Book Recommendations

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The God Who Risks by John Sanders. I'm reading it now and I like it pretty good.

I'm currently reading Bertrand Russell's 'History of Western Philosophy', which fulfils all your requirements, although may well be in the public domain and you've probably read it anyway.

Again you have probably read a lot of Dan Dennet's stuff, but one of his most recent books 'Breaking the Spell' I would recommend - it is about religion, but not about trying to disprove God or not (he considers the arguments for that have been just about 'done' as much as they can be), but about analysing why religion may have started and what human requirements it fulfills etc. - maybe would provide some more useful ammunition in your strident atheistic stance, although he does spend a lot of the book admitting that we need to do a lot more research into religion, which has previously been rather untouchable in terms of being an investigative subject.

Susan Blackmore's 'Conversations on consciousness' is also interesting as she interviews the main people working in the field (neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, mathematicians) and asks them a series of questions about consciousness. It doesn't go into a lot of depth, but is a stepping stone to finding out more about the work of people whose views you appreciate. John Gray's 'Straw Dogs' is also a good one, although quite negative - great if you are feeling nihilistic.

Yes I have read 'Straw Dogs' although over a year ago and have to admit the details of it are hazy now (my memory is appalling). I was in quite a nihilistic frame of mind at the time and far from the book being provocative, I found it to be a very realistic view of things, but can see that it challenges the assumptions of most people, both religious and atheistic humanists. I think it is an important book to read - not the most well written, but brings up some interesting points. In fact I should go back and read it again once I have finished the 'History of Western Philosophy'.

If you want a more in depth book about consciousness I'm not really sure what to recommend as I haven't read a lot apart from Dan Dennett's 'Consciousness explained', which is now 20 years out of date and could do with updating, and Douglas Hofstadter's 'I am a strange loop', which is interesting but diverges a lot into mathematics, which makes it quite complicated in places, but worth a read if you are into consciousness.

In favor of teleology, I'd recommend By Design.

Well, I only got seriously interested in philosophy a few years ago, and found that I had already thought about most of the main topics and come to my own conclusions about things, not realising they were philosophy (never having had a chance to study it at school etc.). It seemed fairly obvious to me that free will was an illusion and have spent my life going from blind religious follower (as a young child), through mysticism and agnosticism to fairly strong atheism, before reading any of the arguments for and against religion. Slightly annoying though to find that most of the ideas I had, had already been thought of by other people. Still, this is what you get when you grow up in similar social/religious/political backgrounds. Most of my views on consciousness/free will etc. have been heavily shaped by severe psychotic depression, which considerably influences the way you perceive the 'self'.

i would recomend
lao-tzu te-tao ching
a new translation based on the recently discoverd ma-wang-tui texts
by robert g. henricks