Maybe it's best for someone who is coming from a strong religious background and needs a starter to break the religion from their mind?
I doubt that their epistemology will let them accept the "fact" that life, including them, can be reduced to molecular interactions. I once exposed an extreme irrationalist / theist to evolutionary ideas, and he said to me that all evolutionists, Dawkins being the prime example, are sponsored by The Enemy -- and he meant "sponsored" in a literal sense, by paying money.
(On the other hand, I succeeded in converting one of my programmers into Evolutianity, but he was a pretty smart and rational guy in the first place, perhaps just a bit new-agey).
I think the Selfish Gene and other popular (but technically accurate) introductions to evolution are best for fence-sitters, not for strongly religious people. And I feel that there's a lot of fence-sitters among religious people these days.
This has been discussed in passing several times, but I thought it might be worthwhile to collect a list of recommended reading for new members and/or aspiring rationalists. There's probably going to be plenty of overlap with the SingInst reading list, but I think the purposes of the two are sufficiently distinct that a separate list is appropriate.
Some requests:
Happy posting!
PS - Is there a "New Readers Start Here" page, or something similar (aside from "About")? I seem to remember someone talking about one, but I can't find it.
1"Everything Eliezer has ever written (since 2001)... twice!" while likely a highly beneficial suggestion for every single human being in existence, is not an acceptable entry. A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation is fine. If you're not sure whether to classify something as "an essay" or "a blog post", there is a little-known trick to distinguish the two: essays contain small nuggets of vanadium ore, and blog posts contain shreds of palladium. Alternatively, just use your best judgement.