Atheism: A Reader

by S.T. Joshi (Editor)

This unique anthology assembles the best writings on atheism, agnosticism, and skepticism by some of the world's great thinkers past and present. Arranged to address the most significant questions pertaining to religious belief-the existence of God, immortality, the nature of religious belief, and religion in relation to science, ethics, politics, and society-the selections in this volume present a challenge to religion on all fronts.Included are Bertrand Russell and A. J. Ayer on the existence of God, Percy Bysshe Shelley on the "argument from design," Lucretius on life after death, David Hume on superstition, Elizabeth Cady Stanton on Christianity's demeaning influence on women's social status, Gore Vidal on modern American fundamentalism, and many other notable writers on controversial issues.Editor S. T. Joshi has carefully selected essays that are eloquent, poignant, satirical, and philosophically rigorous, and has also supplied explanatory annotations and a general introduction that succinctly and forcefully summarizes the atheistic critique of religion.

Genres: Religion, Atheism, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Science, Anthologies

346 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2000

About the author

Sunand Tryambak Joshi is an Indian American literary scholar, and a leading figure in the study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft and other authors. Besides what some critics consider to be the definitive biography of Lovecraft (H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, 1996), Joshi has written about Ambrose Bierce, H. L. Mencken, Lord Dunsany, and M.R. James, and has edited collections of their works.

His literary criticism is notable for its emphases upon readability and the dominant worldviews of the authors in question; his The Weird Tale looks at six acknowledged masters of horror and fantasy (namely Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Dunsany, M. R. James, Bierce and Lovecraft), and discusses their respective worldviews in depth and with authority. A follow-up volume, The Modern Weird Tale, examines the work of modern writers, including Shirley Jackson, Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, Robert Aickman, Thomas Ligotti, T. E. D. Klein and others, from a similar philosophically oriented viewpoint. The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004) includes essays on Dennis Etchison, L. P. Hartley, Les Daniels, E. F. Benson, Rudyard Kipling, David J. Schow, Robert Bloch, L. P. Davies, Edward Lucas White, Rod Serling, Poppy Z. Brite and others.

Joshi is the editor of the small-press literary journals Lovecraft Studies and Studies in Weird Fiction, published by Necronomicon Press. He is also the editor of Lovecraft Annual and co-editor of Dead Reckonings, both small-press journals published by Hippocampus Press.

In addition to literary criticism, Joshi has also edited books on atheism and social relations, including Documents of American Prejudice (1999), an annotated collection of American racist writings; In Her Place (2006), which collects written examples of prejudice against women; and Atheism: A Reader (2000), which collects atheistic writings by such people as Antony Flew, George Eliot, Bertrand Russell, Emma Goldman, Gore Vidal and Carl Sagan, among others. An Agnostic Reader, collecting pieces by such writers as Isaac Asimov, John William Draper, Albert Einstein, Frederic Harrison, Thomas Henry Huxley, Robert Ingersoll, Corliss Lamont, Arthur Schopenhauer and Edward Westermarck, was published in 2007.

Joshi is also the author of God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong (2003), an anti-religious polemic against various writers including C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, T. S. Eliot, William F. Buckley, Jr., William James, Stephen L. Carter, Annie Dillard, Reynolds Price, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Guenter Lewy, Neale Donald Walsch and Jerry Falwell, which is dedicated to theologian and fellow Lovecraft critic Robert M. Price.

In 2006 he published The Angry Right: Why Conservatives Keep Getting It Wrong, which criticised the political writings of such commentators as William F. Buckley, Jr., Russell Kirk, David and Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Phyllis Schlafly, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving and William Kristol, arguing that, despite the efforts of right-wing polemicists, the values of the American people have become steadily more liberal over time.

Joshi, who lives with his wife in Moravia, New York, has stated on his website that his most noteworthy achievements thus far have been his biography of Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life and The Weird Tale.

Reviews

[Stephie Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

The individual chapters were good to very good overall. A Few can even be considered excellent. Although there were few arguments specifically for atheism, many of these pieces provide various critiques of the ways that religion is harmful. My only real qualm is with the title. Joshi's use of atheism is not very accurate. Most of the chapters were not written by professed atheists. This was very disappointing to me. I do not consider agnosticism as on par with atheism. While an agnostic will suspend belief, the atheist has the belief, justified, that there is no god(s). I found it interesting that agnosticism was really presented by a number of authors not as the suspension of belief, but as a mode of investigating the world, similar to naturalism or scepticism. Others were presented as freethoughters, which does not necessarily equate with atheism but could be compatible with it. In the whole book there were only two or three professed atheists. I don't understand why this exclusion of atheists. There are plenty of atheist who have written very good books or articles. I am somewhat torn on how well I liked the book. I can't quite get past this overall exclusion of atheists.

