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RR 2007/116 Dictionary of Atheism, Skepticism and Humanism Bill Cooke Prometheus Books Amherst, NY 2006 637 pp. ISBN 978 1 59102 299 2 £52/$70
Keywords Dictionaries, Humanistic philosophy
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120710738003
The starting point of this book, which is set firmly in the highly respectable tradition of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, was a chance comment by the British humanist Barbara Smoker lamenting that there had never been a revision of Joseph McCabe's Rationalist Encyclopedia. Cooke emphasises in his preface that his work is intended for those who like to think for themselves and are not prepared to follow a route set out for them by others. It is not, he assures the reader, a handbook against religion nor a sustained attack on the falsity of religion. Mercifully, it also does not have a missionary purpose to try to convert readers to atheism, scepticism or humanism.
What the work is in its outward form is...