Influences

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Christopher Hitchens

(1949-2011) Author and journalist. And inspiration for this site. His books made him a prominent public intellectual and a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits. He was a columnist and literary critic at Vanity Fair, Slate, The Atlantic, World Affairs, The Nation, Free Inquiry and a variety of other media outlets. He was named one of the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals” by Foreign Policy and Britain’s Prospect.
Resource: A Great Archive of his work.

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Sam Harris

Author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction.
Resource: Check out his Blog

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Dan Barker

Okay. He’s pretty cheezy. But he’s still got some good stuff to say, in a very “laymens” way.
“If I had limited myself to Christian authors, I’d still be a Christian today,” Dan says. “I just lost faith in faith.” He announced his atheism publicly in January, 1984. He tells his story in the books Losing Faith in Faith (1992) and Godless (2008). After 19 years of evangelical preaching, missionizing, evangelism and Christian songwriting, Dan Barker threw out the bathwater and discovered there is no baby there.
Resource: Freedom From Religion Foundation

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Michael Shermer

Bestselling author Michael Shermer’s comprehensive and provocative theory on how beliefs are born, formed, reinforced, challenged, changed, and extinguished. His most recent book: The Believing Brain. Dr. Shermer also provides the neuroscience behind our beliefs. The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning.

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Dave Bazan

Dave has been on a journey to freedom since our days at a fundamentalist Christian college together in the 90’s, he just got there a lot faster than me. I’ve always been impressed with his honesty, and unrelenting desire to be himself in every song he does, and have been rediscovering his older stuff with an emphasis on the lyrics. This one is a newer one and has such a reflective story to it. Hope I get to buy him a beer some day and apologize for being a religious asshole. Cheers Dave.

Noah Gunderson

This kid is deep. And talented. I don’t know much about him, or if he even gets how good his reflections on religion are, but he’s a local dude who still finding his way in the scene. There are 3 songs that have captured my essence, but this is the best. He taught me there is a better way to make people reconsider their philosophies – write a song to their god. It’s very disarming and non-threatening, yet highly contemplative. I look forward to MANY more songs from this guy.

Check out his site.  Stream all his albums and buying them too (which I encourage you to do if you think this fucker could help the world be a more beautiful and honest place).

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