List Dump

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He is an outspoken advocate for ending religion and feels we should no longer respect the absurdities of religious beliefs as they pertain to public policy and intellectual thought. He is a tremendous debater and thinker and his work should help free thought, secularism and rationalsim make progress in the ongoing culture battle with religion.

Idaho Novelist Vardis Fisher (1895-1968) published thirty-five books, numerous essays, newspaper articles and single-handedly wrote the Idaho Encyclopedia. His atheistic Testament of Man series of novels documented the history of mankind from ape-man to modern times. He read over 2000 scholarly books in preparation for writing the series and spent roughly 20-25 years working on the books. The TOM books met rejection from New York publishers and the largely Christian reading public of the time and at one point he gave up entirely on finishing the series. But he pressed on in a desire to tell the true story of mankind and finished the novels finding small publishers and a small but highly devoted audience. He was a courageous free thinker and sacrificed fame, money, health and possibly sanity in the pursuit of truth. He's one of the greatest philosophers, thinkers, scholars and artists to have walked the earth and few people know it. I truly believe one day his time will come. Hopefully his books, which are currently all out-of-print, can somehow be kept alive until then.