Atheism 101: Answers, Explanations and Rebuttals

by Grigory Lukin

Atheism 101: Answers, Explanations and Rebuttals is a collection of concise and occasionally snarky answers to atheism's frequently asked questions. What is the meaning of life? What was Hitler's religion? What's the deal with the Flying Spaghetti Monster? And what was Mother Teresa's dark secret? This book is highly recommended for everyone curious about America's most misunderstood minority, as well as for those who wish to better understand their atheist friends, neighbors or coworkers.

Genres: Religion

38 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 29, 2011

About the author

I'm a chronic misadventurer with a malfunctioning improbability field. (How else would a Siberian end up living in Quebec City?)

I enjoy devouring hard science fiction, digging up obscure platypus trivia, overdosing on C8H10N4O2 and breaking laws of physics. (I try to put them back together when I'm done with them. Most of the time. (Sorry about Tunguska.))

Want to know more? Check out my books or my site!

Reviews

[Kʜᴀɴ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, but logical and good writing. Thumbs up.

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very short Kindle single that i read on the bus to work. Stating the bleeding obvious in many ways but an interesting little primer for those who suffer the outrage or inane questioning of their Christian friends. As someone who has been challenging theism for nearly 40 years it served as a re-assuring reminder of the sort of silly questions I used to get in the early days. Quite fun really.

[Holly McCaig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty quick read. 30 minutes of my time to read straight forward responses to the typical questions atheists face. It's not a book to try and convert people, but to simply help people understand that atheists aren't bad people. They just don't believe. Good for those of faith or not to just get direct responses.

[Kurt Pankau · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have to give this a resounding "meh". It does exactly what it claims: provides one-off rebuttals to several of the more popular Christian derisions of Atheists. There's no discussion or elaboration, no guidance for steering the conversation. There's quite a lot missing from this book. Most importantly:

SOURCES. There are very few sources. For what is essentially a book of facts, sources are paramount. For all we know the contents of this book are made up out of whole cloth or cribbed from Wikipedia. That combined with shoddy formatting means it's very easy for a Christian to dismiss this book entirely. And I do mean shoddy. Going to "the beginning" drops you right in the middle of a paragraph. There's no table of contents, so good luck finding the answer to a specific question. There are a number of errors that a copyeditor should have caught, including a glaring one in the author bio. Poor, poor presentation overall.

Something else this book could have used is an injection of personality, something to make it feel more like a polemic and less like a laundry list. Here's an example: in rebuttal to the argument that "there are no atheists in foxholes", Lukin gives (sourceless) statistics about religious belief in the military but doesn't mention anyone in specific. He could have brought up the well-known case of Pat Tillman, he could have pointed the reader to militaryatheists.org, he could have casually mentioned someone he knew. Numbers are nice. Logic is nice. But people grasp onto anecdotes.

Honestly, I have to recommend against this book. It's well-written enough, and it would make a fantastic web page, but it doesn't work for me. Any self-respecting atheist will have these arguments at his/her fingertips already, and any Christian will look at the poor presentation and the lack of sources and laugh it off.