Books

A plug for our own free booklet: "A guide to Humanism"

We have produced a 12 page A5 full-colour booklet as a guide to humanism.

Humanism:

is not a religion. It has no belief in the supernatural, no holy books, no holy men, no churches or holy places and no acts of worship or reverence.
is not dependent on science though humanists are sceptical freethinkers. If an idea is unnecessary we reject it. If an idea has no evidence for it, we reject it.
supports freedom of thought and expression while promoting strong moral values and personal responsibility in the society we share.

Free copies available

Please send us an email to obtain a free copy.

Send us an email to obtain a copy

Commercially available books

You can purchase most of these from the National Secular Society, from Amazon or from your local bookshop.

"Letter to a Christian national" by Sam Harris
Small, short, succinct and an easy/fast read - an excellent book.
Harris is outraged at the bigoted, ignorant, evangelical, Christian fundamentalism that surrounds him in the USA but he covers all the main arguments logically and with just the right amount of passion.
"Atheism: a very short introduction" by Julian Baggini
This is a very slim volume (110 pages) and is part of OUPs excellent "very short introductions" series. Strongly recommended
For an academic philosopher Baggini is guilty of "the humanist assumption" - the assumption that there is such a things as "atheism" and that atheists are all good humanists. Religious people are guilty of "the god assumption" but we expect an atheist philosopher to be clearer in his thinking.
There is no ideology shared by all atheists and there are as many bad atheists (Stalin) as there are bad religious people (Hitler). Being an atheist does not make you a good person just as being religious does not make you a good person - as the Catholic Church has found out amongst its own priests.
Baggini covers the basic philosophical ideas behind being an atheist including the historical background, ethics, the proofs/disproofs of god and the "meaning of life" question.
One needs to look beyond simple disbelief to find a set of values and responsibilities for oneself. These can be individual and internal or they can be more formally defined such as those of humanism. (See our own "guide to humanism" above.)
"God is not great, the case against religion" by Christopher Hitchens
Non-believers have always existed but books such as those by Richard Dawkins tend to assume that non-belief really got going with Darwin. (And as for all that pseudo-science "meme" stuff ....)
Those with a more rationalist, freethinking, historical and philosophical approach will welcome Hitchens' book which is strongly recommended.
"Double Cross" by David Ranan
This is an un-put-downable must read for all secularists/humanists. With all the fuss about fundamentalist Islam we tend to lose sight of just how evil the Roman Catholic Church really is.
It covers the history and power structures within the Roman Catholic Church and if you are not jumping up and down while swearing and shouting as you read this book you are a different person from me! Highly recommended for lapsed or serving Catholics!
"The Islamist" by Ed Husain
This biography (he is still in his late twenties/early thirties) explains how an East End teenager from a moderate Muslim background became an extremist Islamist - someone in favour of a state run by Sharia law. Eventually he saw the error of his ways and returned to being a moderate Muslim.
The book gives you an insight into the way he thought at each stage of his intellectual development and the fact that he remains a Muslim makes it a suitable book for those young Muslims who may be considering Islamism. One amusing (not much is amusing in it!) part concerns how they got girls to wear the veil. Once the girls did this they started talking to other even more extremist Islamist women and soon ended up in the complete black bag. This, of course, was very upsetting to the young Islamist males who could not see what they wanted to see!
Books by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins is the major champion of science and reason over religion. His books place evolution, and our increasing understanding of the Universe, at the centre of rational thought. He appears regularly on TV and produced the excellent "Root of all evil?" programs for Channel 4. Strongly recommended

"The God Delusion"
"A Devil's Chaplain"
"The Blind Watchmaker"
"Climbing Mount Improbable"

Note about "the Dawkins debate"
Different atheists have different reasons for their disbelief.
To some, religion is simply a childish fairy story, a comfort blanket. a philosophical nonsense. Since there is no necessity to postulate a god, they don't. To them, as well as to the vast majority of religious people, evolution is just a fact - among many. After all, atheists, secularists and humanists had been around for thousands of years before Darwin popped onto the scene.
It is logic, along with their own rational and freethinking intellectual investigations, that are the foundations of their disbelief. Such people get a little tired of the endless point-scoring between science and the nonsense of "Intelligent Design".
Others need to have a "scientific" reason for their disbelief, they want all the "i"s to be dotted and all the "t"s to be crossed. They feel that philosophical arguments are insufficient - forgetting that science is but a branch of Philosophy.. As Dawkins points out, we will never have answers to everything - but that is the joy of being human - the world is full of questions and ideas that we can investigate and challenge.
"Blind Faith" by Ben Elton
Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person 'feels' and 'truly believes' is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith
Ben Elton's dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion
It offers a chilling vision of what's to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?
The Bible or Koran or Torah
Holy books are the best of all advertisements for atheism. A more perverted, sexually deviant, blood soaked, violent, rapine, mysogenistic, racist, violent, war-mongering book than The Old Testament you could not hope to read.
If you want the tale of a vengeful, spiteful, jealous, malevolent, arbitrary, small minded, bigoted god then this is the place to start.
There is no room for intelligence, thought, reason, logic or freethinking in the Bible - we non-believers are all condemned to hell!
"Moderate" Christians are very selective in their use of the Bible. Many of them accept that much in the Old Testament is "myth", "fable" and "folklore" but when it comes to the New Testament - that is the "word of our Lord." Jesus is a good guy: look at the Sermon on the Mount; look at the rich man, the camel and the eye of a needle (for some reason these are never quoted by Bush or Blair.) Maybe these moderates need to check Luke 19,27. Or maybe they can explain the endless inconsistencies between the Gospels - such as the totally different genealogies of Jesus given by Matthew and Luke or the fact that Mark does not seem to have heard of the nativity story.
"The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason" by Sam Harris
If you have not read a book on the current position of religion in the world, and the threat it presents to the future of mankind, then this is the place to start.
Harris's book is excellent and strongly recommended but we have to take issue with him on three points which probably arise from him seeing the world through the eyes of an American - albeit one who is totally at odds with the Christian fundamentalists who run the US government.

September 11th, 2001: "9/11"
Americans were outraged by the events of 9/11 - many in the rest of the world were horrified but not quite so outraged. American foreign policy for the last 100 years has been self-serving and far from benign - millions have suffered as a result of it. When some god-infested suicide bombers took their perverted "War against infidels" to the symbols of American economic and military power it was not a surprise to the rest of us.
People in England were not surprised when the policies of Tony Blair brought the same type of bombings to the streets of London. We are deeply emotionally upset for those affected, we condemn the act, but we do not believe that the current policies of the US and British governments will do anything to prevent it in the future - not matter what nonsensical curbs they continue to impose on our liberties.
Some of us, while we watched in the gap between the first and second planes crashing into the World Trade Center, felt that this was an opportunity for the USA to expose Islamism for the evil that it is. By taking the opportunity to resolve the running sore that is the issue of Palestine, the US would immediately remove the one thing that gains Islamists sympathy throughout the world (apart from in Israel-supporting America.) The one thing we knew would make the matter worse would be for the USA to lash out in vengeance.
The opportunity was thrown away. The USA invented "The War on a Method" which has curbed the freedoms of people throughout the world and it has made matters far worse than they were on September 8th, 2001. Why else would so many people round the world be quietly in favour of Iran getting nuclear weapons? This personal feeling, shared by many people though they may not want to voice it, is not one of moral equivalence, it is not rational, it is simply bloody-mindedness in response to the actions of the USA. The USA, or its proxy, Israel, will certainly make pre-emptive strikes against Iran. Nuclear weapons, only ever used by the USA, will be used again, by the USA or those who oppose it, because of the bloody-mindedness resulting from US policies. The world is going mad in the name of religion.
The perfect weapon
Harris argues that in an imperfect world, with imperfect weapons, we must accept that there will be "collateral damage" (dead and horribly injured innocent men, women and children and a totally destroyed national infra-structure) whenever it is necessary for the "good" to fight the "bad" in the name of reason.
Harris claims that, unlike the indiscriminate murders carried out by suicide bombers, the USA goes out of its way to prevent the deaths and injuries of the innocent. The reason why it has AWACs, stealth bombers, fighter aircraft, Apache helicopters, fuel-air explosives, bunker busters, tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, white phosphorus shells, napalm, B52s, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, cruise missiles, smart bombs and all the other phenomenally expensive "good stuff" invented by the ardent Christians of the USA, is simply to protect the innocent. On the other hand, the religiously fanatical suicide bomber, dreaming mistakenly of the 72 virgins waiting for him, with his cheap semtex, cheap detonator and cheap ball bearings is an indiscriminate murderer specifically targetting the innocent.
Harris quotes an American TV story showing US soldiers crying after they mistakenly murdered an innocent Iraqi family at a road block. The suicide bomber, his parents, his supporters and his community do not cry when they murder the innocent. This caring sets the USA morally above the perverted fanatics of Islam.
We do not share his view about the USA, its government, its generals or its soldiers.
Intolerant Islam is a major threat to the world. The aim of Islam is theocracy - the rule of the religious. Those who believe otherwise, and those who refuse to believe, are condemned - in many cases, condemned to death. Such intolerance is a humanity-denying evil - as was Christianity only a few hundred years ago - and which it still is on issues relating to sex. For some reason, the USA is deliberately following a policy which increases support for Islam - perhaps the Christians in the USA are keen to bring forward the date of Armageddon or the second-coming of their christ.
Torture
Harris's argument can be summed up by an example. If you had captured the person who had planted a bomb that would kill your family, and only he could tell you how to defuse it, you would be justified in torturing him to get the information to save your family. This line has been followed by the US government as well as one which rejects the Geneva convention on warfare. The US has justified war crimes.
Unfortunately there are multiple problems with any justification of torture.

You would need to be 100% certain that you had the right person. US intelligence services have a long tradition of getting everything wrong.
You would need to be sure that what someone screams out to prevent his testicles being crushed, is in fact the truth, and not simply what they think you wish to hear. The "witches" and "heretics" who went to their deaths under Christian oppression confessing all sorts of nonsense are sufficient evidence that pain will make anyone say whatever you want them to say.
Once you let the torture cat out of the bag you will not be able to stop it. Once it is accepted that "under certain conditions torture is justified" you will enable anyone to make the decision for themselves. In the world of digital cameras we have all seen what happens when those "just obeying orders" feel that their superiors have given them permission to do what they like "in the name of freedom".

Torture is morally wrong. Once you make it acceptable under certain circumstances, you become personally responsible for the abuses carried out by others as a result of your decision.
"2000 Years of Disbelief: Famous People with the Courage to Doubt" by James A. Haught
Self explanatory title - we are not alone! This is an excellent source for those who are fond of quotations!
"Atheist Universe" by David Mills.
A book of outstanding clarity. Everything is covered, everything is well argued and all redundancy is thrown away. Recommended.
David Mills is not a philosopher and he is not a scientist. However, he takes the ideas of both and explains them in manner that anyone can follow and understand.
"Sense and goodness without god" by Richard Carrier
An excellent and clearly argued book providing a world view independent of religion. Recommended.
Carrier states that he has written the book "with the average college-level student in mind" and he makes the point that philosophers are largely to blame for the lack of interest in their subject because they have withdrawn to their academic ivory towers and turned philosophy into "a jargonised verbal dance around largely useless minutiae."
Nonetheless, you will need your thinking cap on when you read this book. For those who have not read a "serious" book in a long time this can be a struggle for the first few chapter and there are times when Carrier gets carried away with arguments against other philosophers so you might like to skip pages and pages of pin-head arguments.
"Darwinism, Design and Public Education" edited by John Angus Campbell, Stephen C. Meyer
This is the opposition - it attempts to give intelligent design credibility. Interestingly, none of the contributors list their religious beliefs - how dishonest can you get?
If you want to know how they dress up god as creator and designer, and wrap it round with pseudo science, then this is the place to start.
It is nonsense.

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