a celebrity atheist  than a working scientist who happens as well to be an atheist and writer.   Too, the endless  snark is wearing a little thin, or starting to, at least for me.   

And I don’t particularly like the book title.  Hitchen’s “God is NOT Great” was excellent, and conveyed precisely both the central argument and the tone of the book.  Ditto for Dawkin’s “The God Delusion.”   But “Dancing on the Graves of the Gods” conveys nothing much beyond grinning snarkery  to me, particularly prefaced by “The Happy Atheist.”  I don’t think I’ll be a first adopter on this one.  Will take a while to look at the reviews in places I have reason to respect first to see if it looks to be worth the price of admission, or is instead merely a much extended PZ-patented blog post trying to pass itself off  as a book. 

 Perhaps my skepticism is misplaced. I hope it is.  

We shall see. 

Good point.  But at least with the kindle, it’s only made once.    If you have 1000 books on one kindle (which is by no means a stretch for most kindle users), the kindle wins (and the battery life is phenomenal… I won’t use mine for a month, but turn it on and it’s still fully charged).  And yes, Stev84, we must always think of the bloody trees!

I’m not a fan of atheist books in general (too much atheist 101), but I’d read PZ’s book.  I’m not really sure what I’d expect it to be or want it to be, but it could be fun.

OK, up now.  And I’m down for the night. Will read in the AM. Thanks for the pointer. 

Myers illustrates what I’ve tried to argue about the meaning of “atheist” based on how people actually use and understand the word: Atheist means something like “a critic or skeptic of theism.” The word doesn’t mean someone with a mysterious void inside him analogous to “non stamp collecting.”

After all, non stamp collectors don’t publish books about how philately poisons everything.

I agree that the ‘non-stamp-collecting’ line doesn’t hold any water, as you show. It seems to me that different people mean different things by identifying as ‘atheist’, and they tend to get antsy if you assume they mean something else.

I’ve had several atheists assert that atheism is nothing more than lacking belief in Gods, where as some will say that they have the (positive) belief that no gods exist… (actually, the former holds this view in a practical sense IMO).The origins of the word come from athe-ism (no god ism – the view that no gods exist). It was only since Antony Flew argued for it in his book ‘The Assumption of Atheism” that it has come to generally be understood as a-theism (not a theist – the lack of belief in gods).

Something else worth noting is that Atheism, at least in the so-called ‘new’ popular manifestation of it, only really makes any sense in relation to what it rejects. As Paul Wallace puts it:
“The atheisms of most committed, principled atheists are often not more than mirror images—inversions—of the theisms they negate.”

Re: your second point: Agreed! Apart from Christopher Hitchens (because he is just such a kick-ass prose artist), I haven’t bothered much with a lot of the new atheist/God debate books, because the atheist books are all just preaching to the choir with me, and the pro-religion arguments are generally nothing new to me either. I would love to read more novels with interesting plots and well-rounded characters where atheists/atheism play a prominent part per se, without devolving into Ayn Randian preachniness.

(Something I’ve also been looking for, for years, is an atheist/secularist Christmas book, one that would have lots of good ideas on how to celebrate the holiday in a fun, materialist way and tell about the pagan origins of the customs without getting all Wiccan and New Age-y!)

Trolling?

Hemant makes a good point though, and it made me realize that with my book that he was kind enough to post about Wednesday, which is about a Mormon girl who becomes an atheist, the word atheist/atheism doesn’t appear in the official description – it just talks obliquely about her leaving behind religious belief …

I think it’s true that the word “atheist” is kind of scary from a publishing standpoint. I think a LOT of the reading public, upon seeing that word in a book title, would automatically put up mental blinders and just not see it as a book they would ever look twice at. (Although, Hemant, I love the title of your book, I Sold My Soul on eBay!)

I have it, it was a little disappointing, don’t set your expectations too high.  🙂

Oh, hell, I’m a PZ sycophant. When the man himself was in the hospital after a heart episode, I hand-delivered a sympathy card to the nurse in his ward. Beat that, fellow Pharyngulites!
Nevertheless, “The Happy Atheist” is a really lousy title.

It does seem odd to define “atheist” in such a way that its meaning could encompass a person who does not hold the view that no gods exist.  

