Skeptics Books

I want to encourage a healthy lifestyle for my family, but it is difficult with all the changing data from the news media, web sites, etc. This is a good book to help you make informed decisions on a variety of health care issues. I suggest reading it to help you come to your own decisions about what is the best choice to make for your lifestyle.

This book has been passed around the family and we bought an extra copy for our local library. In these days of overblown health stories that offer too much, it's nice to have Robert Davis sane and smart advice keeping us readers anchored.

Finally a book that isn't afraid to take on the drug makers and public interest groups who (guess what?) don't always have our best interests at heart. From cholesterol drugs to sunscreen, this book will save you 10 times its cost by telling you what health info is really worth paying attention to--and what isn't. Smart, great read.

Robert Davis has given us a good wake up call here. He reminds us how easy it is to get complacent in our lifestyle, going from diet to diet, falling prey to the latest fad health tips. "The Healthy Skeptic" doles out a good dose of common sense, backed up by a book-full of reminders to check out the research behind what we think is good advice - those "health" claims may not be supported by anything more than the air it took the promoters to utter their words aloud. A good read!

An absolute must read book for ministry leaders who want to better understand the process it will take for postmodern people to come to Christ. When I was a teenager, I went through Evangelism Explosion training at my church. Yet Evangelism Explosion doesn't resonate with people today, and unless we try to understand the 21st century mindset of post Christian people, our outdated evangelism efforts will continue to frustrate us. This is a very good book, a quick and very simple and easy to understand read about understanding how to relate and reach postmoderns for Christ

I was a little worried about the book's approach when it stated it that there are five stages a pre-christian goes through before understanding what it takes to make a commitment to Jesus (as in, "Oh no, not another formula..."). But as I read I saw these stages as not being so much "steps to peace with God" but more like "steps to understanding the journey they are on". It is a book that snaps everything into place in your head if you have ever tried to unsuccessfully (or successfully) lead someone to Jesus. You will say, "Oh, that's why that person reacted the way they did!". Many times we operate on a different level than people are on. Too many times we are too eager to dump all of our knowledge and training on someone who is asking for just a little understanding. Other times people are ready to make the commitment but we are not seeing it and we let the opportunity pass. This book helps you to discern where people are in their quest for Christ as well as letting you know you are not the only one who screws up the evangelism adventure. A must read!

Don & Doug,

thank you and IVCF for this resource. With all the postmodern stuff out there I found this book extremely helpful. I appreciate you guys not entering into the whole postmodern church deal and just sticking to ministering to people. The 5 threshholds were helpful with subpoints for each of them.

thank you for your honesty and for listening to your community and to God about turning your experiences into a resource.

For so many of us, sharing our faith is a frustrating exercise. We have the best of intentions, but end up being jerks for Jesus. We avoid non-Christians like the plague for a while. Then some one or some thing convinces us that we really ought to evangelize. So we gear up with self-righteous, fire and brimstone fear of hell for the next round.

And we wonder why Christians have a reputation for being judgmental, close-minded and angry. Why would anyone else want to be a Christian when we make it look so uncomfortable?

If this sounds familiar to you, you are going to love "I Once Was Lost". Get ready to be amazed at how easy sharing Jesus can be. It's a freeing, wonderful book full of insights and practical applications. Not a how-to book on evangelism. More like a how-come what we have been doing hasn't been working. And biblical, helpful ways to see the whole process of coming to Jesus differently than you ever have before.

Emphasizing relationship over religion and loving over lecturing; this book will give you the confidence to share what you love about Jesus and let Him handle the rest. A very special book that every Christian ought to read.

Once upon a time, when Yahweh's nice Spokesman, Elisha, was about to enter Bethel, a gaggle of 42 children laughed at him and jeered at his bald head. So Elisha, in righteous indignation, called on his god to inflict appropriate punishment on the perpetrators of such irreverence. Yahweh promptly summoned two bears, and the bears mauled the 42 children to death.
Since the obvious moral of that exemplary tale was, "You don't mess with Yahweh's Spokesmen," it does not take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that its author was a shop steward for the Spokesmen's Guild.
Following his retelling of the "Elisha and the two bears" fable, Farrell asks, "Could this story really be true? ... Well, if one accepts the Bible as literal truth, then it most certainly is true." He goes on to explain how defenders of religion try to rationalize such biblical horror stories by arguing that "the Bible doesn't really mean what it says."
Farrell next spells out another biblical myth that no child has ever been taught in Sunday School, of how Jephthah vowed to Yahweh that, if Yahweh granted him victory over the dirty heathens guilty of peacefully occupying land that Jephthah's tribe coveted, he would offer up the first living thing to emerge from his house after the battle as a burnt sacrifice. That turned out to be his little daughter, and Jephthah obediently fulfilled his vow.
By the time Farrell finishes describing the incredible and incompatible rationalizations offered by upholders of biblical "truth," the reader is left to wonder, "What color is the sky in these people's world?"
This is a book that all bible believers, including older children, should be required to read. Of course that is not going to happen. But at the very least, anyone bothered by uninvited door-knocking missionaries should have a copy handy. If nothing else, asking the missionaries to explain why Yahweh's own official biography portrays him as so much less than a nice guy, should stop them from ever returning. That should be worth the purchase price.

