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A review by arensb
The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever by Emma Goldman, Charles Templeton, Charles Darwin, James Boswell, Daniel C. Dennett, Salman Rushdie, Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, George Orwell, Victor J. Stenger, Karl Marx, John Updike, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A.C. Grayling, Sigmund Freud, John Stuart Mill, John Leslie Mackie, Ibn Warraq, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Gardner, A.J. Ayer, Thomas Hobbes, H.P. Lovecraft, George Eliot, Penn Jillette, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Philip Larkin, Albert Einstein, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hardy, David Hume, John Betjeman, H.L. Mencken, Richard Dawkins, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Joseph Conrad, Chapman Cohen, Carl Van Doren, Carl Sagan, Mark Twain, Anatole France, Ian McEwan, Steven Weinberg, Lucretius, Leslie Stephen, Elizabeth S. Anderson
3.0
It's an anthology, so on one hand, it's a mixed bag; on the other hand, if you don't like something, just skip it and move on to the next piece.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this collection is that it shows that the "New atheists"' arguments are not new. I knew this intellectually, of course, but reading Mark Twain or Percy Bysshe Shelley or David Hume making arguments that still come up regularly today really brought it home.
Perhaps the most striking thing about this collection is that it shows that the "New atheists"' arguments are not new. I knew this intellectually, of course, but reading Mark Twain or Percy Bysshe Shelley or David Hume making arguments that still come up regularly today really brought it home.