This is a history of the changes to my book, God? Leaving Christianity, which originally began as a collection of stand alone religious essays. Prior to the major revision in 2023, I had maintained separate revision numbers for online and print editions. Because so many of the online revisions were minor and because even I no longer remember which updates I was counting as big enough to get new revision numbers, I've decided to stop tracking online revision numbers, and simplify things by using just the print edition numbering (though I'm still showing all changes by date below). So, the most current edition of the book is now the Fourth Edition, both in print and online.

• 2023-09-12 – Fourth Edition
  • This was a major revision to the entire book. I updated and rearranged things quite a bit, purged or replaced a lot of the clumsier writing and sections where my views have changed, pulled in a lot of my newer writings, and did a bit of new writing just for this edition. The previous editions were mostly collections of stand alone essays where I tried to preserve my views from throughout my transition to atheism. This new edition presents a much more unified, coherent message that better reflects my current views.
• 2015-06-23 – Print Edition 3
  • Made numerous small revisions throughout the book, including fixing typos and additional footnotes.
  • Created a third edition of the print version on LuLu.com to incorporate the changes.
  • Updated the PDFs to incorporate the changes.
  • Made a few small changes to the layout and wording of this page, including a new title.
  • Removed link to Soapbox entries since they've all been reposted to the blog and are included there.
• 2013-06-27 – Print Edition 2
  • Added an essay, Book Review - More Than a Carpenter.
  • Added an essay, Standards of Evidence for Religion.
  • Made numerous small revisions in several essays.
  • Created a second edition of the print version on LuLu.com to incorporate the above changes.
  • Updated the PDFs to incorporate the above changes.
  • Added a new PDF supplement with the new essays for those people that have the first print edition of the book.
• 2010-12-20 – Print Edition 1
  • Added an essay, Liar, Lunatic, or Lord ... Or Something Else.
  • Added an essay, How Monotheistic is Christianity?.
  • Added an essay, What's the Point of Intercessory Prayer?.
  • Made numerous small revisions in several essays.
  • Changed formatting of PDF copy of all essays - added a cover and an index.
  • Reorganized this index page - added a 'Note from the Author', put HTML version of essays at top, consolidated PDFs into 'PDF & Print Versions' section, added a link to Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus.
• 2010-03-19
  • Added an essay, Confidence in Scientific Knowledge.
  • Added an essay, Reasons for Strong Atheism.
  • Made numerous revisions in several essays.
• 2009-08-19
  • Added an essay, A Brief Introduction to Non-Belief.
  • Corrected numerous typos in several essays.
• 2008-10-02
  • Converted the individual essays to HTML format. Hopefully, this will make the essays more accessible to people who don't want to download pdf files.
  • Revised general introduction to all essays.
  • Added an essay, Further Musings on the Soul
  • Added an essay, Pascal's Wager
  • Made numerous, small changes to several of the essays
  • Added more commentary to the essay, Problems With a Day-Age Intepretation of Genesis
• 2008-04-08
  • Made a few very small changes to the first essay, Abandoning Christianity, including rewording a few sections, and adding a few more footnotes.
  • In the essay, Confidence in Historical Knowledge, added a note about Omphalos Theory, or Last Thursdayism, to the appropriate section, and added a note about Charles Lyell to the section on plate tectonics, as well as a few slight changes to wording in other sections.
  • In the combined Religious Essays pdf, I changed the formatting of the headers & footers - adding the title of each essay to the header, and including page numbers of the format, "Page x of x," in the footer.
• 2007-11-06
  • A very small correction, that should have been caught for the September update - corrected the Table of Contents in the combined Religious Essays pdf. Previously, it showed "Error! Bookmark not defined" for one of the essays, instead of the page number.
• 2007-09-07
  • Updated the essay, E-mail Correspondence- Children & Religion, and incorporated the new version into the document for all essays combined. Since I hadn't asked the correspondent's permission for sharing his views, now that I've made this a public page, I figured I would make him anonymous.
• 2007-08-22
  • Updated the first essay, Abandoning Christianity, and incorporated the new version into the document for all essays combined. I made a few small changes to wording or added new sentences/phrases to better explain points in several places. Additionally, I added several footnotes listing references. Many of these references were simply urls to web pages, so this is still not anywhere near a scholarly article, but at least when I make statements like, "Some people say...," the reader can see who these "some people" are, and see that I'm not just making things up.
• 2007-07-10
  • Converted all essays to .pdf format for easier viewing & better compatibility with other systems (originally most were MS Word, with a few html).
  • Removed the three outdated essays that were superceded by "Abandoning Christianity."
  • Added the essay, "Am I Religious."
  • Created a .pdf combining all essays, for "one stop shopping."
  • Added dates to file names of all essays to enable easier tracking of changes in the future. Note that the current dates (2007-07-10) don't necessarily reflect when the particular essays were last changed, but rather will serve as a baseline for future changes.