Just because someone lacks belief in gods does not mean they believe no gods exist – there is a subtle distinction, but one which is usually lost in practice.

That is exactly one of my points.  There’s a major difference between

A. a person who believes that gods do not exist, and

B.  a person who does not believe that gods do not exist.

Is whether one wants to say that person B might be an atheist more a matter of debating strategy than anything else?

Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s a Kindle.

Totally agree! I’m a lifelong atheist, and the first book I ever read on the subject was Douglas Krueger’s What Is Atheism? back in 1999. That was interesting at the time, but there are only so many debate books that a person can read before getting bored. I don’t feel like I need Atheism 101, and I’d definitely rather read about other aspects of being a nonbeliever.

I enjoyed Phil Zuckerman’s book about secular countries and Dale McGowan’s Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers. I also enjoyed Nica Lalli’s memoir about growing up atheist: Nothing: Something to Believe In. I’d love to read more books like that, rather than argumentative books. There are a lot of subjects that someone could explore. You could have a book about atheist homeschooling, personal essay collections that revolve around a particular theme, a compendium of atheist characters in television and movies, and so on. 

Regarding Christmas, I did enjoy The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas, but it was a collection of essays rather than a how-to guide. I’m guessing that there are probably some mainstream books that fit your description, but I can’t to say for sure. For kids, The Winter Solstice by Ellen Jackson and The Shortest Day by Wendy Pfeffer provide a good overview, but they’re not focused specifically on Christmas.

My friend wrote a chapter in The Australian Book of Atheism. It seems to be getting fairly mainstream coverage and stockage..

     Read the teaser text on Amazon page.  Love the opening line, the one about keeping peace at the dinner table. Ain’t that the truth.  And of course I noticed immediately that there was no letter from Zion [aka Utah] where I now reside.
     About the title:  “Nation” must refer to a “nation” of atheists within the larger Nation of Christians.  Just a tad confusing until you start to read into the text and it becomes clear.
     I like very much the idea of making more public  that unbelief in the US has a long history and is not merely [as the Christian Right likes to pretend]  a result of a recent sharp decline in American civilization and values, usually dated to the Supreme Court school-led prayer in school decision, which is invariably described as “taking God out of the schools.”   That unbelief is… well, is as American as apple pie and has been for a very long time is something worth conveying.
    Unhappily, I notice your book is e-published only.  I do most of my reading these days in coffee shop, and not owning a Kindle or a Nook or a tablet or a laptop, afraid I won’t be able to go deeper than the teaser text from the first chapter on the Amazon site.  [For which pointer, thanks again.]
    As for celebrity-atheists ,  I’m afraid they inevitably [particularly in the minds of journalists] and however reluctantly or inadvertently, morph into  “Atheist leader PZ Myers” or “Atheist leader Richard Dawkins” and so on and so  they get called then to provide the atheist “side” of   said/she said coverage of any news involving atheism or atheists.  Which is funny in a way, because I can’t think of a group less likely to have leaders  members follow, or leaders who can [in a political sense] “deliver” followers, or even leaders who can speak with some justice about “what atheists think”  than American atheists.  Talk about trying to herd cats….

I like my kindle and my real books, but if you guys are going to argue over environmental impact, the library still wins.

But if we lived in a world where stamp collectors fought constantly over which stamps were the best ones and bullied (and even killed) people who weren’t stamp collectors or who didn’t collect the right kinds of stamps, we might very well see books about how philately poisons everything. Atheism isn’t inherently interesting or controversial. In a more secular world, there just wouldn’t be any need for us to discuss it.

My belief is that the argument most often comes up when anti-atheists want to paint atheists as illogical, and as such prefer the hard-atheist definition of atheist, when in fact that vast majority of proclaimed atheists are soft atheists.  One can argue all one wants that Dawkins is really an agnostic, but it doesn’t really change anything.  We all know Dawkins’s position.

What’s important is a person’s position, not who’s right about the definition of a word.  There are a lot of different kinds of Christians.  I hope I would never presume that anyone who claims to be a Christian must necessarily believe in Hell, or Noah’s Ark, or that homosexuality is a sin.

Libraries FTW! I get 99% of my books there.

And I think you’re a jackass. A small, angry one.

PZ is as much a bigot as any.

More power to him.  Because of people like him, atheism will not advance nearly as fast as it might have.