Category: books

The ten best-selling books in history, and what I’m reading

March 31, 2026 • 8:15 am

I think the site below was suggested to me by Facebook, but at any rate one can subscribe for free. It’s called 1000 Libraries Magazine, and it specializes in news about books, which of course interests me.  Here, for example, is one of their latest articles whose title was catnip for me (click to read; you may have to give them your email and subscribe):

Now of course everybody knows at least one of these: the Bible. But can you guess the others? Some are obvious when you think about it, but others are not. I’ll list the top ten giving the number of copies estimated to have been sold. Text from the site is indented. I’ll also tell you if I’ve read them (total read: 8/10).

1.)  The Bible. 5 billion copies sold. 

Sitting firmly at the top, and likely forever unchallenged, is The Bible. With an estimated 5 billion copies sold, it’s the most distributed and translated book in human history.

What makes this even more remarkable is how it spread. Long before modern publishing, social media, or mass literacy. The Bible has been translated into over 3,000 languages, carried across continents by missionaries, scholars, and believers, and printed continuously for centuries.

I read this when I was writing Faith Versus Fact. It was a tedious exercise, and assertions that it’s a great work of literature are bogus. Parts of it are good, yes, but I always say that if there was only one copy of the book, sitting in a dusty “reduced price” bin somewhere, critics would claim it is boring—which it is.  Try reading how the Ark was constructed near the beginning!  It is considered a great work of literature only because it was influential, not because it was good. However, the King James translators did do a good job on the translation.

2.) The Little Red Book. 1.1 billion copies sold. 

This one surprises many people. Officially titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, The Little Red Book reached 1.1 billion copies sold, largely during China’s Cultural Revolution.

It wasn’t sold in the traditional sense. It was distributed, required reading, and a political tool. At one point, owning a copy wasn’t optional; it was a social expectation.

I haven’t read it.

3.) The Qur’an.  800 million copies sold. 

As the central religious text of Islam, the Quran has sold an estimated 800 million copies worldwide.

Muslims believe it to be the literal word of God, revealed in Arabic, which is why translations are often considered interpretations rather than replacements. Like the Bible, it’s recited, memorized, studied, and revered, not just read once and shelved.

Yes, I read it, also when writing Faith Versus Fact. It’s not only boring like the Bible, but filled with more animosity, bellicosity, and hatred than you can imagine. I was surprised that so few copies were sold: there are nearly as many Muslims as there are Christians on the planet, but their sacred book has sold less than 20% as much as the Bible.

4.) The Bhagavad Gita. 503 million copies sold. 

Part philosophy, part spiritual guide, part epic dialogue, The Bhagavad Gita has sold over 503 million copies.

Embedded within the Indian epic Mahabharata, this relatively short text explores duty, morality, devotion, and the nature of life itself. It has inspired thinkers from Mahatma Gandhi to modern self-help writers.

Yes, I read this, but simply because it was touted as a work of philosophy and because it had a big influence on India, a country I love. I thought it was definitely worth reading. I have not read the entire Mahabarata.

Robert Oppenheimer certainly read at least the Bhagavad Gita (and in the original Sanskrit!), for he gave a famous quote from it when the atomic bomb was successfully tested in New Mexico. Here’s what he said to NBC in 1965:

“I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu [a principal Hindu deity] is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds’. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

5.) Don Quixote. 5oo million copies sold.

Often called the first modern novel, Don Quixote has galloped its way to 500 million copies sold since its publication in 1605.

Written by Miguel de Cervantes, this satirical tale of a delusional knight tilting at windmills is hilarious, tragic, and surprisingly modern. It pokes fun at idealism while also celebrating imagination, a tricky balance Cervantes somehow nailed, even way back then.

Yep, I’ve read it, and found it good but not great. My bad.

6.) A Tale of Two Cities. 200 million copies sold. 

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” and apparently, it was also one of the most read. Set during the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities has sold 200 million copies, making it Charles Dickens’ bestselling novel.

Yes, I read it, but think there are better works by Dickens, like Bleak House or David Copperfield.

7.) The Little Prince.  200 million copies sold. 

The Little Prince has sold 200 million copies and remains one of the most translated works ever written. On the surface, it’s a children’s story. Underneath, it’s a poetic meditation on love, loneliness, and what really matters.

It’s the kind of book people reread at different stages of life, and somehow find something new each time.

Yes, I read it—twice, once when younger and once when I was over 40.  I didn’t find much new the second time, and thought it was sappy. Sue me.

8.) The Book of Mormon. 190 million copies sold.

With 190 million copies sold, The Book of Mormon stands as another major religious text with global reach.

Published in 1830, it forms the foundation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its distribution has been driven largely by missionary efforts, making it one of the most actively shared books in modern history.

Yep, I read it, again while writing Faith Versus Fact. It’s a straight ripoff of the Bible, confected not by God but by Joseph Smith, who apparently loved the phrase, “And so it came to pass.” The only part worth reading are the two “testimonies” at the beginning, with 11 people swearing that they actually saw the golden plates. They were all lying. Here’s the second testimony (you can see the whole book here).  Given the fraudlent way the book came to be, I always question the credibility of Mormons who think it’s true.

