I don't mean to insult unnecessarily but I can see how both a book like this and reality as we Atheists put it, is indeed very insulting to those whos beliefs we attack here. People who put faith before reason would find this a very hard read undoubtedly because Sam along with millions of others find that faith should be the last ideal to be propagated through ones mind. But faith is the ideal held foremost to these peoples minds so there is very little common ground with which to begin to converse on these matters in the most polite way.
All that aside this book is in the format of an open letter. Its roughly 100 pages is an easy read not loaded with overblown rhetoric but it is fairly simple and to the point. Some have chastised it as being "fundamentalist atheist" while attacking christian fundamentalists. It attacks the bible. So how can you believe in being christian but not believe in the bible is beyond me but I digress. It makes strait forward points that get to the heart of the matter and it WILL get you thinking. I give it a 9/10 only for being short even though that was the goal.
A couple of the arguments which I will highlight here is: Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girls parents believe - as you believe - that an all powerful and all loving god is watching over them and their family..........One wonders just how vast and gratuitous a catastrophe would have to be to shake the worlds faith. The holocaust did not do it. Neither did the genocide of Rwanda, even with machete wielding priests among the perpetrators. Five hundred million people died from smallpox in the twentieth century, many of them infants. God's ways are indeed inscrutable......Of course people of all faiths reassure one another that god is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that god is both omniscient and omnipotent?
Even if you don't accept that as a valid argument, as seen in genesis god wiped out the population of the earth himself or in revelation god will do it again, to the point of god doesn't care about death. It should at least set the stage for further arguments and get a person thinking.
If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures.....we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the bible (and the ten commandments [mine]) with a single sentence: Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.
Sam goes on to say which makes my point for my follow up: Imagine how different our world might be if the bible contained this as its central precept.
Reading the comment section of another review of this book, the commenter had this to say "Hasn't the 20th. century taught us anything? People like Hitler (who said he was christian but was not), Stalin, or Mao suppressed religion and murdered people who practiced it". Sam Harris says reason should win out but a government that murders its people, does that seem reasonable? SO, it should seem apparent but if not immediately so we should strive for building up that wall of separation of church and state that Thomas Jefferson fought so rightly for.
It is a secular state that atheists, anti-theists, and the like should and overwhelmingly do strive for but they usually don't get that point across. They, I, would like to see a world where reason wins out but that thinking is set aside for the singular, personal mind. The conversations we have should reflect this in that criticizing religious beliefs should be like criticizing any other fact or idea but that in no way means one should adopt a totalitarian view against such religious ideas on the scale of government. To separate church and state does not say to DISALLOW the building of a church or similar.
So go out and buy this book and get some neurons firing. In ending ↓↓↓ abraham going to kill his son on orders from god. Fortunately for Isaac god either changed his mind or figured he temped abraham enough.
