That would be my first choice.
For Sherman, Why People Believe Weird Things.
(Quick check of my bookshelf, that would be Shermer, not Sherman.)
The title sounds like a reference to Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian .
I have that one too…good read. Also interesting is The Lucifer Principle.
Why people believe weird things focuses much less on religion than it does on case studies about Holocaust denial, witch hunts, Randian cults, and creationism. It doesn’t really touch as much on theistic arguments as does How we Believe.
You could always try Alvin Plantinga for some fairly high powered arguments for the existence of god. I don’t happen to agree with most of them, but it’s definately high level, well thought out stuff.
Indeed it is, though I’m unfamiliar with Russel’s work.
I have Atheism, the Case Against God but I wouldn’t recommend it. Smith’s arguments have many holes in them, speaking as an atheist. For instance, his arguments against first cause is that matter is eternal, which is just wrong. Russell’s book, though a collection of essays, is much better, IMO.
Another one I like is Atheism: A Reader edited by S. T. Joshi. It is a collection of essays about atheism, and includes one from Demon Haunted World.
Didn’t someone dub C.S. Lewis “Apostle to the Skeptics”?
Appropriate for this thread.
Michael Shermer’s How We Believe is the best I’ve read, beside
Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World.
It may sound odd, but a great book that helps one with critical thinking is How To Think Straight About Psychology by Keith Stanovich.
More to the theistic study would be any book by Mircea Eliade, Huston Smith, Karen Armstrong. They are more concerned with the history and theory of religions, but the more one knows about Other religions, the clearer it is that they are all about the same thing, just different symbols and methods.
An interesting, but ultimately IMHO unconvincing argument from the theist side is “Finding Darwin’s God” by Kenneth Miller.