This book brings some welcome balance to bible understanding that I think belongs in every home. My main regret is that the book is soft cover and I really would have liked such a valuable addition to my book collection to be hard cover. I also think that color would have added significantly to the book. Over all a short but valuable book. An eye opener.

Laying down his riffs like the red, burning hail of a fomenting heavy-metal maelstrom, Farrell french-kisses the soft parts of the bible like a rabbinical Ace Frehley on a mission - to inform. Classy pictures WILL NOT DISAPPOINT.

Anyone who's ever wandered into a doctors office or dentists office as a child or with a child will be instantly familiar with those 'illustrated stories from the bible' books that show children the wonders of god by telling all the "good" stories from the "good book" with exciting pictures and paintings.

This book is the perfect antidote to such books. In fact, I know a few doctors and dentists who might end up finding a copy of this book "mysteriously appear" in their office...

The shear genius of this book cannot be praised enough. The idea here is simple: Make a book that takes some of the most idiotic, brutal, sexist, racist, and moronic stories that are contained in the bible and tell those stories with artist renderings and modern language and then provide a commentary on those stories that includes chapter and verse quotes and the Christian "reasoning" for the brutality, murder and rape that their god has seen fit to include in the Bible.

The end result is a book that showcases the shear ignorance of many theists out there as to just what exactly is contained in "the good book." For every good story, there are countless others that can only be described as EVIL.

This book is not perfect, but it's damned close.

The illustrations, while funny and brutally honest to the writings of the bible are mostly black and white sketches, so there are no glorious renderings in oil of the 70,000 people slaughtered by God in the Books of Samuel and Chronicles. This is a pity because the mental image of a glorious oil painting of 70,000 rotting corpses laying on the ground under god's out-stretched hand leaves me giddy with school-boyish joy.

The author has an obvious bias and lets it leak into the examination of the stories outlined in the illustrations, and his commentary on those stories often includes word-for-word redundancy. Meaning that, in many cases, the author tells the story two or three times... It can be a little off-putting to read the same story three times in the space of three paragraphs.

Aside from these minor issues, this books a glorious addition to any agnostic or atheist book collection. I know that if/when I have children of my own, this will be the first book I use with them when the subject of religion and god comes up.

As we live in a diverse society, this book gives a refreshing outlook on Faith, no matter what your denomination may be.

Deborah D.

Reviewed by Nina Larson for Reader Views (11/06)

On the surface, Duane Campbell's book, "Inner Strength Defies the Skeptic," is about looking inside oneself to find your personal truth, path and spirituality. His main claim is that value and identity has to come from inside a person, not outside, and especially not from anyone who has a vested interest in skewing that identity for the worse. His stated goal is that he wants this book to startle awake his audience. Awaken them to how they have accepted someone else's priorities, ideologies and limits.

Despite an early claim that his work, referenced under the title of `The Awareness Project," was for "all facets of people, regardless of age, social class, racial or religious background, economical or educational level," pp17, I felt his target audience was clearly poor, black, urban Americans; especially males. This feeling is an example of Duane Campbell's skill in writing. What he writes is more layered then most authors' works. For instance, tracking back on my feeling about his target audience, it started from his repeated use of "man" and "mankind" in one chapter and of course the male pronoun throughout. This was startling since I had heard about this disassociation from other females in other writings, yet I had only once felt that way myself. I suspect this feeling was solidified from the poem extolling the wonders of black women and the next poem a dirge for the black man. As you can see, all of this is subterranean; and very different from his explicit words.

Much of the book has these layered meanings. On the whole, while his route to finding inner strength was helpful, I am uncomfortable with the sub text about the purpose and use of this inner strength. The author states that "some may consider the (main section) of (this book) to be radical and/or confrontational" pp19. I however found that section to be the best part. I can understand why he thought this since on the same page he defines the choice faced after the reader uses that section as either a "rebellion of an oppressive state of existence or the acceptance of a corrupted social and/ or psychological hierarchy," pp.19. This kind of choice is like asking a man if he has stopped beating his wife. By definition any answer is an admittance of violence in the past. Likewise, because the author only allows those two options, it defines you as either with him or against him.