9.) The Lord of the Rings. 155 million copies sold.

One epic fantasy, three volumes, and 155 million copies sold.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth saga didn’t just entertain readers; it redefined fantasy as a genre. Elves, hobbits, detailed world-building, invented languages… all roads lead back to The Lord of the Rings.

Of course I’ve read it—who hasn’t?  I watched part of one of the movies, and was not engaged, since I had the scenery and the characters in my mind from reading the book, and the movie didn’t match, though Gollum was good.  The Hobbit is also an essential part of the Tolkien experience. You have to admire Tolkien for creating an entire fantasy world, complete with its own language—all while he was a professor.

10.) The Alchemist. 150 million copies sold.

Rounding out the list is The Alchemist, with 150 million copies sold. It stands as proof that modern books can still join legendary company.

Paulo Coelho’s spiritual fable about following your dreams resonates across cultures and ages. It’s short, simple, and endlessly quotable, a book people gift, recommend, and return to when they’re feeling lost.

This, along with The Little Red Book, is one of the two out of ten that I haven’t read. In fact, I haven’t even heard of it until now, though it was published in 1988, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. Here’s part of what I read:

The Alchemist (Portuguese: O Alquimista) is a novel by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho which was first published in 1988. Originally written in Portuguese, it became a widely translated international bestseller. The story follows Santiago, a shepherd boy, in his journey across North Africa to the Egyptian pyramids after he dreams of finding treasure there. It has since been translated into more than 65 languages and has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.  In 2009, Paulo Coelho was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s most translated living author.

. . . The book’s main theme is about finding one’s destiny, although according to The New York Times, The Alchemist is “more self-help than literature”. The advice given to Santiago that “when you really want something to happen, the whole universe will conspire so that your wish comes true” is the core of the novel’s thinking. Coelho originally wrote The Alchemist in only two weeks, explaining later that he was able to work at this pace because the story was “already written in [his] soul.”

The NYT take, archived, is here. where Will Smith, who likes the book, calls it “real metaphysical, esoteric nonsense.”  I don’t think I’ll be reading it: life is too short. But if you have read it, weigh in below. The author must be bloody rich!

I’ve recently finished three books, all recommended by my erstwhile editor at Viking Penguin, who knows her books. I enjoyed them all, and I’m reading another book now in preparation for travel (the last below):

We Don’t Know Ourselves:  A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958, published in 2021 Fintan O’Toole. I wouldn’t have thought I’d be engrossed by a history of modern Ireland, but this book did the job. O’Toole, a respected Irish journalist and drama critic, decided to recount the modern history of Ireland from the year he was born up to the time of publication, with each chapter encompassing a period of time.  As I said, I really liked the book and learned a ton, especially about the entangled and convoluted history of the Catholic Church and Irish politics during this period.  Even in O’Toole’s youth and young manhood, the Church was enslaving children and unwed pregnant mothers, engaging in financial misdealings with the government, and oppressing the Irish (condoms were legalized only for married people in 1979, and for the unmarried in 1985; while abortions were illegal until just seven years ago).  That the Irish came through all this shows their resilience.

Empire of the Sun, published in 1984 novel by the English writer J. G. Ballard. This is a “fictionalized biography” based on Ballard’s experiences as a youth in China when he was separated from his parents and interred in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai for some years.  The resourcefulness of Ballard, insofar as his depiction is true, is amazing, and the book engrossing. I gather that it was turned into a very successful 1987 film with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard and directed by Stephen Spielberg. You can’t do better than that pair. I must see the movie. However, I found I have a bit of a problem with biography turned into fiction, as I get distracted trying to separate truth from imagination.  I should just let that endeavor go, but it somehow interrupts my reading.

Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, published in 1982. Ondaatje wrote the Booker-Prize-winning novel The English Patient, while Running in the Family is a somewhat fictionalized memoir of his youth in Sri Lanka and of two subsequent visits he made there as an adult. It seems to be more truthful than the two books above in terms of recounting what happened, and the characters are surely somewhat accurate, though bizarre. It suffers a bit in talking about only the rich, English-associated people of the country, so one doesn’t learn anything about the Sri Lankans (then “Sinhalese”) themselves. But as a portrait of upper-class “colonialist” life in the country it is colorful and absorbing.

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt (1994).  I am visiting Savannah in mid-April with some old friends, and was told to read this book as preparation. It’s another “nonfiction novel,” about which Wikipedia says this:

The book’s plot is based on real-life events that occurred in the 1980s and is classified as non-fiction. Because it reads like a novel (and rearranges the sequence of true events in time), it is sometimes referred to as a “non-fiction novel.”

The characters are unbelievably colorful and eccentric, but they were apparently like that in real life. So far I’ve read about 120 pages and haven’t gotten into the main plot, but already the setting has made me eager to go to a renowned and beautiful city that I’ve never visited.

