Amanda Marcotte wrote a short article on five preachers-turned-atheists at Salon.
One thing that caught my eye is that she mentions Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion as having played a role in Andrew Johnson’s deconversion. This is very interesting to me, as another on Marcotte’s list, Teresa MacBain, also mentions the book as being instrumental in her deconversion (see MacBain’s talk at Skepticon). This suggests the book is powerfully effective tool at deconversion, and as such it probably ought to be the first book we atheists recommend. In spite of a few misgivings one might have with the book, its central argument is correct and deadly in its force, and it has yet to receive a convincing answer from theistic philosophers even though it has been around over 200 years, ever since David Hume first advanced it (if you’re curious, another version of the argument is summarized briefly and beautifully in “A Counter-Clockwise Paley“).
There are two more former preachers that I think readers of Marcotte’s article might be interested in: the first is our own John Loftus. The second is the late Ken Pulliam, and I’ll just leave some links to his work for those interested:
Pulliam’s blog: Why I Deconverted from Evangelical Christianity
Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot: An Interview with Ken Pulliam
The End of Christianity – In which Ken Pulliam authored a sledgehammer of a chapter against the doctrine of Jesus’ blood atoning for sins.