The setup of the book brings this lens up early, in the first of the three sections. This first part explains the `Awareness Project,' the book, and about the author. The second section is titled `Outreaches' and is the bulk of the how-to. In this part, a poem starts each chapter. The last section, labeled `Flow,' is all poetry. All in all this is quite a short book and very lyrical. "Inner Strength Defies the Skeptic" is a great example of how different written English usually is from spoken English. The entire book has a rhythm; ponderous on the statements, dancing on the poetry. A minor quibble is that the first two sections are a little disorientating to read since almost all of his sentences are statements and each sentence is a different paragraph. This is probably due to his goal of having all of his ideas "in statement format and not within the terminology of the theoretical" pp. 12. And this format does make it easy to meditate on any paragraph/ idea. Mostly these sections read like they should be orated from a pulpit or in a rally. On the technical side there were a couple of grammar mistakes that might be deliberate since his poems used e. e. cummings' method of lower-case letters as the standard of punctuation. It did bother me that his great `Awareness Project' mantra of "Within the seed of an apple there lives an orchard invisible" was under a picture of a sprouted acorn.

In conclusion, I believe "Inner Strength Defies the Skeptic," follows the author's intention very well. This is not a comfortable book and probably has layers I couldn't see or didn't notice. I found his message interesting, the methods helpful, and the purpose disquieting. I believe this book would interest any person who is spinning in place, convinced that their value depends on what "everyone knows" is important. I get the impression that this is the first of many planned publications and applaud Duane Campbell for following his path.

An excellent book, that really makes one think, on a whole new level.
The book is great at giving u a diiferent point of view, from poems, to the author's point of view.
Very, very enlighting.

Campbell gives us a unique look at the strength, peace and needed balance that lives within the human spirit. This combination of poetry and psychological/sociological references gives us a candid view of today's African American youth. Extraordinary insight to the souls of the black american future. Read it and learn!!!

Beautifully written this book takes you on Connie's personal journey through many kinds of alternative healing. I couldn't put the book down, finding myself smiling with pleasure at each new discovery and revelation. Most important it opened me up to try those therapies I had never experienced.
An excellent read.
Diana Cooper

If you've never tried alternative healing and information sources because of your "conventional" upbringing and learning, but wonder about them, Connie's book is a great resource. You can find out about the possibilities in the safety of your own home. As the daughter of a medical doctor and a tax accountant, I really found Connie's book helpful in answering my questions and deciding whether to pursue some alternative sources.

Wow....What a great book that is long overdue. Connie has shared her personal experiences and findings for the betterment of mankind. This book was such an easy read with great insights to alternative methods of healing beyond the realms of traditional medicine. The last time I was as excited about a book was when I read "Many Lives, Many Masters" years ago.

This is a great book to guide people into opening up themselves and seeking a variety of ways to heal their mind, body, and spirit. It's also a great resource book with contacts for reliable practitioners and healers.

The whole time I was reading this book I felt as if I knew Connie. She captured my attention throughout the whole book. I have been telling everyone I talk to how great the book is and they have to read it.....

Connie Siewert has written a very warm and often humorous account of her experience with healers from multiple backgrounds. I was fasinated by the similarity of the opinions given by people who come from such diverse points of reference. From Enenrgy Medicine to Equine Assisted Psychotherapy they were all interesting and entertaining. I am sending this book to several people I feel will benefit from her understanding.
Linda Hudson, MS, LPC

This is a well written introduction to the question of how to approch the issue of life's origination on Earth.

Shapiro starts with some comments about the nature of science and of life. Next is a discussion of the age of the Earth. Yes, it is a "little indelicate" to ask the Earth for her age, but we do that anyway.

After that, we get into some early speculations about the origin of life, including the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis. This involved a reducing atmosphere and a prebiotic "soup." Some of its assumptions now appear invalid. Shapiro also attacks the fact that the step from abiotic to biotic forms is too quick, requiring a stroke of luck which is far more than astronomical, even worse than the numbers Hoyle and Wickramasinghe came up with. We can get better numbers just by producing a random replicator rather than an enitre organism, but that still can't be done spontaneously. Theories that simply produce nucleic acids by chance don't make sense. We need to find something that gets us there another way, with more plausible steps. Perhaps there is a substrate that can lock the ingredients in place, where they can evolve chemically. And the author mentions some ideas here. I think the most important point should be that it is always dangerous to say that a process can't happen because you haven't thought of a mechanism for it yet! A mechanism may well exist. You or someone else may think of such a mechanism in the future.

