Atheism and the librarians

While we don't know which books Palin wanted to ban from her town library, book banning and burning is not the only issue we may face.

Here in Hennepin County, Minnesota, in the US Midwest, my county library holds most every book in the Cambridge "Companion" Series but one: The Cambridge Companion To Atheism.  Oddly enough, the author, Michael Martin, Boston U. Professor emeritus of philosophy, Harvard Ph.D. has another book missing from the collection, his Atheism. A Philosophical Justification.

Although both of these books with "Atheism" in the title are available at Amazon or your local bookstore, the librarian with whom I spoke seemed satisfied than within the county holdings (which now include the Minneapolis Public Library) there are 136 books under that subject keyword of "atheism".

So when I got home and back on the internet I checked the Subject keyword "Christianity": 5190 titles.  That ratio alone is 0.0262 which might seem fitting if there were about 2% non-theists in our county -  if that were a valid measure.  I tried "Christian": 11106; Islam: 1268; Buddhist: 475; Judaism: 1946 - and now we are on the order of 20,000 to 100 or 200 to 1 and I am still counting ...

This is the USA, where Bertrand Russell once had trouble with permission to deliver a lecture at Columbia, as I recall - one nation under God. America where we are told that no single non-criminal epithet is so derogatory as "atheist".  What if you child married an atheist!?!

By looking for books by various authors, I think that I could bring the number of books devoted to non-theism up to the order of 300.  Let's suppose that I could bring it up to 1000.  If I add in the new wave of Christian fiction, Christian music I suspect that the 20k would creep towards another order of magnitude - and if the same criterion for non-theist were applied to classify books as theist, will this would start to look grim.

The books are available through inter-library loan from some local colleges and universities.

But one last sanity check:  astrology: 536; tarot: 164; psychic: 562 - and even supposing some overlap, we already have a discrepancy of an order of magnitude.

Not that the subject catalog keyword search is definitive, as we have Bible: 5357 but religion: 5316 but religious: 9297

Oh, and not to forget the philosopher Jesus, Himself: a mere 2319.