This of course is also a prompt for readers to let us know what they’ve read lately, and whether they liked it (I get a lot of suggestions from such comments). Your turn.

Alex Byrne recounts an episode of professional rejection involving yet another academic taboo

March 20, 2026 • 11:30 am

Over at The Philosopher’s Magazine, Alex Byrne (a professor at MIT who works in part on gender and sex), has written a tale of rejection that’s both amusing (in how it’s written) and depressing (in what it says).

Alex was invited to write a book review for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, an online site that publishes only reviews of philosophy books. Because reviews are invited (sometimes after a prospective reviewer offers to write one), they are rarely if ever rejected.

But not so with Byrne. Because he wrote a critical but not nasty review of a book on gender by a trans-identified male, Alex’s contribution was rejected—without the site even giving him an explanation.

Click the screenshot below to read Alex’s sad tale. Actually, it’s not really sad because his review will be published elsewhere, and this rejection does him no profesional damage.  But the way he was treated reflects yet another academic taboo like the one I discussed in the last post. In this case, the taboo involves saying anything critical about gender science or, in this case, philosophy, particularly about a book written by a trans person.

Some excerpts:

last October, I saw that Rach Cosker-Rowland’s Gender Identity: What It Is and Why It Matters had just come out with Oxford University Press. “Philosophically powerful,” “excellent, important, and timely,” and “fascinating, well-argued,” according to blurbs from well-known philosophers who work in this area. Timely, for sure. I thought reviewing Cosker-Rowland’s effort myself would be worthwhile, since I’ve written extensively on gender identity, in my 2023 book Trouble with Gender and other places.

Many readers will be aware that the topic of sex and gender has not showcased philosophers on their best behavior. It is almost ten years since Rebecca Tuvel was dogpiled by colleagues for writing about transracialism, and—incredibly—things went downhill from there. Dissenters from mainstream thought in feminist philosophy have been subjected to name-calling, no-platforming and other extraordinarily unprofessional tactics. As a minor player in this drama, I have had OUP renege on a contracted book and an invited OUP handbook chapter on pronouns rejected. My recent involvement in the Health and Human Services review of treatment for pediatric gender dysphoria has done little for my popularity among some philosophers.

I was not hopeful, then, that an invitation to review Cosker-Rowland’s book would spontaneously arrive. But NDPR welcomes “proposals for reviews from suitably qualified reviewers” (see above), and I had reviewed three times for them before. So, I emailed the managing editor in October. I was pleasantly surprised when Kirsten Anderson wrote back to me in December, “Good news! After consulting with the board about it, we’ve decided to move forward with your review.” OUP and NDPR were keen to get the book to me—I received a hard copy from both, and OUP also sent a digital version.

By mid-January I had finished, and sent the review to Anderson with the following note:

Review attached. It’s a big and complicated book but mindful of your guidelines I tried to keep the main text as short as I could—it’s a little over 2200 words. However, the review is very critical, and (again mindful of your guidelines) I need to give reasons for the negative evaluation, so I put a lot of the supporting evidence in the lengthy endnotes.

To which she replied:

Thanks for the review and the extra explanation! Your review will now go through the standard process, starting with being vetted by a board member covering the relevant area. If the length is a problem, I’ll let the board member weigh in along with any other revision requests that may arise. Otherwise, it’ll go straight to copyediting. After that, it’ll be published.

As I said, Alex’s review was not nasty but it was critical (there’s a link below), and he found a number of simple errors that Cosker-Rowland made. Here’s one:

I kept it clean and the overall tone was well within the Overton window for philosophy book reviews, which (as noted at the beginning) is wide. Terrible arguments in philosophy are common; more remarkable was Gender Identity’s slapdash scholarship and glaring factual mistakes. Here’s one example (from the review’s lengthy endnotes):

Gender Identity would have greatly benefited from fact checking. One particularly egregious error is the allegation that “in March 2023 there was a rally outside the Victorian Parliament in Melbourne at which neo-Nazis and gender critical feminists campaigned against trans rights and held up banners proclaiming that trans women are perverts and paedophiles” (158). The two groups did not campaign together and the feminists held up no such banners. The feminists’ rally, including banners and placards, can be seen in one of Cosker-Rowland’s own citations, Keen 2023. Cosker-Rowland even manages to misdescribe the neo-Nazis: their sole banner read “Destroy Paedo Freaks” (Deeming v Pesutto 2024: para. 100); although hardly well-disposed towards transgender people, whether the neo-Nazis meant to accuse them of pedophilia is not clear (para. 114).

I documented some other obvious errors and scholarly lapses in the review—by no means all the ones I noticed. “OUP should note,” I wrote, “that quality control in this area of philosophy is not working.”

Let’s reflect on Cosker-Rowland’s claim about the Melbourne rally for a moment. As a footnote in Gender Identity confirms, she knows that the gender-critical philosopher Holly Lawford-Smith was at the event. Cosker-Rowland believes, then, that Lawford-Smith, a philosophy professor employed by Melbourne University and an OUP author, is happy to attend—indeed, speak at—a rally at which fellow-feminists joined forces with neo-Nazis, both holding grotesque banners about trans women and pedophilia. Perhaps Lawford-Smith waved one of these banners herself! No one with a minimal hold on reality would find this remotely credible. Even more astounding is how this managed to get by the OUP editor and multiple referees—it’s not buried in a footnote, but is in the main text.

