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WillowOne's Positions

The Portable Atheist

Overview

Subtitled Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever, this is Hitchens' anthology of unbelief: Lucretius, Omar Khayyam, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Shelley, Mill, Marx, George Eliot, Darwin, Twain, Freud, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, Orwell, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, among others. Each extract has a short introduction by Hitchens, and the whole is prefaced by an essay arguing that disbelief has a tradition as long and as distinguished as belief. Some pieces are arguments, some are satire, and some are simply people describing what it is like to see through a religion they were raised in.

Notes

Useful mainly as a corrective to the idea that atheism was invented in 2006. The arguments against God in this book are mostly old, and reading Hume or Russell on them makes plain how little the modern apologetic replies have changed either. It also shows the range of the thing: the Lucretius and the Twain are not making the same case as the Dawkins, and I find the older, quieter voices more persuasive than the louder recent ones. A good book to leave lying around rather than read in order.

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