I'd much rather read William Sargant's Battle for the Mind: (1957) (a physiology of conversion and brainwashing). London: Heinemann. Reprinted in the US (1997)

Thanks for sharing your experience on finding a more peaceful existence. Perhaps it can help others.

Cover of book.

Religious people don't make me angry at all. People who don't know the difference between "it's" and "its", on the other hand...

Experiencing Prof. Daniel Dennett present his work on looking at religion through the lens of evolutionary biology has really helped tamp down the vitriol in my emotional response to religion-ism in all its expressions (houses of worship and their devoted attendees, billboards, political platitudes, christian hegemony, etc.) I highly recommend viewing any of his many talks available on youtube or ted.

Thank you for the recommendation. This sounds like a book I need to read. I am not an angry or uneducated atheist. Not even an atheist at all, I don't know if there is a "god" or "goddess" or not. I don't care what anyone else believes as long as they don't try to push it on me. I lived in the liberal oasis of Austin for 20 years and just moved back behind the Pine Curtain, deep in the Bible Belt. I don't let many people here know that I'm not a Christian, because they immediately start trying to "save" me. I need some good hard facts to help fend off these well-intentioned folks. I'll def check these books out.

Ignorance - a state of mind that can be rectified by learning and gaining knowledge. Ignoring or failing to change the state of ignorance is stupid. I have not seen alot of stupid on this site.

The name of this website, agnosic.com, implies that here a safe place for agnostics-as opposed to a website with religious people in it.
So, perhaps those who "escape" the alt-right by coming here need to vent a bit, get it out of their systems.

I'm already starting to skip anything that references religion, looking for more interesting topics.

After understanding what religion is and how it affects people, I ceased to have anger toward the concept. There are many things that religion does that can be detrimental but to me I feel like it was our first attempt at "science". We didn't understand so we found explanations. Further, it gave a version of government that couldn't easily have formed without appeals to supernatural. The early demogogues could dismiss a leader as soon as something bad happened. "If you're so smart stop the volcanos from erupting" leader "I can't the gods are angry". Religion kept society's from falling apart. Obviously it wasn't the best method(horrible in many cases), but it was the predecessor to true science and democracy.

I'm not an angry type human. To me, anger only burns the one who chooses to haul it around, and it can become a formidable burden.
Same thing goes with vengeance - a waste of perfectly good energies !

I really don't care what others believe, or not. It can be enlightening to share thoughts - as we're doing here, but otherwise these sorts of conversations rarely come up in my day-to-day life.

I have noticed a fair amount of anger in some folks here, and I hear the glee in their tone, when they talk of having verbally "gotten" a believer, who did nothing to them.

Seems we all have the ability to pipe up if need be. If someone oversteps their boundaries with you, end it. Silence them. Walk away. There's quite enough unrest in the world already, isn't there ?

I have anger because of what the followers have done to me.what they have done to the world and what they continue to try and do. I don’t hate the religion, I just know it’s a lie. And I’ve grown more angry over the lack of being able to have a clean debatic conversation with anyone that actually knows anything about the damn religion because the moment I do I’m just some dumb sinner because I don’t believe some magical fairy man flooded and entire world but 1 boat and 1 family and 2 of each animal( so we’re all born from incest?) anger comes because 2018 and the church is still force feeding this stupidity in the efforts to stop humans moving forward and changing for the better.
And no matter the point of your post here. This a self pat on the back, self righteous post full of ego because you had to do a lot to understand what most of us already do. You just don’t understand the real anger behind us all. The prosecution I’ve had to live with.

if us non-believers want to argue that morality and ethical behavior is not rooted in religion, we better act accordingly, at least being respectful and having the sense and patience to present ideas with calm confidence.

Don't forget the Bhavagad Gita.

Funny, I find fun in the atheist that uses science as the new religion and provides probability numbers and calculations in absence of facts... as facts. Oh the scientific fugazi!!! Is not anger is entertainment.

So this is something I'm curious about. My estranged wife is such and atheist. I am not. Even when I try and discuss the Bible and my skepticism towards it she is uninterested and even sometimes gets angry. It's actually kinda weird. I don't understand her position and it is part of, (not the only reason) why we are estranged.

This is the first book I bought to explore religion. I was in my 30s. I don't think I got all the way through it. I don't remember much about it.

Thanks for the book recommendations.

As for the "angry, bitter atheists", rage on. Seriously, is there a more sober reaction one should have after freeing themselves from the psychological shackles of religion? Consider for a moment all of the harm that religion has done around the world, to your friends, to your family.. and to yourself. How should you feel?

As an anti theist, isn't it my duty to show the horror of religion? why should I let the religious use their texts to invade society with bigoted views?

if christians were still real christians, we'd be burning witches, stoning gays and adulterers, beating children, keeping slaves, inbreeding, conquering innocent peoples and impressing the teachings upon the unsuspecting populations.

the religious are just victims. religion is the true puppet master. what's worse, is terrible people are excused because of their religion. the roman catholic church actively hides old preachers who have been caught fucking children. they protect them from persecution. they provide the child fuckers shelter while they ignore the poor. they allow someone like mother teresa to put hundreds of sick people in unsanitary conditions while she proclaims to enjoy being around them and suffer with them. they denied condoms and asserted they were useless, or worse, they spread disease. they belittle homosexuals and deny them the ability to love another human being of the same sex.