He found other errors that he didn’t mention in the review but gives in this piece (you can see his entire review here, in Philosophy & Public Affairs). Here’s Byrne’s summing up given in the last two sentences of his review:

Back in the day, we knew what it was to be transsexual. Transsexuality’s contemporary descendant, being transgender, is decidedly more nebulous and deserves an explanation. Gender identity as Cosker-Rowland conceives of it is of no help, and neither is obstetrical paperwork.

Some weeks after submitting the review to Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Byrne got a rejection that said only that the journal site was “not moving forward” with publication. No reasons were given. Alex wrote back to the editor asking if they would be so kind as to answer two questions:

1. Who was the board member who initially vetted my review? This is not blind reviewing, I take it. The board member knew who wrote the review. Seems only fair that I should know the identity of the board member. If the board member had reasonable concerns, then there should be no objection to making everything transparent.

2. What, exactly, was the reason why you have decided not to publish the review?

Well, reviewers aren’t always entitled to the names of those who vetted a review, but certainly reasons should be given for a rejection.  None were, except that one board member declined to vet Alex’s piece and the other “recommended strongly that it be rejected outright.” That was the only feedback he got. Byrne isn’t moaning about this, but his essay does have a serious point about the infection of the publication process in his field by ideology:

The philosophy profession has shown itself to be an institution of fragile integrity when put to the test. One can only hope spines will eventually stiffen, and academic law and order is restored. Meantime, we cannot solely rely on the fortitude of Philosophy & Public Affairs. I suggest that the Journal of Controversial Ideas starts publishing book reviews.

Amen!

Crick, Cobb, London

March 14, 2026 • 8:30 am

by Greg Mayer

On my visit to England earlier this year, one of my goals was to get a copy of Crick, Matthew’s award-winning biography of Francis Crick, co-proposer of the now well-known double helix structure for DNA. Like Jerry, I prefer the dust jacket of the British edition, and thought it would be fitting to get a copy of the British edition in Britain.

I first looked in the very extensive gift shop of the British Museum. It had many biographies, on a wide range of personages, but relatively few on scientists (or science books in general)– a clerk I queried kindly explained the shop’s offerings.

It did, however, have a fine selection of cat books.

My next try was at the Natural History Museum gift shop, which had a nice book section, but not nearly as large as that at the British Museum, and no Crick.

With the days of our stay running low, my wife and I did a half-day of shopping, and headed to Foyles, which had been recommended to us.

Checking Foyles’ website, the Charing Cross Road shop had copies. The store was a revelation– I have not seen a bookstore like this in the US for many years– I could have spent a lot of time there!

But we were on a quest, so we headed straight to the “Biography” section on the ground floor, but no Crick. A clerk explained to us that if it wasn’t there among the recent biographies, there was a large biography section upstairs. Upstairs, again, no luck. A clerk there, when queried, though, said right away to check the science section, pointing us towards it, and success!

I am not quite done reading it yet, but I have learned much and heartily recommend it. Although but a small part of the story, I was intrigued by Matthew’s account of how the order of authorship was determined for the 4 papers on DNA that Watson and Crick published in 1953-1954.

There were three other items on my list of things to find in London: first, Jerry’s favorite English beer, Timothy Taylor’s Landlord– done!

We got it at the Zetland Arms, not far from the Natural History Museum in South Kensington.

Then, an Everton scarf, which we tried for at Lillywhites, a big sporting goods store off Piccadilly Circus. When my wife said “blue and white scarf” to the clerk, he smiled and said “Chelsea, of course”, but when we explained it was Everton, he said it was 50-50 at best (they had maybe half the Premier League club scarfs), and Everton was among the missing. I thought we were out of luck, but we stopped at the Museum Superstore, a tourist trap souvenir shop two doors down from the British Museum, looking for some tea tins, but my wife emerged from the back of the store with an Everton scarf— qapla’!

I had also been hoping to get a book on British amphibians and reptiles more up to date than my copy of Nick Arnold’s book. There are a few such books, but, alas, neither Foyles nor the Natural History Museum had one. 🙁

Matthew Cobb wins big prize for his Crick biography

March 6, 2026 • 9:45 am

I told you that Matthew’s new biography of Francis Crick was good! Now Crick: A Mind in Motion has been given the imprimatur of quality by winning a big book prize in England.  Matthew sent me his Bluehair post below, and when I asked him what prize he won, he replied:

Hatchard’s First Biography Prize. Hatchards is a posh bookshop on Piccadilly where the King buys his books. I will get a proper cheque. £2.5k! 

It is a big check—in both senses:

I won! I have a big cheque!

