"What difference does God make?
...[an] atheist friend asked her this question ... I decided I would find out, by living for a year without God."
Above from Ryan Bell's blog Year without god
Away from religious habits - an unexpected journey.
I was a Seventh-Day Adventist like Ryan. My path diverged in the early 80's. I left the sda denomination over various SDA specific dogmas but I remained a generic Christian for decades after that. It was only after looking into atheism (in 2008) that my journey out of religious belief altogether really got underway. Books mostly, that's what did it. Only after that year did I see some videos, hear some podcasts, read some blogs, join some facebook groups, attend an atheist convention, go to some meetup groups etc.
My journey begins. The train pulls out of the station from outer suburban Melbourne. I am on it, I begin reading my "book one". The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I felt awkward, embarrassed even and read it behind a magazine to disguise the fact. I had picked it up on a whim, seemed many others were reading it. My motivation was curiosity, my expectation was that it was all rubbish and I knew better as a Christian , my hope was to be able to refute everything with an apologetic stance etc. Questions were raised.
Consider reading "both sides", some apologetic books and rebuttals etc.
If one is still immersed in young earth creation (YEC) as a fundamentalist then consider some YEC Christian friendly evolution books- By Fairbanks, Alexander , Collins - otherwise go direct to Dawkins, Coyne etc. Read some age of the earth books, geology etc. If one is still stuck in Noah's flood as real , see the rocks don't lie. Some philosophy books, logic, critical thinking etc.
The (~ 190) books below have largely (re)shaped my world view.
| 100 Billion Suns: The Birth, Life, and Death of the Stars | Rudolf Kippenhahn |
| 36 Arguments for the Existence of God | Rebecca Newberger Goldstein |
| 50 Great Myths about Atheism | Russell Blackford |
| 50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True | Guy P. Harrison |
| 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God | Guy P. Harrison |
| 50 Simple Questions for Every Christian | Guy P. Harrison |
| 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists | Russell Blackford |
| A God of One's Own: Religion's Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence | Ulrich Beck |
| A Manual for Creating Atheists | Peter Boghossian |
| A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing | Lawrence M. Krauss |
| A World Without Islam | Graham E. Fuller |
| Adam's Tongue: How Humans Made Language, How Language Made Humans | Derek Bickerton |
| Adams Vs. God: The Rematch | Phillip Adams |
| Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness | A.C. Grayling |
| All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age | Hubert L. Dreyfus |
| Atheism | Julian Baggini |
| Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker | David Eller |
| Atheism and the Case Against Christ | Matthew S. McCormick |
| Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy | David Ramsay Steele |
| Atheism: The Case Against God | George H. Smith |
| Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam | Michel Onfray |
| Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism | David Mills |
| Believing Bullshit: How Not to Get Sucked into an Intellectual Black Hole | Stephen Law |
| Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions | Cami Ostman |
| Beyond Good and Evil | Friedrich Nietzsche |
| Blindness | Josea Saramago |
| Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Cat's Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Caught in The Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Climbing Mount Improbable | Richard Dawkins |
| Cosmos | Carl Sagan |
| Create Your Own Religion: A How-To Book Without Instructions | Daniele Bolelli |
| Creation or Evolution?: Do We Have to Choose? | Denis Alexander |
| Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Decoding the Language of God: Can a Scientist Really Be a Believer? | George C. Cunningham |
| Deconverted: a Journey from Religion to Reason | Seth Andrews |
| Dot, Dot, Dot: Infinity Plus God Equals Folly | James A. Lindsay |
| Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson | Jennifer Michael Hecht |
| Endless Forms Most Beautiful: The New Science of Evo Devo and the Making of the Animal Kingdom | Sean B. Carroll |
| Evolution vs. Creationism: An Introduction | Eugenie C. Scott |
| Evolving out of Eden: Christian Responses to Evolution | Robert M. Price |
| Faitheist: How An Atheist Found Common Ground With The Religious | Chris Stedman |
| Fear and Trembling | Søren Kierkegaard |
| For God's Sake | Jane Caro |
| Forged: Writing in the Name of God | Bart D. Ehrman |
| Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us about Development and Evolution | Mark S. Blumberg |
| Free Will | Sam Harris |
| Friendship | A.C. Grayling |
| From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World, Vol. 1 | Marilyn French |
| Generation Atheist | Dan Riley |
| God -- the Failed Hypothesis | Victor J. Stenger |
| God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says | Michael D. Coogan |
