Being Good by Simon Blackburn

One of the major sticking points of being religious is that you want to be a good person, that you want to help your fellow humans, that you want to be gentle and kind and those are the reasons we still need religion. Well, that is not true. Even if you feel that you need some guidance on how to live well and why you should do it when it seems that being evil is much more worthy, there are books that can help you in that regard. More than that, there are entire completely secular systems of why you should be ethical and how to best approach it.

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Review: The Non-Existence of God by Nicholas Everitt

Unlike, say, Dawkins, whose books in my opinion do make similarly grandiose claims, without a strong philosophical foundation, here we see that the author takes extra care to try to disprove the strongest arguments possible. He understands that it does not make much sense to disprove a weak argument and leave the stronger one untouched. Naturally, some would say that Dawkins’ books are written for a more general population.

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Peter Singer: Practical Ethics

WHY are you “automatically” good if you do certain things, we might ask – or we might dismiss such a question with a thought of the sort “because stealing is against the law”. Ok, but what about lying? Or cheating, for that matter? Are the answers always so clear? What about if you’re lying, cheating or stealing to prevent or stop a greater injustice?

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