[Mark Gowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

S.T Joshi has edited several books, all of which I like because of his aggressive style and willingness to take literary and publishing chances. This book is no different. It is a collection of essays, but what makes this book so good is the collected authors. Secular Humanist writing and thinking has many people to thank, and this book does just that in including them.
In eight parts, Joshi manages to represent Thomas Huxley, Carl Van Doren, Percey Bysshe Shelley, Robert Ingersoll, John Stuart Mill, Antony Flew, David Hume, Charles Darwin, H.L Mencken, Frederich Nietzsche, Carl Sagan, Thomas Paine, Benedict Spinoza, Clarence Darrow and even Walter Kaufmann as well as Gore Vidal just to name a few. Get the picture? Good. Now go get the book!

[Alessandro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great retrospective on thinkers who recognized early on the flaws in religion. Joshi's collection helps us see how Atheism is not a new thing; how the world is slow in shedding its useless baggage of ancient beliefs. The work of the intellectuals explored in this book is proof that morality and humanity are priority for the secular thinker, and a reminder of the inhumanities religions still promote.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hundreds of essays and documents of by and for those of us who regard religion as a massively shared psychosis for which together we can find a cure in order to insure and enhance the survival of our species.

[Kendra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent book, An anthology covering a wide group of authors and time periods, from Lucretius in 60 BC to Carl Sagan in 1995. 8 chapters, 30 authors, very good book.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good collection of essays by many great writers on atheism.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I initially gave this 3 stars. Despite the preponderance of negativity that follows, this collection of essays is worth spending your time reading. Just because i don't agree with everything that's said in its pages is no reason to downgrade the value of the content. The size is undaunting. The material is neither too dense and scholarly nor too simple and flimsy.

Based solely on the intro essay, i took a dislike to the way Joshi thinks and expresses himself immediately. I'd label him a bad atheist; smug, haughty, insulting, arrogant.

I'd like to be well-versed in the history of atheism and its "primary texts." Since i have no such training or knowledge, i enjoin you, Dear Reader, to consume the following sentence with great scepticism: Since virtually every entry is in the public domain or owned by this book's publisher, i suspect that Joshi might've been most influenced by reprint permission costs.

There: now i've cast 2 unsubstantiated aspersions upon this guy. Must be some kind of repressed jealousy. Sorry.

"Agnosticism" by TH Huxley wasn't exceptionally compelling: if you're relying on probability, please EXPLAIN how you've calculated your relative likelihoods.

Leslie Stephen's "Agnostic's Apology" was excellent. (With a dad as intelligent and eloquent as Stephen seems in this essay, how could Virginia Woolf fail?)

Emma Goldman's brief "Philosophy of Atheism" might be more accurately entitled "Things I Don't Like About the Philosophy of Theism."

Charles Van Doren's "Why I Am an Unbeliever" was well written and insightful.

Percy Shelley's "Refutation of Deism" was adequate, though it seems hackneyed after all these years; i guess everyone since has adopted and adapted his arguments. "That credulity should be gross in proportion to the ignorance of the mind which it enslaves is in strict consistency with the principles of human nature." Great as that sentence is, it also evinces the high-minded snobbery (aka, the snobbery of those who believe they have Higher minds than others) of Joshi's collection. Another datum for the pyre: "It is among men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found [not true], but among these alone is cherished an hostility to those errors with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected [not true, too]." PBJ ends on a high note: "We can have no evidence of the existence of God from the principles of reason." (emphasis mine)

I think Robert Ingersoll's question-laden "What is Religion?" failed miserably, unless he intended to litanize rhetorically each of his personally disliked facts of life. He falls into the trap lurking beneath every outspoken atheist's soapbox and presents grievances against a god that he professes to believe is nonexistent.

Bertrand Russell's quizzically entitled piece, on the other hand, contains some of the best statements i've ever read on the subject of religion. "The question whether there is a God is one which is decided on very different grounds by different communities and different individuals. The immense majority of mankind accept the prevailing opinion of their own community." Similarly: "I will not assert dogmatically that there is no cosmic purpose, but I will say that there is no shred of evidence in favor of there being one." So good that i'm questioning my negativist recollections of Why I Am Not a Christian (for the nth time).

AJ Ayer's piece is an excerpt from The Central Questions of Philosophy. The headings in these 10 pages are "Existence of God," "Argument from Design" (ie, creation vs. other cosmology), "Religion and Morality" (ie, The Problem of Evil), and "Meaning of Life": central questions, indeed! Alas, it's just another bogus "if you can't prove there's at least one god, then i'm better than you for believing there are no gods" argument.

The excerpt from Lucretius is surprisingly fresh for something 2000 years old. A question of translation arises, though, in that "mind" and "soul" seem to be used interchangeably. Both sides of the believer/nonbeliever battle would certainly challenge this as being confused at worst and confusing at best.