| God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion | Victor J. Stenger |
| God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | Christopher Hitchens |
| God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter | Stephen R. Prothero |
| God or Godless?: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions. | John W. Loftus |
| God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist | Victor J. Stenger |
| Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels | Sikivu Hutchinson |
| Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists | Dan Barker |
| Good and Evil (Great Minds Series) | Richard Taylor |
| Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe | Greg M. Epstein |
| Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies | Jared Diamond |
| Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor's Journey from Belief to Atheism | Jerry DeWitt |
| How Proust Can Change Your Life | Alain de Botton |
| How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at An Answer | Sarah Bakewell |
| Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide For The 21st Century | A.C. Grayling |
| Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century | A.C. Grayling |
| Infidel | Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
| Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) | Bart D. Ehrman |
| Leaving the Fold | Marlene Winell |
| Letter to a Christian Nation | Sam Harris |
| Letters to a Young Poet | Rainer Maria Rilke |
| Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution | Nick Lane |
| Lying | Sam Harris |
| Man Made God: A Collection of Essays | Barbara Walker |
| Man's Search for Meaning | Viktor E. Frankl |
| Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage | Stephanie Coontz |
| Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why | Bart D. Ehrman |
| Mister God, This Is Anna | Fynn |
| More Than Human | Theodore Sturgeon |
| Mortality | Christopher Hitchens |
| Natural Atheism | David Eller |
| Nature's Clocks: How Scientists Measure the Age of Almost Everything | Doug Macdougall |
| Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) | William Gibson |
| Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations | Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
| Objecting to God | Colin Howson |
| On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction | Brian Boyd |
| Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution | Neil deGrasse Tyson |
| Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space | Carl Sagan |
| Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There | Richard Wiseman |
| People in Glass Houses | Tanya Levin |
| Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life | Louise M. Antony |
| Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines | Richard A. Muller |
| Predictably Irrational. The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions | Dan Ariely |
| Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain | Maryanne Wolf |
| Proust Was a Neuroscientist | Jonah Lehrer |
| Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus | Richard Carrier |
| Relics of Eden: The Powerful Evidence of Evolution in Human DNA | Daniel J. Fairbanks |
| Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion | Alain de Botton |
| Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics | Peter Singer |
| Road Out Of Eden From Adventist To Atheist | LouAnne White |
| Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality | Darrel Ray |
| Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality | Christopher Ryan |
| Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut |
| South Park and Philosophy: Bigger, Longer, and More Penetrating | Richard Hanley |
| Stranger in a Strange Land | Robert A. Heinlein |
| Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet | Ted Nield |
| Supernatural Selection: How Religion Evolved | Matthew Rossano |
| Swann's Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1) | Marcel Proust |
| Talking Difference: On Gender and Language | Mary Crawford |
| The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution | Gregory Cochran |
| The Age of Everything: How Science Explores the Past | Matthew Hedman |
| The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution | Richard Dawkins |
| The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions | Alex Rosenberg |
| The Australian Book of Atheism | Warren Bonett |
| The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths | Michael Shermer |
| The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts | Israel Finkelstein |
| The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design | Richard Dawkins |
| The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam | Ayaan Hirsi Ali |
| The Case Against The Case for Christ | Robert M. Price |
| The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails | John W. Loftus |
| The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion Book One: The Mormons | David Fitzgerald |
| The Dark Side of Christian History | Helen Ellerbe |
| The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark | Carl Sagan |
| The End of Biblical Studies | Hector Avalos |
| The End of Christianity | John W. Loftus |
| The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason | Sam Harris |
