"God, No!"

(Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales)
-by penn jillette
2011
Don't get overexcited. The title is misleading.
Not in the specific sense...penn's lead-off essay is exactly what the title and subtitle promise. His premise is this - if "god" told you to kill your child, would you do so? Penn dares suggest that the overwhelming majority of believers would NOT, thereby outing themselves as atheists-in-hiding. It's a sharp argument.
But don't expect a book devoted to theistic matters. Penn shoots off into more traditional memoir fare...his experiences in zero G, firsthand knowledge of what burning cock smells like, devout admiration for siegfried & roy, devout loathing for kreskin, sober partying with ron jeremy and a naked elvis impersonator...penn's voice is well-honed, and his writing smooooth.
He also takes a stab at re-writing the Ten Commandments. He calls agnosticism insincere, intellectual sleight-of-hand, and that the sins of faith are too life-threatening to be appeased (my own approach is sometimes still conciliatory, but not long ago i wrote an "atheisto" essay in which i declared i could no longer be agnostic in good conscience).
Penn also dives into his libertarianism, and his frustrations with conservatives and liberals. He makes good points, yet it also seems that libertarianism's devotees are so widely divergent as to be almost incoherent. Penn acknowledges this...indeed he's sometimes modest to a fault (while at the same time being somehow unapologetically arrogant). Libertarian's individualism, freedom, and the notion that we don't need big government social programs, combined with penn's atheism, misses an important point - religion as an institution isn't about god at all. It's about social glue. And in a property-based culture of competition, people need artificial, POWERFUL social glue to keep us from acting despicably. Is penn right about people basically being good? I think so...but capitalism without something to replace religion is just a confederacy of amoral predators.
But the book taken as a whole is rather fantastic, and entertaining as hell. Penn's forthrightness is admirable, and even if you disagree with him, you get the sense that he'd be delighted to talk about it, and might possibly change his mind if you made sense.
Would that we were all like that. We might even maybe save this insane world.