The book is called Concluding Atheism: A Primer for Newly Secular Free Thinkers. It went live on Amazon today. The link is at the bottom.
I was raised Southern Baptist. I left the way most people actually leave, which is not in a single dramatic moment but by inches, over decades, by displacement. There was no thunderclap. The vocabulary I had been handed stopped matching the world I was walking around in, and at some point, I noticed I had stopped consulting it.
The book is part argument and part memoir. The argument is the one I have been making here in pieces for years: the major religions were assembled by humans, for human purposes, in specific historical circumstances, and the supernatural claims do not survive honest scrutiny. None of that part will surprise you if you have been reading me.
The memoir is the part I did not expect to write. It turns out you cannot honestly explain why a person leaves a religion without explaining the family that the religion was holding together. That is the thing I learned writing this. To leave a religion is to take on the work the religion had been doing on your family’s behalf, and to discover that almost none of the work was ever about gods. My mother used the faith to handle griefs she had no other language for. My father handled his by never speaking at all. I grew up inside the space between those two strategies, and it took me forty years and this book to see the shape of it.
There is a dedication at the front. It reads, in part, “And for Linda, who was here first.” Linda was my older sister. She was born and died on the same day in 1964, four years before I arrived. My mother could not say her name without crying for the rest of her life. I never met her, and she is in the book anyway, because the book is not honest without her.
This is for the lapsed believer, the closeted skeptic, and anyone trying to talk to family across the divide. It is also, in its back half, about the political moment this country is in, and about what the religion is being weaponized into. You know that part of my work. This is the long version.
It is $7.99 on Kindle. A paperback is coming in a few weeks for those of you, like me, who want to hold the thing in your hands. If you read it and it lands, the single most useful thing you can do is leave a review. Reviews are how strangers find a book like this one.
Thank you for reading me to the point where I had the nerve to do this.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H37KYQT3