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2026-03-05T19:23:03.888Z

Below is the site for the prize (click to go there). Note, too that Matthew’s book beat out the John & Paul: A Love Story in Songs, a book about Lennon and McCartney and Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealisme, a kiss-and-tell memoirSarah Wynn-Williams, who used to work for Facebook and who has been clobbered with lawsuits by that company and other people. 

And the site’s announcement:

Hatchards has teamed up with The Biographers’ Club to support the Best First Biography Prize.

The prize awards £2,500 to the best biography or memoir published that year, and has been won in recent years by Daniel Finkelstein, Katherine Rundell and Osman Yousefzada, Lea Ypi, Heather Clark, Jonathan Phillips, Bart van Es, Edmund Gordon and Hisham Matar.

This year’s winner is Crick by Matthew Cobb.

Go buy it, or take it out from the library to read it. (This advice is for people who are interested in science, but if you’re not, you shouldn’t be reading here.)

Congratulations to Matthew! I told him to use the £2500 prize to treat himself to something nice, like a vacation.

Amazon review of “The War on Science” volume rejected for using “woke” as pejorative

March 5, 2026 • 11:00 am

Reader Jon Gallant recently finished the essay collection compiled and edited by Lawrence Krauss, The War on Science:  Thirty-Nine Renowed Scientists and Scholars speak Out About Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process.” (Luana and I have a paper in it taken from our Skeptical Inquirer paper on the ideological subversion of biology).

Jon decided to leave a review of the book on its Amazon page (his review is shown below in the Amazon rejection). Yep, his submitted review was rejected. He sent the rejection to me and I reproduce it and his emailed speculations (with permission).  I’ve put a red box around the submitted review:

At first I was puzzled, as I don’t follow Amazon reviews and know nothing about the ideology of the site or company.  Can you guess why the review was returned with requests for changes?  I suspect you’ve guessed correctly, though we can’t be sure.  I asked Jon what he thought, and here’s some of his response:

Use of the term “woke” in a less than reverential tone is no doubt classified by Amazon’s editors as “hate speech”.  After all, it makes wokies feel unsafe.  My hunch is that the dopier Communications majors from the 2010s work as review editors at Amazon.  The better-connected ones get into the editorial offices of some Nature publications we have encountered.

In truth, I can see no other explanation.  The review was not worshipful enough of wokeness, and in fact made fun of it, even expressing a hope that it would disappear.  If you have another explanation, by all means put it in the comments. I had no patience to read Amazon’s “community guidelines” to see if there were other infractions.

I don’t know if Jon will resubmit his review, but I thought that this was both sad and amusing. The other reviews (126 of them) are bimodal (70% five star, 18% one star), and it’s also amusing to look at the negative ones, most of them finding the book guilty of association with the wrong people, or not hard enough on Trump and right-wing assaults on science (not its purpose)

The New York Times highlights faith again

March 2, 2026 • 10:45 am

Originally I was going to call this post “The New York Times coddles faith again,” but there is not all that much coddling in this review of Christopher Beha’s new book Why I am not an Atheist. 

What puzzles me is that the review is on the cover of the NYT’s latest Sunday book section. That position is usually reserved for important or notable books, but Timothy Egan’s review doesn’t make the book seem that interesting. Could it be that the cover slot came from the book being about . . . . God? At any rate, given that Beha’s book came out February 17, the fact that its Amazon ranking is only 1,562 (very low for a new book on the benefits of faith), and there are only 8 reviews (all 5-star reviews, of course), is not a sign that this is a barn-burner that will fill the God-shaped lacuna in the public soul.

Beha has previously given an excerpt of his book in the NYer, which I discussed in my recent post  “A New Yorker writer loses faith in atheism.”  I found Beha’s arguments lame, and I summarized the book this way, as well as provided information on the author.  From my post:

Even the title of this New Yorker article is dumb: “faith in atheism” is an oxymoron, for a lack of belief in gods is not a “faith” in any meaningful sense. But of course the New Yorker is uber-progressive, which means it’s soft on religion. And this article, recounting Christopher Beha’s journey from Catholicism to atheism and then back to a watery theism, is a typical NYer article: long on history and intellectual references, but short on substance. In the end I think it can be shortened to simply this:

“Atheism in all its forms is a kind of faith, but it doesn’t ground your life by giving it meaning. This is why I became a theist.”

So far as I can determine, that is all, though the article is tricked out with all kinds of agonized assertions as the author finds he cannot “ground his life” on a lack of belief in God. But whoever said they could?  But it plays well with the progressive New Yorker crowd (same as the NY Times crowd) in being soft on religion and hard on atheism.  The new generation of intellectuals need God, for to them, as to Beha, only a divine being can give meaning to one’s life.

Christopher Beha, a former editor of Harper’s Magazine,  is the author of a new book, Why I am Not an Atheist, with the subtitle Confessions of a Skeptical Believer. The NYer piece is taken from that book

You can read the Sunday NYT review by clicking on the screenshot below, or find it archived for free here.

