The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Don't believe in God? This is a great book for you. Believe in God, but don't mind being disabused of the notion of God or think it can't be done (you've been indoctrinated to such an extent that there's no way you think you can be convinced otherwise), then you've nothing to lose by reading this (though you might want to read The Selfish Gene first to give yourself the full chance of being convinced). Dawkins who wrote The Selfish Gene and is an expert on evolution is an atheist. He takes a strong stand against the idiot zealots and encourages other non-believers to do the same. Stop letting these crazy people run the planet and spread their crazy ideas. I was pumped just by the preface.

It's actually quite funny in parts. People have made all kind of weird, illogical arguments for the existence of God. With well written prose, Dawkins pretty much takes apart all the faulty reasoning (circular, non-sequitur, etc). In fact, he points out that the founding fathers of America were in fact extremely secular for the day and fought to remove references to religion (Christianity) in founding documents. Overall he does a great job at systematically discussing and refuting all the reasons people have given for why God exists. He also discusses why religion came about (homo sapiens tendency to personify unexplained agency), but isn't needed and is in fact bad for humanity. (A key reason is that it indoctrinates children into accepting religious tenets as truth without question/thinking. This primes them for atrocities such as suicide bombing or setting abortion clinics on fire.)

One of the main reasons people have for the existence of God, is that things are too complicated to have come to be without some higher intelligence. As a scientist and key proponent of evolution, Dawkins obviously disagrees. Complex organisms have taken a long time but slowly evolved to become more complex. Looking at the end result or culmination of evolution -- people, trees, even the smallest ant, it's quite truly wonderous, but it's the end of a process which survival advantages benefited ancestors and propagation of their genes. Those less wonderously adapted to survival simply did not survive, but they have even left fossils behind as proof of their existence. There is no need for a God acting in 7 days. Dawkins excoriates people who are too lazy to understand the science appropriately and would rather cling to old superstitions which were used to explain the world before science came to understand it.

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Personally, I think it's just the idea of heaven which sustains religion (okay, in conjunction with early childhood brainwashing). People are just too blindly hopeful of something magically like life after life to accept the true deadness of death. Wishful thinking. Hey people snap out of it!