The Religious Condition

My new book, entitled The Religious Condition: Answering And Explaining Christian Reasoning, is available for purchase from Amazon by clicking here. Excerpts, notes, and other information can be viewed here. So what’s the book about, and should you purchase it?

The first half of the book is on how persuasive psychology has demonstrated that certain factors have a much greater impact on the formation and maintenance of beliefs than they should, especially when those beliefs are unfalsifiable religious ones. Topics in this section include dissonance, confirmation bias, indoctrination, emotion, rationalization, and freethought. Key texts cited include Robert Cialdini’s Influence, Richard Petty and John Cacioppo’s Attitudes and Persuasion, and Michael Shermer’s Why People Believe Weird Things. The second half of the book is my answer to negative responses on my previous work, focusing primarily on arguments related to evolution, creationism, proofs, argumentation, and morality.

If you’re interested in how psychological studies demonstrate that the majority of human beings are way too gullible and unreasonable to form objective conclusions on important matters (such as religion), and you’ve never read about the formation and maintenance of beliefs in depth, I think you would gain a lot from it. On the other hand, there would be nothing new to a freethinking persuasive psychologist here (“freethinking” would be a bit redundant, since I’ve never found a religious one). The balance of the book probably doesn’t provide too much new material for those who have read Sagan, Mills, Dawkins, Harris, etc., but it could serve as an inclusive summary refutation for those who haven’t. This portion is more of a fun project in the tradition of Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation.

So purchase it if you want, but I would also highly recommend reading all of the books I mentioned here in their entirety sooner or later. If you’re looking for an in depth scholarly discussion of apologetic views, by all means, read John’s book, not mine. His terrific work points out specifically why apologists are incorrect; mine points out why they’re unreliable to begin with. I’m also sending a copy to John as thanks for inviting me to contribute on his blog. If he reads it, I’m sure he’ll let you know what he thinks. So get it, read it, praise it, or trash it if you want; I don’t care. I can at least be proud that I made a serious effort to leave humanity better than I found it.