Here’s the cover highlighting the book (thanks to Greg for sending me a photo of the paper version he gets).  Stuff like this roils my kishkes:

Reviewer Tinothy Egan is somewhat lukewarm about the book, even though he avers that he is a believer and had his own search for faith as well as an inexplicable faith epiphany. The NYT identifies him this way:

Timothy Egan is the author of “A Pilgrimage to Eternity: From Canterbury to Rome in Search of a Faith,” among other books, and a winner of the National Book Award for nonfiction.

So both author and reviewer, as well as the MSM (including the NYT), are rife these days with either promotions of religious books or softball reviews of them.  And all this manages to center on the search for meaning in these dire times, a search for meaning that always winds up filling the “God-shaped hole” in our being. That is something Egan apparently documents in his own book and is, of course, the subject of Beha’s book.

As I noted when reviewing Beha’s New Yorker piece, he went back and forth from a youthful Catholicism to a materialistic atheism and then found his way back to God again, always tormented by the fact that he saw an angel who spoke to him when he was 15.  As reviewer Egan says:

As someone who also saw something inexplicable (a long-dead saint opening her eyes from a crypt in Italy), I preferred the teenage Beha who was filled with religious wonder. Not to worry. By the end of the book, he returns to the angel with an expanded view. It was both miracle and real. “I know what ‘caused’ these visitations, from a strictly material standpoint, but I also know what they in turn caused — a lifelong journey that I am still on.”

Not to worry! That statement alone speaks volumes. But Egan continues:

In between are several hundred pages that make up that journey, almost all of it through the mostly atheistic philosophers of the Western canon. Unlike a traditional pilgrimage, this book is an odyssey of the mind. Beha debates the old masters: Descartes, Kant, Locke, Mill, Hobbes, Camus, Nietzsche and many, many others, but he starts with a poke at the “New Atheists” Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and the like — all of them now passé, in his view.

This tells you two things: the reviewer is soft on spiritual experiences, since he himself had one (see the link three paragraphs back), and that the author bashes the New Atheism as being “passé”, a cheap shot which doesn’t at all give New Atheism credit for pushing along the rise of the “nones” and making criticism of religion an acceptable thing to discuss.

But Beha is still somewhat critical of the scholastic tenor of the book, so it’s not a totally glowing review:

Beha is not a stone thrower or even much of a picker of fights. He reveres the great minds, to an obsessive degree. He’s the guy you wanted as your college roommate in the pre-A.I. era. Or maybe not. He’s done all the reading and even wrote a memoir about it, “The Whole Five Feet,” recounting the year he consumed all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics series. Just looking at the list makes most of us tired.

He climbed that mountain, so we don’t have to. But, alas, at times in his new book he gets lost in the clouds. Here’s a sample, discussing Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher: “Kant is here invoking two binaries we’ve already discussed. The first is that between a priori and a posteriori truth; the second is that between analysis and synthesis.”

But Beha is sincere, honest and likable on the page. I found his personal story more engaging than his intellectual one. He started to doubt his faith at 18 when he nearly lost his twin brother to a car accident. He suffered from depression and life-threatening cancer, drank too much and took too many drugs. (He was an atheist for a long time.)

But as for the things I highlighted in my own take on Beha’s NYer article—things like the “faith in science” that we supposedly have, and the “romantic idealism” that is coequal to science in its inability to apprehend universal truths—of these things Egan says nothing. Nor does he point out that many people (I’m one) have found satisfaction without God, though many of us don’t have a God-shaped hole nor are actively looking for meaning.  Instead, Egan’s take is anodyne, for one simply cannot get away with pushing nonbelief in the New York Times. What you can do is bash atheism in general and New Atheism in particular.

Egan:

Ultimately, atheism failed [Beha], as it did some in the French Revolution who briefly converted the Notre-Dame Cathedral into the spiritually barren Temple of Reason. The religion of nonreligion can be like nonalcohol beer: What’s the point?

I have to interject here to note that “nonreligion”—atheism—is not religion, in the same way that not drinking is a form of alcoholism.  The trope that atheists have “faith” is simply ridiculous. What they have is a failure to be convinced of a phenomenon when there is no evidence for it. But I digress. Egan continues his review’s peroration:

Beha is not interested in trying to sway those who’ve given up on God. He simply wants to explain what moved him back to the faith of his fathers, “listening to the whispering voice within our souls.” There’s no Road-to-Damascus conversion. He’s not blinded by the light. It’s more about his often miserable life getting better with the right woman, a Catholic confession, regular attendance at Mass. And that woman — “she was the reason I believed in God” — isn’t even a believer. She’s a lapsed Episcopalian.

If Beha doesn’t necessarily win his argument with Russell, give him credit for following the imperative of all sentient beings — to deeply consider the mystery of ourselves in an unknowable universe.

“I don’t believe I will ever see things clearly; not in this mortal life,” he concludes. “The best we can hope for is to be looking in the right direction, facing the right way.”

The proper response to this conclusion is “meh”.

