Customer Reviews

Letter to a Christian Nation

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This brief volume wastes no time in getting to the point: Christianity is what it claims to be, or it isn't. There is no middle ground in this debate. Believers are convinced that their faith is true and valid. Harris brings up many inconsistencies from both the Old and New Testaments that point to a man-made origin for Christianity, rather than the divine beginning we've all been taught. And his arguments are oftentimes very pointed and difficult to refute, logically. Emotionally, many believers will oppose it because it doesn't present the conventional view of Christianity. Indeed, many of the "reviews" here are testament to the hostility of many believers towards Mr Harris. But he uses the Bible's own words in much of his reasoning. In other places, he resorts to logic, an example of which I'll quote here:

(speaking to his Christian audience regarding atheism)

"The truth is, you know exactly what it is like to be an atheist with respect to the beliefs of Muslims. Isn't it obvious that Muslims are fooling themselves? Isn't it obvious that anyone who thinks that the Koran is the perfect word of the creator of the universe has not read the book critically? Isn't it obvious that the doctrine of Islam represents a near-perfect barrier to honest inquiry? Yes, these things are obvious. Understand that the way you view Islam is exactly the way devout Muslims view Christianity. And it is the way I view all religions."

While many believers will see this as an assault on their religion, I submit that Christianity is strong enough to stand up to a little criticism and scrutiny. If your faith is so fragile that it crumbles under Harris' thrust, then it wasn't very robust to begin with. But I think that Harris does a very good job of presenting a format for believers to examine their beliefs and gain some perspective regarding their religion in comparison to other faiths and to those who don't adhere to any faith.

Highly recommended.

I think its great the way Sam Harris defies conventional thinking in this book. As someone who has struggled with theses arguments with family members all my life, it is nice to be backed by by intelligent arguments. Also as a scientist I would like to say that it is nice that he has addressed the need for the end of faith as a survival priority for the species.

I just read that the "Harvard University Humanist Chaplain" (?) Greg Epstein is calling Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins the "atheist fundamentalists." "He sees them as rigid in their dogma, and as intolerant as some of the faith leaders with whom atheists share the most obvious differences" (Chicago Sun-Times, March 31, 2007).

It is not supposed to be a compliment.

Harris replied that "atheist fundamentalist" was ''a silly play upon words,'' noting that "when it comes to the ancient Greek gods, everyone is an atheist and no one is asked to justify that to pagans who want to believe in Zeus."

Epstein sees Harris as too rigid and too confrontational.

Harris says "In our next presidential election, an actor who reads his Bible would almost certainly defeat a rocket scientist who does not. Could there be any clearer indication that we are allowing unreason and otherworldliness to govern our affairs" (p. 39, The End of Faith)?

I guess Epstein is right. Harris IS confrontational. BUT... does the world need more Epsteins, or Harrises?

I vote for Harris.

Letter to a Christian Nation is Sam Harris' rebuttal to the arguments from Christians to his viewpoints in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. It's a slim book, barely over 100 pages.

What does he say?

"People have been cherry-picking the Bible for millennia to justify their every impulse, moral and otherwise" (p. 18).

"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" (p. 22).

"When was the last atheist riot?" (p. 39).

"When a tsunami killed a few hundred thousand people on the day after Christmas, 2004, many conservative Christians viewed the cataclysm as evidence of God's wrath. God was apparently sending another coded message about the evils of abortion, idolatry, and homosexuality" (p. 47).

"The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious" (p. 51).

"It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion - to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious taboos, and religious diversions of scare resources - is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity. Unfortunately, expressing such criticism places the nonbeliever at the margins of society. By merely being in touch with reality, he appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors" (p. 56-7).

"Billions of people share your belief that the creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of our books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and they make incompatible claims about how we all must live" (p. 79).


I'd say the world needs more atheist fundamentalists. It's not that they are wearing rose-colored glasses. It's that they don't need any glasses at all.

"Letter to a Christian Nation" is a rallying cry to rationalists everywhere and should serve as a wakeup call to retrograde Christians eagerly toiling away to displace science with magical thinking, overturn a woman's right to choose, relegate gays and lesbians to second class citizenship, or ensure the apocalypse.

