Free Republic

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition. Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that have...

A book fit for the garbage can. A bad, bad book. Sam Harris writes from a condescending, self-centered perspective, casting aspersions left-and-right and jumping to surprising conclusions from flimsy argumentation. The author's analysis of religious experience is simplistic and his anthropology rife with reductionism. His description of the Catholic Eucharist is particularly odious, even more so his assertion that it is a bloody ritual connected to genocide. Toss this ill-conceived clap-trap away and read instead The Fire in the Equations: Science, Religion, and the Search for God, by Kitty Ferguson, a more intelligent, thought-provoking treatment of the subject.

January 2005 Among the Non-Believers The tedium of dogmatic atheism. Chris Lehmann The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris, New York: Norton, 336 pages, $24.95 For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ. As a strictly intellectual proposition, atheism would seem, on the face of things, to have wiped the floor with the believing opposition. Still, village atheists are as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever...