The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

In the next few months, I began going to museums. I needed to see ruins and mummies and old dead people, to look at the reality of the bones and to absorb the realization that, when I die, I will become just a bunch of bones. Some of them were five hundred million years old, I noted; if it took Allah longer than that to raise the dead, the prospect of his retribution for my lifetime of enjoyment seemed distinctly less plausible.

I was on a psychological mission to accept living without a God, which means accepting that I give my life its own meaning. I was looking for a deeper sense of morality. In Islam you are Allah’s slave; you submit, which means that ideally you are devoid of personal will. You are not a free individual. You behave well because you fear Hell, which is really a form of blackmail—you have no personal ethic.

Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn’t be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion—which are to be a better and more generous person—without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.

After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heart-land often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim vision, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother’s angels and djinns.

The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.

Credits and Permissions

Dedication quote reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group from The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi. Translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal. Copyright © 1986 by Giulio Einaudi editors s.p.a., Torino. English translation Copyright © 1988 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

“A Letter on Religion” by H. P. Lovecraft: Letter printed by permission of Lovecraft Properties, LLC.

“Why I Am an Unbeliever” © 1926 by Carl Van Doren, reprinted by the permission of the estate of Carl Van Doren.

“Memorial Service” by H. L. Mencken. Reprinted by permission of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, in accordance with the terms of the bequest of H. L. Mencken.

From The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey. Copyright © 1961 by James Strachey, renewed 1989 by Alix Strachey. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Material taken from various volumes of The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, copyright © Hebrew University and Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Excerpt from A Clergyman’s Daughter, copyright © 1936 by the Estate of Sonia B. Orwell, reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Inc.

From A Clergyman’s Daughter by George Orwell. Copyright © 1935 by George Orwell, by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell and Secker & Warburg Ltd.

“In Westminster Abbey,” from Collected Poems, by John Betjeman, copyright © 1955, 1958, 1962, 1964, 1968, 1970, 1979, 1981, 1982, 2001. Reproduced by permission of John Murray (Publishers).

“Monism and Religion” and “An Old Story” by Chapman Cohen. Courtesy of American Atheist Press.

“An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” by Bertrand Russell first published by Haldeman-Julius in 1943. Reprinted with permission of Taylor & Francis Books.

“Aubade” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

“Aubade” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1988, 2003 by the Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber, LLC.

“Church Going” by Philip Larkin is reprinted from The Less Deceived by permission of the Marvell Press, England and Australia.

“The Wandering Jew and the Second Coming” copyright © 1997 by Martin Gardner. From The Night Is Large: Collected Essays 1938 ndash;1995. Reprinted with the permission of St. Martin’s Press, LLC.

“The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan. Copyright © 1997 by Carl Sagan. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC. All rights reserved this material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Democritus Properties, LLC.

“The God Hypothesis” by Carl Sagan. Copyright © 2006 by Carl Sagan. Reprinted with permission from Democritus Properties, LLC. All rights reserved this material cannot be further circulated without written permission of Democritus Properties, LLC.

From Roger’s Version, copyright © 1986 by John Updike. Reprinted with permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

From Dreams of a Final Theory, copyright © 1992 by Steven Weinberg. Reprinted with permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

“Conclusions and Implications” from The Miracle of Theism by J. L. Mackie (OUP 1982, pp. 240–262) by permission of Oxford University Press.

“If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted” by Elizabeth Anderson. Chapter 17 from Philosophers Without Gods, edited by L. M. Anthony (OUP 2007, p. Chapter 28-29) by permission of Oxford University Press.

“Genesis Revisited” by Michael Shermer. Copyright Michael Shermer. Originally published in Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com).

“That Undiscovered Country” by A. J. Ayer from The Meaning of Life and Other Essays Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, London © 1990 by Alfred Jules Ayer.

“Thank Goodness!” by Daniel C. Dennett. First published on the Edge Web site, http://www.edge.org. Copyright © 2006 by Edge Foundation Inc.

From Farewell to God: My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith by Charles Templeton ©1996. Published by McClelland & Stewart. Used with permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Excerpt from “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God,” from The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins. Reprinted by permission of Transworld Publishers, a division of the Random House Group, LTD. All rights reserved.

“Gerin Oil” by Richard Dawkins, copyright © 2003 by the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). This article originally appeared in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 24, Number 1 (December 2003/January 2004), published by the CSH in Amherst, New York.

“Atheists for Jesus” by Richard Dawkins, copyright © 2004 by the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH). This article originally appeared in Free Inquir magazine, Volume 25, Number 1 (December