The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

5

5. Brahmans or Brahmins are the priestly caste among the Hindus. Talapoins are Buddhist monks.

6

6. The ninth month of the lunar calendar, during which Muslims are to abstain from eating and drinking between sunrise and sunset.

7

7. Bomilcar or Bormilcar was a Carthaginian general (fl. 310 B.C.E.) who unsuccess fully sought to become tyrant in Carthage.

8

8. L. Sergius Catilina (108–62 B.C.E.), Roman patrician who attempted to lead a revolt against the government. Cicero delivered four celebrated orations condemning him.

9

1. Boswell never filled the blank.

10

1. In 1998, two international teams of astronomers independently reported unexpected evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. These findings suggest that the universe is not oscillating but will continue to expand forever.

11

2. Earth-based telescopes provided the answer in 1998. See previous note.

12

1. H. Kung, Does God Exist? (Collins, London, 1980; first published in German as Existiert Gott? by Piper-Verlag, Munich, 1978).

13

2. See the Appendix to The Cement of the Universe (see n. 2 to Chapter 1, Chapter 3, above) and “A Defence of Induction” (see n. 9 to Chapter 8, Chapter 21, above).

14

3. See n. 7 to Chapter 6, Chapter 13, above.

15

4. Cf. Chapter 6 of Hume’s Moral Theory (see no. 2 to Chapter 6, Chapter 12, above), and my “Cooperation, Competition, and Moral Philosophy,” in Cooperation and Competition in Animals and Man, edited by A. Colman (Van Nostrand, London, forthcoming).

16

5. N. Machiavelli, The Prince (many editions), Chapter 11.

17

6. R. Robinson, An Atheist’s Values (Oxford University Press, 1964; paperback Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1975), Chapter 8. The story is no doubt apocryphal. This book as a whole gives a very full answer to the question of the moral consequences of atheism. References in the text to Robinson are to pages in this work.

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7. See the works referred to in nn. 3 and 4 (pp. 246 and 250) above.