A review by arensb
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by John Betjeman, David Hume, Sigmund Freud, Elizabeth S. Anderson, Michael Shermer, Carl Van Doren, John Leslie Mackie, A.C. Grayling, John Stuart Mill, Albert Einstein, Philip Larkin, Omar Khayyám, Lucretius, Richard Dawkins, Charles Darwin, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, George Eliot, Thomas Hobbes, Ian McEwan, George Orwell, Emma Goldman, Mark Twain, Thomas Hardy, Salman Rushdie, Victor J. Stenger, Martin Gardner, Christopher Hitchens, John Updike, Daniel C. Dennett, Baruch Spinoza, Chapman Cohen, Joseph Conrad, H.L. Mencken, Steven Weinberg, Penn Jillette, Carl Sagan, Ibn Warraq, Karl Marx, Charles Templeton, H.P. Lovecraft, James Boswell, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Bertrand Russell, A.J. Ayer, Anatole France, Leslie Stephen, Sam Harris
3.0
It's an anthology, so on one hand, it's a mixed bag; on the other hand, if you don't like something, just skip it and move on to the next piece.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this collection is that it shows that the "New atheists"' arguments are not new. I knew this intellectually, of course, but reading Mark Twain or Percy Bysshe Shelley or David Hume making arguments that still come up regularly today really brought it home.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this collection is that it shows that the "New atheists"' arguments are not new. I knew this intellectually, of course, but reading Mark Twain or Percy Bysshe Shelley or David Hume making arguments that still come up regularly today really brought it home.