5 Best Books To De-Convert A Christian

Whenever you see posts titled like this one always consider the source and the intended target audience. How widely read is the person recommending these books? Is he or she a former believer? Which type of Christianity do the recommended books target? On what level of scholarship do the books deal with? Are the recommended books philosophically oriented, biblically oriented or scientifically oriented, or general ones? Take for instance the recommendation to read the Bible itself. A fundamentalist won't deconvert upon reading it. A Catholic like Julia Sweeney did. Remember, Isaac Asimov's famous quote is this: "Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." The question is which books help which readers properly understand the Bible? That's my focus, my specialty. My target audience are educated evangelicals in the pews and colleges. So with that let me whittle down my list of recommended books to just five (excluding my own):

For a fuller list of my recommended books see the 2013 Debunking Christianity Challenge. Christian, what are you afraid of? Read them.

In alphabetical order here are the five finalists given my target audience and focus on the Bible:

Hector Avalos, Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship.

Bart Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them).

Matt McCormick, Atheism and the Case Against Christ.

Robert M. Price and Edwin Suominen, Evolving out of Eden.

Thom Stark, The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (And Why Inerrancy Tries To Hide It).

As far as who am I and how widely read I am, that's for you to decide.

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Soon I'm sure to recommend two new books that are in production:

Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists.You can listen to a recent interview with him about his book on The Malcontent's Gambit.

Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee

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