Shapiro then gets to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's ideas about life reaching Earth from outer space. And maybe the best part of the book is the way he shoots down some of their specific ideas and claims on the subject. This, of course, does not disprove the idea that life on Earth came from outer space (although at even odds, I'd bet against it). It just means that Hoyle went badly astray here.

After that is a discussion of creationism, where the author points out that creationists are "not so much interested in advocating the practice of religion, which they can do in many other, less controversial ways, but rather are trying to subvert the practice of science in areas where the conclusions reached by scientists do not please them." Shapiro also shows that the creationists really have no evidence to base their views on. Making snide comments about the evidence of others does not suffice to constitute evidence for their own views.

Shapiro then returns to the question of which came first, nucleic acids or proteins. He feels the nucleic acids couldn't have been first, and I agree, although I feel far less sure about it than he does. He concludes that life appears to have originated on Earth, and that the complicated molecules and structures that we observe in life today are the result of a long process of evolution. That's a sensible conclusion. He adds some speculations about substrates which are plausible as well.

I recommend this book.

In the Origin of Life debates, most books take one side or the other and argue that point. eg, Behe says God did it. Dawkins says evolution did it. Shapiro doesn't really present a point of view as to "This must be the way it started". Rather, he goes through all the evidence in a witty yet lucid style, and really gives you an appreciation of how complex life is. By the time you've finished reading this, you won't know how life started, but you'll want to read any book you can find and examine all the theories. At least I did. It's a shame this book is out of print, as its without doubt the best introduction to the subject around, even 15 years after it was written.

It's amazing to me that a scientist has to write a book about getting back to the scientific method in the search for how life originated on earth, and it is all because of an eight-hundred pound gorilla called DNA.

Robert Shapiro, a leading DNA scientist, says that our genetic coding is so complex that it is a major problem for the theory of evolution. That doesn't mean that science should give up, he says, but that real scientific method should be pursued, instead of religious or scientific mytholology, or unproven beliefs that are strongly held. It shouldn't matter to science how faithfully people believe in the Creation Story of the Bible, that God created everything in seven days, or in the theory of panspermia, that the seeds of life came from outer space. Science, instead, should be about science; it should be about looking at the evidence critically, obtaining proof, being able to repeat results, and standing up to skepticism, or negative questioning of the results. A lot of this is simply not being done, in his opinion. By the way, he sees no conflict between believing in a Creator and science at the same time, but that the two should be separated for purposes of scientific study. You can believe in God and evolution at the same time. I couldn't agree more.

The first DNA molecule did not have enough time for 'spontaneous generation' given the overwhelming odds of 1 chance in 10 to the 40,000th power (1 followed by 40,000 zeros). Nobel Prize contender Dr. Fred Hoyle, who coined the term `Big Bang' in the 1940's, came up with this number. In fact, Shapiro says the odds are much greater than that, 1 chance in 10 to the 100 billionth power. These odds have been calculated based on the complexity of the 2000 enzymes in the cell, each consisting of 100 to 1000 specific amino acids linked together in a specific sequence. Hoyle assumed already-assembled amino acids in the pre-biotic soup, and Shapiro assumed `reduced' chemicals instead. Bottom line, either way, DNA just didn't happen spontaneously.

Shapiro gives us a history lesson of where we have been scientifically and where we might go from here. He starts with the famous, but overrated Miller-Urey experiments where only a couple of amino acids were produced in an attempt to simulate the pre-biotic condition of early earth, a very long way from the completion of a DNA module. He goes through a lot of scenarios about the early earth and how the principal chemicals got together with the right energy sources to produce that first cell. He admits that it is all conjecture and that it would have to be proven in a laboratory. He goes over the theory that bubbles or mud in the soup could have combined and been exposed to the right chemicals and conditions for something to happen. He proposes looking into the Random Generator that could possibly be a sort of intermediate step in the creation of DNA. He considers the initial, start-up reversal of the Central Dogma of microbology: from DNA producing RNA producing protein, to protein producing RNA producing DNA. He finally hits the subject of panspermia, which says that life on earth originated from outer space. Bizarrely, the noted Dr. Chandra Wickramasinghe even proposes a hierarchy of creators, including a silicon chip. Do we start to see some desperation?

