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The Trouble With Christmas Tom Flynn (Editor, Free Inquiry magazine)
This is an enlightening and thoughtful book, and an easy read. It presents
the Puritans' historical opposition to Christmas; creation of Santa's "invented tradition"
by 5 Dead White Anglophone Males and A Queen (Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, Queen
Victoria, Clement C. Moore, Thomas Nast, Francis Church); and Santa's damage to
our multi-cultural children.
Who Wrote the New Testament: The Making of the Christian Myth
Burton L. Mack, School of Theology at Claremont
This is a great book. Atheists can learn of the good parts of Christianity. Christians can
learn much about the origins of their faith, if they can forgive Burton's
use of the word "myth."
Who Wrote the Bible Richard Elliott Friedman, UCSD Dept. of Literature
Modern scholarship establishes that the Five Books of Moses were spliced together from four major works.
Loving detail, little perspective?
The Dark Side of Christian History
Helen Ellerbe
"Without understanding the dark side of religious history, one might think that
religion and spirituality are one and the same. Yet, organized religion has a very
long history of curtailing and containing spirituality, one's personal and private
relationship with God, the sacred, or the divine."
Woe to the Women: The Bible Tells Me So
Annie Laurie Gaylor, Director of the Freedom From Religion Foundation
"Most religionists are familiar only with the 'Ten Commandments'
but there are more than 600 such commandments supposedly dictated by Jehovah to Moses,
many self-contradictory. As the sinfulness of sex is one of the Mosaic preoccupations,
and women are typcast as sin-citing Eves, Delilahs and Jezebels, one need not be a
prophet to predict how poorly women fare in the biblical scheme of justice."
The Case Against Christianity
Michael Martin, Dept. of Philosophy, Boston U.
"Well's argument against the historicity of Jesus is sound, and recent criticisms
against his argument can be met. So, on the basis of Well's argument, there is good
reason to reject not only Orthodox Christianity but even those versions of Liberal
Christianity that assume that although Jesus was not the Son of God he was an ethical
teacher who lived in the first century. However, since Well's thesis is controversial
and not widely accepted, I will not rely on it in the rest of this book." [Conclusion, Chapter 2]
A Theory of Religion
Rodney Stark, formerly Sociology at Univ. of Washington, now Baylor Univ
A theoretical perspective on religion, based on social exchange theory. When
people cannot achieve a desired reward, they will accept a compensator (unverifiable IOU)
instead, treating the compensator as if it were a tangible reward.
[Used as a graduate text at UCSD].
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