The selection from JS Mill contains more than one workhorse argument against immortality. The following, in particular, thoroughly rebuts a central claim from CS Lewis's Mere Christianity: "To suppose that the desire of life guarantees to us personally the reality of life through all eternity is like supposing that the desire of food assures us that we shall always have as much as we can eat through our whole lives and as much longer as we can conceive our lives to be protracted by." Even if one stipulates that for every human need there is provision from God, one cannot conclude that eternal life must be among them. Simpler: food and eternal life are not equivalents.

Antony Flew's modern prose style (from 1993) was—for me—the least comprehendible jargon in the whole book. Yet again in my life i must apostrophize, "Academics, bah!" (my friends in academe excepted, of course)

The selection from David Hume's Natural History of Religion fails to show how RELIGION is to blame for anything that can't more simply be attributable to typical flaws in human character regardless of that person's religiosity. Nonbelievers can chronicle every bad thing perpetrated in the name of religion but until we can show that these crimes against humanity were distinct from atrocities committed for non-religious motives, such chronicling ultimately amounts to little more than name-calling.

George Eliot's critique of "Evangelical Teaching" feels more like an extremely well-written, well-argued attempt at damage control by an open-minded, intelligent Christian than like an atheist's essay: Dr. Cumming is publishing twaddle and codswallop in the name of Christianity and Eliot's gonna cut through the crap to bring her fellow Christians back to right-mindedness.

Charles Bradlaugh fails to define Christianity. The closest he comes to even trying is, "As a system or scheme of doctrine, Christianity may, I submit, not unfairly be gathered from the Old and New Testaments." Way to nail it down, Chuck!

Anatole France's "Miracle" is a nice kick in the face to believers because it sets up the game (not unfairly) such that it can only be played by nonbelievers. Read it.

Charles Darwin's autobio excerpt is just as brilliant as France's bit. Take for example the beautiful consolation on offer (imo, especially relevant to pessimistic nonbelievers):

"[P]leasurable sensations serve as their habitual guides. We see this in the pleasure from exertion, even occasionally from great exertion of the body or mind,—in the pleasure of our daily meals, and especially in the pleasure derived from sociability, and from loving our families. The sum of such pleasures as these, which are habitual or frequently recurrent, give, as I can hardly doubt, to most sentient beings an excess of happiness over misery, although many occasionally suffer much" (emphasis mine).

Q: Why is there Evil and why isn't life better?
A: Perhaps because our accounting method over-values ephemeral high-intensity Evils and under-values persistent low-intensity Goods. (i'm a card-carrying member of the pessimists club, by the way) And, finally, i wish that every great thinker could be OK with the following:

"I cannot pretend to throw the least light on such abstruse problems. The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."

Socrates, anyone?
(bizarro tangent. The following sentence made me wonder if a deep, spiritual ennui plagues giant pandas: "If all individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree, they would neglect to propagate their kind.")

Friedrich Nietzsche's "Antichrist" is sick with invective and bluster that weaken its ideas; it is the raving of an overzealous anti-zealot, the lashing out of someone angry at Christianity as if it insulted him personally.

HL Mencken's trio of articles on the Scopes trial include an LOL moment, but, yes, HL, you should be polite even when battling superstition.

Speaking of which, Carl Sagan's "Demon-Haunted World" excerpt might be best as a straight history of oft-trod ground. I remember loving the entire book from which this came. I've gotta reread and possibly reassess.

d'Holbach is worth pursuing further but surely i'll never have the time and dedication to read The System of Nature. "Atheism, if well understood, is founded upon nature and upon reason." I noted that i'd never heard it put this way before, but it has lost its novelty upon rereading.

Thomas Paine is someone i also ought to read further. For example, i really like his revealed religion distinction. I doubt that i grok his critique of the Golden Rule, though.

HP Lovecraft: OK, it's just a private letter, but when it's anthologized i expect it to have essay quality organization, form, and thought. Lovecraft's letter had me wondering whether intellectual superiority is a nonbeliever-specific epidemic. And then, does moral superiority preponderantly infect believers? Same disease with slightly differing symptoms? Shelley, Mencken, Nietzsche, and many others in this collection included elitist statements similar to Lovecraft's and Joshi's. In retrospect, though, it seems most likely that HPL and STJ, an admirer and studier of HPL, exhibit similar literary or linguistic markers that i personally interpret to be intimations of haughtiness. Is this merely another sidetrack like the one about the pandas? I'm probably hypersensitive to this biznaz because one of my earliest memorable epiphanies was insulting a newish classmate as having a brain the size of the puffball on his hat; a girl standing beside him rightly chastised me; i reacted with shocked silence and cold sweat: i was a shitty little kid crowing about being smarter than everyone else. I still hate it when this behavior surfaces, so i'm maniacally alert to finding evidence of it in others. Bottom line: maybe my personal issues sufficiently undermine my theory that this anthology—and the nonbeliever community as a whole—suffer from rampant Vanity of the Mind.

