Major Scriptures, Religious Texts and Influential Books

A repository of sacred texts, presented unmodified and without commentary, is sacred-texts.com.

For links to the sacred texts listed on this page (and others), we recommend the Religious and Sacred Texts site maintained by David Wiley. The site is non-sectarian, with an academic approach, and has quality links to religious texts (many with enhanced search and link features) in the following categories:

Major Religious / Scriptural Books
(Heinlein)

The plot revolves around the arrival on Earth of Michael Valentine Smith, the son of two astronauts to Mars who perished when the first manned trip to Mars lost contact with Earth soon after it arrived. Twenty-five years later the second manned expedition to Mars encounters Smith and the indigenous Martian race which raised him in their society.

In Stranger, Heinlein (an atheist) presents his views on a variety of topics, especially religion, sex, language, culture and politics. In one passage (pg. 290), a character is described surrounded by the major religious books of the world:

• Talmud
• Kama-Sutra
• Bible
• Book of the Dead
• Book of Mormon
• Koran
• Golden Bough
• The Way (i.e. the Tao-te-ching)
• Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
• other, unnamed books from minor religions

Primary Religious and Sacred Texts
(U. of Penn.)

• Bible
• Torah (Judaism)
• Talmud (Judaism)
• Chuang Tzu (Chinese)
• Analects of Confucius (Chinese)
• Mencius (Chinese)
• Tao Te Ching (Chinese)
• I Ching (Chinese)
• Avesta (Zoroastrian)
• Book of Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
• Doctrine and Covenants (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
• Pearl of Great Price (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)
• Qur'an (Islam)
• Hadith (Islam)

Holy Books of the World
(Brain Bank)

The following list is from the Brain Bank's Holy Books of the World reference page, which provides brief descriptions of each (27 October 1999):

• The Analects (Confucius)
• Bhagavad Gita
• Five Classics (attributed to Confucius: Spring and Autumn Annals; I Ching; the Book of Rites; the Book of History ; and the Book of Songs)
• Koran (al-Qur'an)
• New Testament
• Old Testament
• Talmud
• Tao-te-ching
• Upanishads
• Vedas

Spiritual Texts
(Erowid)

• The Bible
• The Dead Sea Scrolls
• The Quran (Koran)
• The Tao Te Ching
• Bhagavad-Gita
• Book of Mormon
• Talmud
• The Urantia Book

Prophecies Listed in Earth Re-Born

• Bible (Old Testament and New Testament)
• Buddhist tradition
• Nostradamus
• Book of Mormon
• "Life Readings" (Edgar Cayce)

Top 20 Most Inspirational Books Ever Written

Top 10 Best Non-Fiction Books

1. The Education of Henry Adams, Henry Adams
2. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James
3. Up from Slavery, Booker T. Washington
4. A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf
5. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson
6. Selected Essays, 1917-1932, T. S. Eliot
7. The Double Helix, James D. Watson
8. Speak, Memory : An Autobiography Revisited, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov
9. The American Language, H. L. Mencken
10. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes

Many of of the Modern Library Board's Top 100 novels are among the authors listed on the Religious Affiliation of Famous Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors web page.

5 Best Nonfiction Books of the Century

1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Pessimism and nostalgia at the bright dawn of the twentieth century must have seemed bizarre to contemporaries. After a century of war, mass murder, and fanaticism, we know that Adamss insight was keen indeed.

2. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1947)

Preferable to Lewiss other remarkable books simply because of the title, which reveals the true intent of liberalism.

3. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1952)

The haunting, lyrical testament to truth and humanity in a century of lies (and worse). Chambers achieves immortality recounting his spiritual journey from the dark side (Soviet Communism) to thein his eyesdoomed West. One of the great autobiographies of the millennium.

4. T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (1932, 1950)

Here, one of the centurys foremost literary innovators insists that innovation is only possible through an intense engagement of tradition. Every line of Eliots prose bristles with intelligence and extreme deliberation.

5. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (1934-1961)

Made the possibility of a divine role in history respectable among serious historians. Though ignored by academic careerists, Toynbee is still read by those whose intellectual horizons extend beyond present fashions.

5 Worst Nonfiction Books of the Century

1. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

So amusing did the natives find the white woman's prurient questions that they told her the wildest tales-and she believed them! Mead misled a generation into believing that the fantasies of sexual progressives were an historical reality on an island far, far away.

2. Beatrice & Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (1935)

An idea whose time has come...and gone, thank God.

3. Alfred Kinsey, et al., Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)

So mesmerized were Americans by the authority of Science, with a capital S, that it took forty years for anyone to wonder how data is gathered on the sexual responses of children as young as five. A pervert's attempt to demonstrate that perversion is "statistically" normal.

4. Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964)

Dumbed-down Heidegger and a seeming praise of kinkiness became the Bible of the sixties and early postmodernism.

5. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (1916)

Dewey convinced a generation of intellectuals that education isn't about anything; it's just a method, a process for producing democrats and scientists who would lead us into a future that "works." Democracy and Science (both pure means) were thereby transformed into the moral ends of our century, and America's well-meaning but corrupting educationist establishment was born.

Editors: Mark C. Henrie, Winfield J.C. Myers, Jeffrey O. Nelson. Consultants: Brian Domitrovic, Harvard University; Victor Davis Hanson, California State University, Fresno; E. Christian Kopff, University of Colorado; Peter Augustine Lawler, Berry College; Leonard Liggio, Atlas Educational Foundation; Mark M. Malvasi, Randolph-Macon College; Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Harvard University; Wilfred McClay, University of Tennessee, Chattanooga; Mark Molesky, Harvard University; George H. Nash, author; George Panichas, Modern Age; John Willson, Hillsdale College.

Top 10 Bestselling Books of All Time

* Aggregate sales of annual publication.

Source: Russell Ash. The Top 10 of Everything 1999 New York: DK Publishing (1998), pg. 123; "Rolly & Wells: Reaching a Milestone" by Paul Rolly and JoAnn Jacobsen-Wells, The Salt Lake Tribune, 1 March 2000.

"One Book" List at rec.arts.books

My proposal is this: I would like for each of you to decide on a single book that you would most like for the world to read for inclusion in the list. The book that, for you, was the most influential, or thought-provoking, or enjoyable, or moving, or philosophically powerful, or deep in some sense you cannot properly define, or any other criteria you wish to set.

I will include your name and email address, along with any commentary care to include on why you chose this book above all others.

This was is in no way a popularity contest, but books which happened to receive three or more submissions are listed below (as of As of Jun 29 1998, at which time the list had 777 different books suggested by 1014 people):

• Atlas Shrugged (15)
• The Bible (13)
• Lord of the Rings (11)
• To Kill a Mockingbird (11)
• A Prayer for Owen Meany (10)
• The Book of Mormon (7)
• Les Miserables (6)
• The Brothers Karamazov (6)
• The Catcher in the Rye (6)
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (6)
• Catch-22 (5)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (5)
• On the Road (5)
• Stranger in a Strange Land (5)
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (5)
• Gravity's Rainbow (4)
• Steppenwolf (4)
• The Little Prince (4)
• The Mists of Avalon (4)
• The Phantom Tollbooth (4)
• The Stand (4)
• Watership Down (4)
• A Wrinkle in Time (3)
• Anthem (3)
• Brave New World (3)
• Breakfast of Champions (3)
• Cat's Cradle (3)
• East of Eden (3)
• Ender's Game (3)
• Lonesome Dove (3)
• Love in the Time of Cholera (3)
• Magister Ludi (3)
• Siddhartha (3)
• The Book of the New Sun (3)
• The Celestine Prophecy (3)
• The Dispossessed (3)
• The Eight (3)
• The Fountainhead (3)
• The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon (3)
• The Power of One (3)
• The Prophet (3)
• The Urantia Book (3)
• This Present Darkness (3)
• Winter's Tale (3)