| The Epigenetics Revolution | Nessa Carey |
| The Evolution of God | Robert Wright |
| The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves | Stephen Grosz |
| The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us | Victor J. Stenger |
| The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights | Austin Dacey |
| The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism | A.C. Grayling |
| The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question | Gary Cox |
| The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between) | John R. Shook |
| The God Delusion | Richard Dawkins |
| The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life | Jesse Bering |
| The Good Atheist: Living a Purpose-Filled Life Without God | Dan Barker |
| The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution | Richard Dawkins |
| The Heart of Things: Applying Philosophy to the 21st Century | A.C. Grayling |
| The Hero with a Thousand Faces | Joseph Campbell |
| The High Price Of Heaven - A Book About The Enemies Of Pleasure and Freedom | David Marr |
| The Hinge Factor: How Chance and Stupidity Have Changed History | Erik Durschmied |
| The Holy Machine | Chris Beckett |
| The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries To Hide It) | Thom Stark |
| The Last of the Just | André Schwarz-Bart |
| The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty | Peter Singer |
| The Little Prince | Antoine de Saint-Exupéry |
| The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution | Sean B. Carroll |
| The Meaning of Life | Terry Eagleton |
| The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life | A.C. Grayling |
| The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka |
| The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason | Victor J. Stenger |
| The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True | John W. Loftus |
| The Philosophy Gym | Stephen Law |
| The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever | Christopher Hitchens |
| The Problem with God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be Wrong | Peter Steinberger |
| The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? | Robert M. Price |
| The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion | Jonathan Haidt |
| The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood | David R. Montgomery |
| The Shrink and the Sage: A Guide to Modern Dilemmas | Julian Baggini |
| The Speed Reading Book | Tony Buzan |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus |
| The Tree Of Man | Patrick White |
| The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter | Peter Singer |
| The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? | Jared Diamond |
| The Young Atheist's Handbook: Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God | Alom Shaha |
| The Young Atheist's Survival Guide: Helping Secular Students Thrive | Hemant Mehta |
| Think: Why You Should Question Everything | Guy P. Harrison |
| Thinking of Answers: Questions in the Philosophy of Everyday Life | A.C. Grayling |
| To Set Prometheus Free | A.C. Grayling |
| Tragedy: A Very Short Introduction | Adrian Poole |
| Truth: A Guide | Simon Blackburn |
| Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder | Richard Dawkins |
| Western Values Versus the Gospels - What Jesus Really Values and Why We Shouldn't Agree with Him | Peter Woolcock |
| Wetware: A Computer in Every Living Cell | Dennis Bray |
| What Are You Without God?: How to Discredit Religious Thought and Rebuild Your Identity | Christopher Krzeminski |
| What Evolution Is | Ernst Mayr |
| What On Earth Evolved? ... In Brief | Christopher Lloyd |
| What Should I Believe?: Why Our Beliefs about the Nature of Death and the Purpose of Life Dominate Our Lives | Dorothy Rowe |
| What's It All About?: Philosophy and the Meaning of Life | Julian Baggini |
| When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time | Michael J. Benton |
| When Species Meet | Donna J. Haraway |
| White as the Waves: A Novel of Moby Dick | Alison Baird |
| White Washed: Uncovering the Myths of Ellen G. White | Sydney Cleveland |
| Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless | Greta Christina |
| Why Beliefs Matter: Reflections on the Nature of Science | E. Brian Davies |
| Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design | Michael Shermer |
| Why Evolution Is True | Jerry A. Coyne |
| Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity | John W. Loftus |
| Why Tolerate Religion? | Brian Leiter |
| Why Truth Matters | Jeremy Stangroom |
| Yes, But How Do You Know? | Stephen Hetherington |
Out of these, my top 80 would be:
| 50 Great Myths about Atheism | Russell Blackford |
| 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God | Guy P. Harrison |
| 50 Simple Questions for Every Christian | Guy P. Harrison |
| 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists | Russell Blackford |
| A God of One's Own: Religion's Capacity for Peace and Potential for Violence | Ulrich Beck |
| A Manual for Creating Atheists | Peter Boghossian |
| Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness | A.C. Grayling |
| Atheism | Julian Baggini |
| Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker | David Eller |