must I continue? the religion must be stamped out. you're on this website and you're trying to stop someone like me from remembering how many children have been severely harmed, killed, mutilated, indoctrinated and coerced into radical religion, just so I'm nicer to the cunts who pretend it's not part of their religion, until it's not their religion and suddenly they know it's wrong to believe in that shit.

to assert the existence of a thing nobody can observe, and say you know it's real, it's just madness. if everybody completely forgot, had no recollection of religion, there was no religious history tomorrow, then someone said they hear a voice, feel a presence and they call it our creator, they would be institutionalised immediately. that's because people who are mentally ill have no control over their mental faculties and shouldn't be allowed to roam around in public.

so no fuck that. I don't care if I come off as angry at all. the only thing I won't do is belittle the individual. the religion, every religion, causes harm, causes pain, has death on its hands and nobody gives a fuck because their god is the right god and those acts are the right thing to do because morals come from the orders you're given.

if a commanding officer told his lieutenant to fuck a child until it stops screaming, is it moral? what if the commander was god? what if the person delivering the orders was god? is it moral then? fuck no. we don't need a god. what pisses me off the most is the religious who pretend they are nothing like god. but they are better than god, they're better than any god could ever be. they can create, destroy, command, obey and become absent.

we humans have created entire universes. these stories we write are just as real as the universe we live in. the characters, mostly, have no idea they entertain us with their pain and joy. we can decide when they die, if they die at all, we can choose who they become. us humans, in the real world, we decide for ourselves, we choose our own destiny, we create our own possibilities. there's a fucking car, in space, with a spaceman in the drivers seat, just floating around. with, on the dashboard, a tiny version of the car it's in, with a tiny version of the spaceman driving it. before the battery died, the radio was playing Starman for fuck sake. no god would ever dream of that being something we can be empowered by. billions of years in the future, some being will see that and find it amusing. it's an intergalactic joke and it can only be made by things which are alive. a human wanted that to become a reality, not a movie joke, not a comic book skit, not a fruitless endeavour, but a reality. there's a red fucking car, made by humankind, in space which was achieved by putting it on a rocket made by humans which landed itself. where the fuck is religion now? religion and gods had no fucking clue what we could do and we've surpassed the need for gods when humans are infinitely more impressive and memorable. christians have been christians for a couple thousand years, that's it. we still revere humans from before that time. we have more respect for humans who improved life for the whole of humanity, than we do any gods which have allowed such devastating acts because they shouldn't interfere.

if you want to follow a god, there are plenty of humans worth emulating before you even consider calling yourself an image of god. Zelda Williams is made in the image of a god, Carmen Jane Plant is in the image of a god, Scarlet Page is in the image of a god. we have humans alive today who are infinitely better than any god both in actions and words. if you want me to be nicer towards something as despicable as religion, you're going to need to fix every evil thing they've ever covered up, excused, allowed and have done themselves. until then, I'll stick with my anti-theist rhetoric and I won't stop until the world knows and admits they are better off without religion.

I've not even started yet. if you want peace on earth, start with the cunts who made it worse to begin with. until that moment comes, until religion is outcast, marked, stricken from our future and disallowed any influence in our future societies and cultures and ridiculed for it's stupidity, maybe I'll lay off. I'm not here to be nice. I'm here because I'm bored. where else is better to put on my anti-theist hat then somewhere I can be provocative and force everybody who see's my words to admit I'm right and it's a fucking shame I'm right. I don't want to be right, I don't want children to be fucked physically and mentally. I don't want to know what I know. what I do know is unsettling at best, but this isn't at best, this is reality and reality tells me religion is nothing more than a chunk of shit on the shoes of humanity and it's time we wiped our feet clean of it once and for all.

individually, I show a lot more respect, because individuals aren't the reason for what happened, they're just responsible for what comes next by pretending the no true scotsman fallacy is appropriate for excusing their religion from whatever crime they objectively know to be insanely nasty.

some people fight for seperation of church and state, some people fight for secularism, I don't, I'm being as brutal as I can because it will never be as harsh as the way religion has abused humanity physically and mentally for eons. there isn't a single religion without a single death on its hands.

The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. ~Mark Twain

All I have to know is that religion motivated those guys in the airplanes to know that, at least the way it's interpreted by some people, religion can be poison.

you a f,,,,, ng publisher we don't need book reviews, we need comments. not book reviews

Bottom line. God is not going to help you. As a college student I tried them all. If I found anything that would get me what I wanted, you can bet I'd be doing it.

Good for you... funny, I don’t find that at all... but thanks. Generally I find a well informed, compassionate group of people discussing topics of social interest... religion and politics dominating a majority of discussion, including an occasional angry outburst aimed at a frustrating topics... all in all, civility.

Oy, Karen Armstrong. Not following the thread, just dropping in since I saw her name up there. Apparently, Karen and Jack Miles are now in charge of public communication of whatever modern academic biblical criticism is. (they are now co-editors of the encyclopedia of religion). Jack can write like a stone m-f'er. Karen? I've got to keep a machete on hand to cut through her thicket of end notes. And I totally disagree with the thesis in Battle for God. Leadership can't gin people up for a religious war which is really a resource war unless large numbers of people are all-in for the religion.

Karen Armstrong has been around a long time. I bought her book, "History of God", when it first came out and have made comments about it and her on this site. In "The Atheist Bible" she is quoted as saying: "An omnipotent, all-knowing tyrant is not so different from earthly dictators who made everything and everybody mere cogs in the machine which they controlled. An atheism that rejects such a god is amply justified."