A lot of what he writes is technical, and I had to look up words like caovercate, eukayotic, lipid, enzyme, ribosome, organelle, etc. I also had to dust off my college chemistry memories and do some searches on Google to make sense of what he was saying. I don't believe he was at all showing off or talking down, but was making a valiant effort to communicate a complex subject. Frankly, I would have liked a little higher-level explanation of the detailed subject matter, but I'm sure he is writing for an audience that varies in its knowledge of science and DNA workings. He comes across as a humble man who admits he doesn't have all the answers.

He likens all this to `unbaking a cake' to find out how DNA got here. I liken it to de-compiling a multi-billion line program, going backward from the machine code to the source, something I've never seen done.

DNA and its first appearance is THE issue that won't go away for the origin of life on earth. It is still the eight-hundred pound gorilla.

During the Enlightenment it was widely thought the end of religion was near - and yet somehow the peoples of the world are in many ways more religious that ever. Why? Disillusion. Gurdjieff skillfully dissects our dissillusions in plain language and presents an alternate path to happiness. A masterpiece for those skeptics who haven't been able to communicate their issues with spiritualism.

This book gets at the heart of authentic spiritual practice. It is an antidote for the repressive and outdated religious beliefs that have been plaguing modern society for the last few centuries. Although you might not agree with everything Gurdjieff says, it is the challenging of our beliefs that ultimately sets us free from them. Take a chance and read this book, it could change your life for the better. At the very minimum, it is quite thought provoking. Highly recommended!

A must read! An extremely disturbing yet necessary book. Gurdjieff forces you to open your eyes and take a deep look inside yourself. You may not like what you find, but he shows you how to fix what you don't like. Gurdjieff gets at the core of spirituality, shedding superstitious and religious belief systems as readily as we shed our dirty clothes. Although the exercises seem simple, they are extremely effective. I highly recommend this book.

The sign of a good book is when you are very sorry to turn the last page! I liked the fact this book combines an interesting mystery with a facts about the United States during the 1920s to 1960s. There are lots of fascinating old pictures to pour over.

This is a fascinating true mystery! The historical comments are interesting as well. Much of the book reads like a "Little House" book, except for adults, and about a different time period. Humorous anecdotes add a personal touch. The author goes back and forth between the mystery of why her father changed his identity and left his family, to her mother's extensive memoirs of the period between 1919 and 1980, to things happening with her father's family in St. Louis, to world history events. The book is full of photographs stratecically placed. A recommended read!

Pete Shanks has written a terrific introduction to human genetic engineering and the fraught issues it raises. The basic question he takes on: How do we get what's good out of human biotechnology, but make sure we don't wake up one morning and find ourselves in GATTACA?

"Guide to Human Genetic Engineering" covers the cloning of people and pets, "transhumanism," eugenics, sex selection, designer babies, gene doping, stem cells, and more. It welcomes beneficial uses of biotechnology, but cuts through the techno-boosterism that characterizes far too much of the current public discussion of these issues.

The book's appearance is engaging, with a table or pull quote or something else visually interesting on almost every page. The writing is top-notch -- entertaining, even funny and intermittently irreverent, but without ever losing sight of the seriousness and importance of the subject matter. The author clearly explains the technical basics, and goes beneath the surface of the political and social controversies, but not so deep as to lose "perplexed" or simply curious readers. He makes it clear what he thinks, but it's obvious that he respects what others think too.

I recommend this book very highly.

This is a great primer and source-book on just about everything connected with human genetic engineering -- cloning, stem cells, the fertility industry, gene therapy (and how it hasn't worked), and even the history of eugenics. There's really nothing like it. Every chapter has got suggestions for further reading, there's an appendix listing all the best websites and books ... and on top of it all, Shanks can really write. Clear, concise, accessible; this is the best introduction to the subject yet.

Nobody's Fool offers practical and straight-forward information on every aspect of managing your money. Mr. Jacob's no-nonsense approach to maintaining and growing your financial wealth is the perfect tool. His language is clear and his tips are easy to follow and are based on his experience. He demonstates the truths of many of the common myths and shows how to put the knowledge to use in a variety of everyday ways. A great tool for families, businesses and anyone who wants to understand and apply proven techniques to create wealth.

Nobody's Fool: A Skeptic's Guide to Prosperity by experienced entrepreneur A. B. Jacobs is a practical, "user friendly" guide to financial ways and means written expressly for the benefit of non-specialist general readers. Individual chapters address the truth about Social Security, effective approaches to maintaining one's health, need-to-know information on mutual funds, and much, much more. Nobody's Fool is recommended as being a highly useful guide to the diverse pitfalls of the modern financial world.