| Atheism and the Case Against Christ | Matthew S. McCormick |
| Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy | David Ramsay Steele |
| Atheism: The Case Against God | George H. Smith |
| Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam | Michel Onfray |
| Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism | David Mills |
| Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions | Cami Ostman |
| Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Caught in The Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind | Daniel C. Dennett |
| Create Your Own Religion: A How-To Book Without Instructions | Daniele Bolelli |
| Deconverted: a Journey from Religion to Reason | Seth Andrews |
| Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson | Jennifer Michael Hecht |
| Faitheist: How An Atheist Found Common Ground With The Religious | Chris Stedman |
| Fear and Trembling | Søren Kierkegaard |
| For God's Sake | Jane Caro |
| Forged: Writing in the Name of God | Bart D. Ehrman |
| Generation Atheist | Dan Riley |
| God -- the Failed Hypothesis | Victor J. Stenger |
| God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says | Michael D. Coogan |
| God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion | Victor J. Stenger |
| God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything | Christopher Hitchens |
| God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter | Stephen R. Prothero |
| God or Godless?: One Atheist. One Christian. Twenty Controversial Questions. | John W. Loftus |
| God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist | Victor J. Stenger |
| Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels | Sikivu Hutchinson |
| Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe | Greg M. Epstein |
| Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor's Journey from Belief to Atheism | Jerry DeWitt |
| Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) | Bart D. Ehrman |
| Leaving the Fold | Marlene Winell |
| Letter to a Christian Nation | Sam Harris |
| Man Made God: A Collection of Essays | Barbara Walker |
| Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why | Bart D. Ehrman |
| Natural Atheism | David Eller |
| Objecting to God | Colin Howson |
| Philosophers Without Gods: Meditations on Atheism and the Secular Life | Louise M. Antony |
| Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus | Richard Carrier |
| Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion | Alain de Botton |
| Sex & God: How Religion Distorts Sexuality | Darrel Ray |
| The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions | Alex Rosenberg |
| The Australian Book of Atheism | Warren Bonett |
| The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts | Israel Finkelstein |
| The Case Against The Case for Christ | Robert M. Price |
| The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails | John W. Loftus |
| The Complete Heretic's Guide to Western Religion Book One: The Mormons | David Fitzgerald |
| The Dark Side of Christian History | Helen Ellerbe |
| The End of Biblical Studies | Hector Avalos |
| The End of Christianity | John W. Loftus |
| The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason | Sam Harris |
| The Evolution of God | Robert Wright |
| The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us | Victor J. Stenger |
| The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism | A.C. Grayling |
| The God Confusion: Why Nobody Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question | Gary Cox |
| The God Debates: A 21st Century Guide for Atheists and Believers (and Everyone in Between) | John R. Shook |
| The God Delusion | Richard Dawkins |
| The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life | Jesse Bering |
| The Good Atheist: Living a Purpose-Filled Life Without God | Dan Barker |
| The High Price Of Heaven - A Book About The Enemies Of Pleasure and Freedom | David Marr |
| The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries To Hide It) | Thom Stark |
| The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason | Victor J. Stenger |
| The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True | John W. Loftus |
| The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever | Christopher Hitchens |
| The Problem with God: Why Atheists, True Believers, and Even Agnostics Must All Be Wrong | Peter Steinberger |
| The Reason Driven Life: What Am I Here on Earth For? | Robert M. Price |
| The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion | Jonathan Haidt |
| The Young Atheist's Handbook: Lessons for Living a Good Life Without God | Alom Shaha |
| The Young Atheist's Survival Guide: Helping Secular Students Thrive | Hemant Mehta |
| Western Values Versus the Gospels - What Jesus Really Values and Why We Shouldn't Agree with Him | Peter Woolcock |
| What Are You Without God?: How to Discredit Religious Thought and Rebuild Your Identity | Christopher Krzeminski |
| What Should I Believe?: Why Our Beliefs about the Nature of Death and the Purpose of Life Dominate Our Lives | Dorothy Rowe |
| Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless | Greta Christina |
| Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity | John W. Loftus |
| Why Tolerate Religion? | Brian Leiter |
My goodreads.com read list
