Product Description

From the new afterword by the author:

Humanity has had a long fascination with blood sacrifice. In fact, it has been by no means uncommon for a child to be born into this world only to be patiently and lovingly reared by religious maniacs, who believe that the best way to keep the sun on its course or to ensure a rich harvest is to lead him by tender hand into a field or to a mountaintop and bury, butcher, or burn him alive as offering to an invisible God. The notion that Jesus Christ died for our sins and that his death constitutes a successful propitiation of a “loving” God is a direct and undisguised inheritance of the superstitious bloodletting that has plagued bewildered people throughout history. . .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2080 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-08
• Released on: 2008-01-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Review
"A breath of fresh fire." —Wall Street Journal

“I dare you to read this book...it will not leave you unchanged. Read it if it is the last thing you do.” —Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion

“It’s a shame that not everyone in this country will read Sam Harris’ marvelous little book Letter to a Christian Nation. They won’t but they should.” —Leonard Susskind, Felix Bloch Professor in theoretical physics, Stanford University

About the Author
Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times best seller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, which won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). His work has been discussed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Economist, and New Scientist, among many other journals, and he has made television appearances on The O'Reilly Factor, Scarborough Country, Faith Under Fire, and Book TV.

Customer Reviews

Live and Let Live
Mr. Harris makes a very important point very effectively. At our nation's founding, a great many of the people had a consciousness of how important it was not to deny the freedom of conscience to anyone. The history of Europe and Christianity is full of the oppression, persecution, and brutal violence of people who disagreed on what God commanded people to kill for. Through the slaughter of heretics and blasphemers by mobs, inquisitions, and culminating in the horror of the conflict between the Reformation movement of Protestants and the Counter-Reformation of Catholics that covered the continent with blood and whose violence still continues, people had grown weary of the fight and come here to escape from the dictates of established churches. When we got here, we began making the same mistake all over again, as when the Hartford Baptists were prevented from worshipping by the Episcopalian authorities of the locally established church. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison together with a coalition of followers of non-established churches, including Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, and Unitarians, among others, set down in the Constitution and laws that the government wasn't to meddle in religious affairs, and established a tradition that our nation would protect the freedom of conscience of all. This book re-asserts this tradition and clearly opposes the current efforts of Fundamentalist Christians to impose their values and beliefs on everyone else. His arguments should persuade all but the most fanatic and pious that we're better off without a national religion and need to find another way to educate our children not to harm others than to smack it into their heads with Bibles and telling them that Christian charity extends only to those Christians that have been government-approved.

Great read!
Harris does a fantastic job of getting his point across without being pretentious. Both atheists and christians alike should read this book.

Disappointly lacking in intelligence and scholarship
Disappointing. I read this looking for a well thought out defense of atheism. Something that would help me look at things in different ways and identify logical falacies in what I believe. Generally, I was looking for something that would make me a better Christian apologist. There are a few things that made me think a bit, but they were not really new things, they were just reminders of old arguements. I was hoping for an intellectual or at least a scholarly defense of atheism, but this book doesn't provide this. Instead, the author comes across as a lawyer trying to prove his case. Basically, the case he is trying to prove is this: Christianity is wrong and it is harmful. He comes across as a lawyer in that he frequently twists data to prove his case. A writer in search of the truth will never do this. One example of this is when he is trying to make a case that red states have a higher crime rate. To prove this he cites the fact that a large number of cities in red states have higher crime rate than cities in blue states. This is a very inaccurate way of comparing crime rates. If he had looked at the crime rates in the states as a whole, he would have seen that 8 of the 10 safest states are in fact red. Or, if he had looked at a county by county breakdown, he would have seen that the cities in question are all blue. It is difficult to take any arguements seriously from someone who twists statistics in this fashion. Another place Harris says that Christians who have advanced degrees in science who disagree with him are not true scientists and are mearly using their degrees to give their unscientific ideas substance. Harris does not cite any source for this information nor does he give any names or give any specifics on their arguement or any counters to these arguements. But, even more disappointing, Harris does not appear to be qualified to make this assessment. The intellectually honest way to make such a statement would be to find the christian scientists in question and find qualified non-christian scientists to refute the work of the christians and expose them as unscientific. Harris later trys to refute Intelligent design by suggesting ways in which humans are not well designed. Once more, he is unqualified to make this statement and he does not cite any qualified sources. His ignorance of biology is most evident in his apparent belief in recapitulation theory. This is the theory that says that unborn babies show signs of earlier stages of evolution while they are developing - signs such as tails and gills. This theory has been rejected by pretty much all credible scientists for nearly a century. I almost put the book down at this point in frustration. His strawman counter arguements are insulting. His lack of resources and proper citation of resources indicates poor scholarship. His espousing of recapitulation theory indicates intellectual laziness and a lack of knowledge of the subject he is discussing. It takes five seconds to pull this up on Wikipedia! If you are an atheist and looking for something that will feed your beliefs, this book may work for you. But, if you are a christian looking for a thought provoking defense of atheism, there are many far superior books that are more worth your time. You might find some interesting points to mull over here, but it's difficult to filter through all the garbage. If you have read the book and Harris' arguements are new to you, I recommend reading a Christian apologist like Ravi Zecharias. Zecharias provides a far more intellectual and scholarly defense of christianity than Harris does of atheism. If you are an atheist who for whatever reason like Harris, I recommend reading Zecharias so that you can see what scholarly and intelligent discussion look like.