Dennis Prager in The Free Press: Morality can come only from God, so we should at least act as if He exists

February 20, 2026 • 9:45 am

With this article by Dennis Prager, the Free Press officially raises its flag as “We are totes pro-religion!”  In article after article, the site has touted the benefits of religion as a palliative for an ailing world, but you’ll never read a defense of atheism or nonbelief.  Here Dennis Prager, conservative podcaster and founder of an online “university,” touts religion as the only “objective” source of morality. I suspect the “we love religion” mantra of the FP ultimately comes from founder Bari Weiss, who is an observant Jew.

But Prager is wrong on two counts. First, religion is not the only source of morality—or even a good one. Second, there is no “objective” morality. All morality depends on subjective preferences. Granted, many of them are shared by most people, but in the end there is no “objective” morality that one can say is empirically “true”. Is abortion immoral? How about eating animals? What is wrong with killing one person and using their organs to save the lives of several dying people?  Can you push a man onto a trolley to save the lives of five others on an adjacent track?  If these questions have objective answers, what are they?

First, the FP’s introduction:

If you were to name the defining figures of the 21st-century conservative movement, Dennis Prager would surely rank near the top of the list. A longtime radio host and founder of digital educational platform PragerU, he is one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals, publishing more than a dozen books on religion, morality, and the foundations of Western civilization.

His latest book, “If There Is No God: The Battle Over Who Defines Good and Evil,” hits shelves next week. Drawn from a weekend-long lecture Prager delivered to 74 teenagers in 1992, it is a full-throated defense of objective, biblical morality at a time, he says, when more people dispute its existence than ever before. Though rooted in an earlier moment, the book holds new weight: In 2024, Prager suffered a catastrophic fall that paralyzed him from the waist down.

“A certain percentage of this book,” he reveals in the introduction, “was written by dictation and editing from my hospital bed. Were it not for Joel Alperson, who also organized and recorded the entire weekend, the book would not have been finished. We completed the book together. It is a testament to how important we both consider this work.”

Next week, our Abigail Shrier will interview Prager from his hospital room, so stay tuned for their full conversation. And below, we bring you an exclusive excerpt from his book, answering a question that many of us ask every day: In a world where profoundly evil things happen, how do we raise good people? —The Editors

I’m hoping that Abigail Shrier does not throw softballs at Prager, and asks him about “objective” morality and his evidence for God. But I’m betting she won’t: one doesn’t harass a man recently paralyzed from the waist down, and Shrier is employed by the Free Press.

Click, read, and weep.

At the beginning, Prager raises one of these moral questions, and argues that yes, there’s an objective answer—one that comes from the Bible (bolding is mine):

One of my biggest worries in life is that people these days are animated more by feelings than by values.

Let me explain what I mean. Imagine you are walking along a body of water—a river, lake, or ocean—with your dog, when suddenly you notice your dog has fallen into the water and appears to be drowning. About 100 feet away, you notice a stranger, a person you don’t know, is also drowning. Assuming your dog can’t swim, and also assuming that you would like to save both your dog and the stranger, the question is: Who would you try to save first?

If your inclination is to save your dog, that means you were animated by feelings. Your feelings are understandable, and as I own two dogs, I fully relate. You love your dog more than the stranger, and I do, too.

But the whole point of values is to hold that something is more important than your feelings. There is no ambivalence in the Bible about this. “Thou shalt not murder” is not for one group alone. “Thou shalt not steal” is not for one group alone. It is for every human being. Human beings are created in God’s image. Therefore, human life is sacred and animal life is not. You should save the stranger.

Unfortunately, those universal values are not what we’re teaching people today.. . . .

What? You can’t murder a dog? What if the drowning person is Hitler?  And aren’t five human lives on the trolley track worth more than one? What would Jesus do?

And what other Biblical values should we take literally? Should we levy capital punishment for homosexuality? Is it okay to have slaves so long as you don’t beat them too hard? Was it “moral” for the Israelites to kill all the tribes living on their land? Is it okay for God to allow children to die of cancer?  (Of course, sophisticated theologians have made up answers to these questions so that, in the end, they find nothing immoral in Scripture.)

When Prager says that our big problem is that feelings have replaced values, I wonder where those “values” come from. Apparently they come from God. But that raises an ancient question: is something good because God dictates it, or did God dictate it because it was good? (This is Plato’s Euthyphro Dilemma.) And if the latter is true, then there is a standard of morality that is independent of God’s dictates.

This is not rocket science. But Prager sticks to the first interpretation, adhering to the “Divine Command Theory“:

In fact, the Bible repeatedly warns people not to rely on their hearts. If you want to know why so many people reject Bible-based religions, there it is: Most people want to be governed by their feelings and not have anyone—be it God or a book—tell them otherwise.

The battle in America and the rest of the Western world today is between the Bible and the heart.

And Prager sticks to his guns, arguing that atheists and agnostics have no guidelines for morality:

Millions of people today are atheist or agnostic. If you are one of them, my goal is not to convince you that God exists. But I am asking you to live as if you believe God exists, and by extension, as if you believe objective good and evil exist.

Why? Because for a good society to maintain itself, we need objective morality. What would happen to math if it were reduced to feeling? There would be no math. Likewise, if we reduce morality to feeling, there would be no morality. In other words, if values and feelings are identical, there would be no such thing as a value.