Walter Kaufmann's "Faith of a Heretic" and Chapman Cohen's "Religion and Sex" end as they're gaining momentum, which i'm inexpertly attributing to poor excerpting. Cohen touches on an eye-opening "perversion of one of the deepest of human instincts," which likely is 180° from traditional Christian beliefs.

I skipped all of Part 7 (Religion and the State) and most of Part 8 (Religion and Society) for lack of interest.

[Steve Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the essays here were excellent. Still others-usually written by British authors-were written with 19th century prose styles that were reflective of their age, and are often thick and opaque. Bertrand Russell is an example of one Brit that didn’t fall into that category. George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) isn’t necessarily easy, but she’s so sharp, and has moments where the prose just pops, that it’s worth the effort to take time with her.

Then there is Anthony Flew. I thought, here is a 20th century man who was roundly respected as a philosopher. Surely he’ll be clear where his 18th and 19th century countrymen were not. Here’s a sample of his work that I think I can provide without having to list it as a “spoiler”….

“If, on the other hand, we take care so to specify the nature of our hypothesized astral bodies that the falsification of the hypothesis that such there be, while still possible in principle, is in practice indefinitely deferred, then we find that we have made it impossibly difficult to identify creatures of too, too solid flesh and blood with as such perennially elusive hypothetical entities.”

Got that? It just absorbs like a glass of water on a hot day, doesn’t it? After reading that I went to my study, and the as yet unread copy of one of Anthony Flew’s books flew off my shelf and on to that stack of donation books for the library. I think it was titled “How To Think Clearly” or something like that.

Please don’t mistake me for an Anglophobe, but there is a distinct split in prose styles between the U.S. and Great Britain that occurred in the 19th century. The American essays included here often use a flowery rhetoric typical of a public speaker, but it has clarity and the sentences are succinct. You don’t find a sentence burdened with semi-colons and commas and dragged out to half a page.

I can’t call any thinker “brilliant” if he or she can’t clearly articulate their ideas. The defense against this might be that I’m asking it to be “dumbed down”. Hardly. I’m asking it to be made readily accessible and structured with clarity. If a reader spends more than the usual time with a paragraph it should be because they’re ruminating over the profound implications of that thought provoking passage they just read, not because they’re trying to figure out what the author was actually trying to say.

So is the book worth tackling? Perhaps. If the reader finds his eyes crossing with one writer, they can always skip to the next. I didn’t, and plowed my way through. There might be readers out there who relish tackling the challenging prose I’ve described. And there were indeed a number of clear and compelling essays.

I made a note of what I thought were the best writers and found, to my delight, that many of their works are past copyright and available for free online should I ever need them for reference or because I want to re-read them.

But this one is joining Flew for the trip to the library. I need room on my bookshelf.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Erudite, considered and sometimes very esoteric in its language, this collection of essays explores and dissects the notion of religion, its effects on society, its moral structure and the ramifications it has for the future of our children.

Some of the writers here are very firm in their opinions that religion does vastly more harm than good. Others actively scorn the idea that the United States is a Christian nation, pointing out that our Founding Fathers were adamant in releasing the newborn colonies from the tyranny of a king who felt ordained by God. Still more mourn the damage done by adherence to the bible, an incoherent mess at best, a vicious screed at worst, as it advocates everything from rape to slavery to stoning your neighbors for picking up sticks on a Sabbath.

Some of the chapters made for difficult reading, for certain. You’d have to be a Rhodes scholar to pick up meaning from those dense passages. But others are fairly straightforward and easier for the contemporary reader to grasp.

Overall, however, this is a very thorough look at non-belief, with insights from some of the most famous freethinkers that have existed across the centuries. If you take religion seriously, you have to consider other viewpoints about it, including what non-believers have to say about it.

[Roman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a collection of excellent essays and writing on atheism and non-belief. I gave it 5 stars, even though I was not pleased with the introduction. Skipping that, the selection of essays is very well done and showed me several works I was previously unaware of. It shows that belief, and religious leanings in general, have never been simply a given at any point in human history. Overall, I highly recommend this collection.

[brendanoblivion]

the greg graffin book (is belief in god good, bad, or irrelevant) inspired me to pick this up, along with the agnostic reader. i just wanna be a better non-believer, i guess. i've also read a great deal of s.t. joshi's excellent h.p. lovecraft related output, so i can trust that these collections have been intelligently assembled.

[Nance · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant