This is a hilarious expose of one of the silliest (and most dangerous) combinations of religious nonsense and medical misconception. A classic that is still relevant after a century. (This is a downloadable free version of the book, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.)

Everyone knows that they are too smart to ever get sucked in by a cult, but when you look at the victims there are some smart people there who believed the words of conmen and liars. The difference with most conmen is they only take your money but the cults can take your family, your sanity and your life.

There are people who deny that the Holocaust happened; there are people who say that if it happened, nobody high up planned it; there are people who say it might have happened but it wasn't really that bad. Underlying all of this is a barely-disguised foundation of racism.

This book was first published in 1841 and told about panics and hysterias of the past. Updating the book to today would just require the addition of a chapter on the Internet stock craze, an update to the witchcraft chapter to include mention of recovered memory syndrome, satanic ritual abuse and alien abductions, and a new chapter about Y2K madness.

It is bad enough that charlatans hawk untested medicines and techniques to sick people, but there seems to be something particularly evil about people who claim to have magic healing powers or who claim to be using powers delegated to them by God. At least some of the quack medicine salespeople believe in what they are doing.

The book that helped to win a battle! Edited by Lisa Appignanesi, the PEN/Penguin book with thought-provoking essays by Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, Hari Kunzru, Howard Jacobson, Helena Kennedy and many more was published on December 1 2005.

Shermer makes the distinction between belief, non-belief and unbelief, and describes his own transition from one state to another. Religion and science have different roles in society, and this book looks at the boundaries and overlaps which are legitimate for each.

You might think the title of this book is a rhetorical question, but the criminal cult of Scientology is out there as a testament to Hubbard's madness so there are obviously still some people who can't work out the right answer for themselves. If you are unfamiliar with the cult, Operation Clambake is a good place to start.

You just know that the author of this book is hitting the target right in the middle when you see that an Islamist web site referred to him by using the words: "May Allah rip out his spine from his back and split his brains in two, and then put them both back, and then do it over and over again. Amen". Apparently the writer of that comment was upset about Spencer's view that Islam is not all about peace and light.

Buy this just for the "Tom Cruise - Trapped in the Closet" episode!

The title of this book might suggest that it is anti-science, but in fact the author posits that science is a natural part of human existence (and even that of some animals) because it is about how organisms explain and interact with the world around them. The author has produced a very good summary of the philosophical path through Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend, and there is commentary about the relationship between religion and science which mightn't please Richard Dawkins but which provides a credible explanation for the ubiquity of religion across societies (and which allows for religion to be abandoned when better knowledge comes along).