Imagine a child in kindergarten who sees a box of cookies meant for the whole class and takes them all for himself. Most people would acknowledge that the child has to be taught that this is wrong. But if values were derived from feelings, this child would keep all the cookies on the basis of his personal value that whoever gets to the cookies first gets to keep them. It’s not as though this philosophy is without precedent. It has been the way many of the world’s societies have looked at life: “Might makes right.”

Again, this palaver appears in the Free Press, which apparently thought it worth publishing.

What Prager doesn’t seem to realize is that an atheist can give reasons for adhering to a certain morality, even if in the end those reasons are directed towards confecting a society that (subjectively) seems harmonious.  For example, John Rawls used the “veil of ignorance” as a way to structure a moral society. Others, like Sam Harris, are utilitarians or consequentialists, arguing that the moral act is one that most increases the “well being” of the world.  But even these more rational moralities have issues, some of which I raised in my questions above. The systems adhere largely to what most people see as “moral”, but they are not really “objective”. They are subjective.

But adhering to the word of the Bible, and twisting it when it doesn’t fit your Procrustean bed of morality, is palpably inferior to reason-based morality. Indeed, the fact that theologians must twist parts of the Bible so that, while seeming to be immoral they turn out to be really moral, shows that there’s no objective morality in scripture.

Does Prager even know his Bible? Have a gander at what he writes here:

That’s precisely why the Ten Commandments outlaw stealing. Because stealing is normal. The whole purpose of moral and legal codes is to forbid people from acting on their natural feelings.

Consider another example, this one far more serious. In virtually every past society, a vast number of women and girls have been raped. In wartime, when victorious armies could essentially do what they wanted, rape was the norm, with few exceptions, such as the American, British, and Israeli armies. Only men whose behavior is guided by values rather than feelings do not rape in such circumstances.

Both of these vastly different examples prove the same thing: To lead good lives, people must first learn Bible-based values, mandated when they are children.

Has he read Numbers 31? Here’s a bit in which, under God’s orders, Moses and his acolytes not only butcher a people, but save the virgin women for sexual slavery (my bolding, text from King James version):

And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites: afterward shalt thou be gathered unto thy people.

3 And Moses spake unto the people, saying, Arm some of yourselves unto the war, and let them go against the Midianites, and avenge the Lord of Midian.

4 Of every tribe a thousand, throughout all the tribes of Israel, shall ye send to the war.

5 So there were delivered out of the thousands of Israel, a thousand of every tribe, twelve thousand armed for war.

6 And Moses sent them to the war, a thousand of every tribe, them and Phinehas the son of Eleazar the priest, to the war, with the holy instruments, and the trumpets to blow in his hand.

7 And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.

8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; namely, Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.

9 And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.

10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.

11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, both of men and of beasts.

12 And they brought the captives, and the prey, and the spoil, unto Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and unto the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the camp at the plains of Moab, which are by Jordan near Jericho.

13 And Moses, and Eleazar the priest, and all the princes of the congregation, went forth to meet them without the camp.

14 And Moses was wroth with the officers of the host, with the captains over thousands, and captains over hundreds, which came from the battle.

15 And Moses said unto them, Have ye saved all the women alive?

16 Behold, these caused the children of Israel, through the counsel of Balaam, to commit trespass against the Lord in the matter of Peor, and there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord.

17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.

18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

I suppose that Prager thinks that not only atheists and agnostics lack moral standards, but that’s also true of all the non-Christians of the world, as morality not based on the Bible is evanescent at best:

Again, you don’t need to believe in God. But deciding between right and wrong is essentially impossible without a value system revealed by God. If there isn’t a God who says pushing little kids down—or raping women—is wrong, then all we have to go by are feelings, and then doing whatever you feel like doing isn’t wrong at all.

We’re not talking about theory. We’re living in a country where every few minutes a woman is raped, every minute a car is stolen, and every few hours a human being is murdered. The people committing these crimes don’t act on the basis of biblical values; they act on the basis of feelings.

This is not a wholesale indictment of feelings. Feelings are what most distinguish humans from robots. Feelings make us feel alive. Without feelings, life wouldn’t be worth living. But feelings alone are morally unreliable. Guided by feelings, every type of behavior is justifiable: If you feel like shoplifting and act on your feelings, you’ll shoplift. If a man is sexually aroused by a woman, he will rape her. And, of course, if you have deeper feelings for your pet than for a stranger, you’ll save your dog and let the stranger drown.

If we rely solely on feelings, everything is justifiable. And a society that justifies everything stands for nothing.

So much for Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims, who march along with us atheists thinking that nothing is immoral.

This is not only stupid, but it’s not new, either. It was Ivan Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s novel who said, “Without God, everything is permitted.”  Prager (and by extension, the Free Press) is making a Swiss cheese of an argument here, one that’s full of holes. If Abigail Shrier doesn’t dismantle it in her interview, I’ll be very disappointed, for I’m a big admirer of her work. And she’s way too smart to buy into Prager’s nonsense.

Here’s Prager’s new book: