Books like What has Christianity ever done for us? by Hill, Jonathan

Richard Dawkins argues that belief in God is irrational, harmful, and unnecessary, presenting scientific, historical, and philosophical evidence to refute religious claims and promote a secular, reason‑based worldview.

Explores how the early Christian Church reshaped Western intellectual life, turning a culture of inquiry into one that subordinates the mind to authority and accepts divine incomprehensibility as inevitable.

Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion's most passionate antagonists -- Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others -- have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance: so contends David Bentley Hart in this bold correction of the distortions. One of the most brilliant scholars of religion of our time, Hart provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists' misrepresentations of the Christian past, bringing into focus the truth about the most radical revolution in Western history. Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the "Age of Reason" was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values. - Jacket flap.

Explores the early development of Christianity after Jesus's death, discussing such topics as leaders and opponents, ideas that survived, persecutions, and how the average Christian worshiped.

In this sweeping history, Jennifer Michael Hecht celebrates doubt as an engine of creativity and as an alternative to the political and intellectual dangers of certainty -- Just as belief has its own history featuring people whose unique expressions of faith have forever changed the world, doubt has a vibrant story and tradition with its own saints martyrs, and sages.