Social justice book reviews
If there’s anything my family loves other than Jesus, it’s reading. I grew up involved in both, but for me, the Jesus didn’t stick, but the reading did. My books are obviously not the kind that my family would want me to read, but that’s irrelevant. Read more
Last year, we lost a man who was one of the most famed scientific minds to date. Stephen Hawking took after Albert Einstein in a quest to discover how the universe works, even in the face of the greatest adversity. Hawking was a pioneer on the quest to reconcile quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and his specialties were the study of black holes and how we might be able to reverse what we know about them to find out how the Big Bang occurred. Brief Answers to the Big Questions was the first book I read by Hawking, but I already feel like I’ve learned so much.
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Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (and happy birthday to me)! Last week I gave my review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and this week as everything slows down during the holidays, I’m giving my blog post over to him. Here are 30 of my favorite Dennett quotes from Breaking the Spell!
For the last two months, I’ve been getting to know the work of the fourth horseman of atheism: Daniel Dennett. I’ve read and reviewed the other three, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, before this, and I’ve found it interesting to get to know each author’s writing style and area of expertise. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, Hitchens takes a political science approach, and Harris and Dennett each take their own individual approach to psychology. But from what I’ve seen, Dennett is the only one with the greatest amount of reserve when critiquing religion, while it seems that the other authors are attacking it.
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I believe that religious deconversion is a process. Throughout this process, the person evolves. Some evolve more than others, and some endure the changes in more ways than one. For me, deconversion went like this: Christian → agnostic → atheist. My evolution underwent several transformational stages. In between Christian and agnostic, there was the initial period of doubt followed by a period of apathy. In between agnostic and atheist, there was curiosity and intrigue about general arguments regarding the existence of God. This intrigue made me very passionate about atheism itself. I have been engrossed in the interplay between religious and secular, reading about both to get the most precise answers I could. Read more
This week I was able to spend some time reading apologetics book E-mails to a Young Seeker by a former professor of mine, David S. Hogsette. I made it through to the fifth “email exchange” between Hogsette (or as he tirelessly refers to himself, Prof Dave) and his fictional “seeker” college student. Read more
I’d read three books prior to this one. The first said, “God exists.” The second said, “God does not exist.” The third said “God exists.” And the fourth said, “god is not great.”
Upon beginning this book, I had just barely made it out of Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator with my sanity. Strobel’s entire book was a biased scam of fallacy after fallacy in an insultingly illogical argument for intelligent design. I began God is Not Great ready to be refreshed hearing something from my own side of the argument, but what I found within its pages was even better. Read more
Before I get into any criticism, I want to explain why this book is so important to me. I first heard of Richard Dawkins in a class with a teacher who absolutely loathed him. He gave me the impression that no one takes Dawkins seriously and he believes in “scientism” I hated that teacher, and I knew that I shouldn’t trust what he said about atheists, but I still had a slightly skewed perception of Dawkins before I really learned how highly regarded he typically is among atheists like me.