A book I would highly recommend to the religious, the unreligious, the irreligious, and the anti-religious is The Closing Of The Western Mind : The Rise Of Faith And The Fall Of Reason, by Charles Freeman.

Freeman discusses the history of Christianity objectively, with neither the advocacy, nor the hatred, nor the hysteria that many others discuss the matter, such as some of those mentioned above. It's not so much religion or religious people per se that are the problem, it's when particular religious institutions gain or are given secular power.

Freeman gives a history of Christianity from what was going on before it existed on into its early development as one religion among many, and its major turning point when Emperor Constantine, for reasons more political than religious, gave it the force of secular power. Then, Freeman traces the results of that transformation from there.

It explains a lot, and it is definitely a book that needs to be read as a warning for our time.

Don Firth