Harris presents concise arguments with lucidity, brevity and impact. If you haven't read his prior book "The End of Faith" the thesis of "Letter to a Christian Nation" will be startling and new. If you have, this worthy distillate of his prior work specifically focuses on the fundamentalist follies and foibles of America's cleverly marketed McJesus movement. With deft strokes Harris pens a number of reasons not to be a Christian - or religious at all. He exposes the unreasonableness of faith, explaining with clarity and philosophical rigor why there is no real justification for believing in God, and how the notion of "faith" does little to justify any unfounded belief, or merit respect for same.

Moral arguments come next as Harris, using examples ranging from Mother Teresa to the hatred of homosexuals, demonstrates that the Christian value system easily leads to ethically repugnant behavior - despicable in principal and practice because of the widespread and very real human suffering it creates. Christianity's maniacal obsession with people having sex is revealed as morally destitute - religious right political mandates that keep condoms out of Africa only increase the staggering AIDS death toll. Earlier this year Christian luddites unsuccessfully attempted to block the life saving Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) vaccine, which will prevent many cases of cervical cancer because - in their twisted moral calculus - it might lead to teenagers having a little more sex. In this latter case what is deeply evil - immoral doesn't begin to describe it - is that Christians have decided that dying of a preventable disease is the price teenagers should pay - their punishment for a capriciously and arbitrarily defined concept known as sin - for daring to enjoy each other's bodies.

Harris never holds back and isn't afraid to offend his intended audience. After a through debunking of the fraudulent anti-evolution ideology that has become a litmus test for the Christian Young Earth Creationist (YEC) claque, he concludes by bluntly stating that those who don't accept evolution on the facts are ignorant at best, delusional or dumb at worst.

In a world where people are killed every day because they hold different views about which internally inconsistent and ultimately incomprehensible book God supposedly wrote, and mail-order ministers or medieval mullahs impose the ravings of bronze to iron age mystics on impressionable children, scientific marvels save and improve countless lives every day - what excuse is their for belief in a God who slaughters innocent children by the tens of thousands in tsunamis, or the global genocide euphemistically glorified as the Noachian deluge? Or a God seemingly obsessed with who has sex with who and how they have it?

In "Letter to a Christian Nation" Sam Harris delegates Christianity to the same deity dustbin of history that Thor, Zeus, and Mitrha occupy. Hopefully this book will inspire others to leave behind their equally invisible and imaginary friends.

Sam Harris received a lot of criticism for his book, "End of Faith." There were also people who believed he was speaking about Islam rather than the group of Abrahamic religions. This book is directed at the Christian majority of the United States and adresses the group directly. The book is very short, so it takes a couple of hours to read at the most.

This is a great think-piece by harris, however, I find it hard to justify paying the price for this thin volume. In reality, the book is less than 90 tiny pages long and should really be sold as a digital short. Nonetheless, the content is strong, well-written, and impassioned. Harris makes strong arguments as to why Christians are so hypocritical when it comes to real-world issues such as abortions, war, cervical cancer and more. Even though I recommend this I would say you would be better off checking it out of your local library.

Two hundred ninteen reviews and counting, plus thousands of comments to reviews. Any book that stimulates this kind of passion is a worthy read! How encouraging it is to find people on both sides of a religious divide drawn into an invigorating discussion, and a book that facilitates it!

Like several reviewers, I am a former evangelical Christian. I'm not here to rap Christianity or Christ. I am amongst a growing number of folks that see evangelical Christianity as perhaps the greatest deviation from what Christ was all about, and find it shameful how politicians manipulate evangelicals to further a rather ungodly political agenda, with predictable consequences--though lately encouraged to see that this trend is reversing, as more and more evangelical Christians become aware that the "R" party may be a wolf in sheep's clothing, and are engaging their God-given brains. As one Christian friend put it to me, "If God did not want you to change your mind, why did He give you a mind?"

My "conversion" away from evangelical Christianity occurred almost 30 years ago, while I was a young university student. Reading evangelical books written to refute evolution, I was dis-illusioned by their intellectual dishonesty, selective mis-use of observations, and fallacious arguments. How ironic to be driven away from Christianity by Christian books! Discussing this in a desperate prayer with God one night, I asked a simple question, "Dear God, may I look elsewhere?" I felt such a sense of peace and a resounding "Yes" answer that I have never looked back. Today, I am certainly not a Christian in the sense defined by evangelicals. I've come to believe that the truth is not contained in a single book such as the Bible. Rather, I see the truth pouring out to me in all of creation, whether it be in the fossil record, the study of the cosmos, or in my prayers to a greater, undefined power. These days, my only prayer is, "Open my eyes". There's so much to see that I wish I could live an eternity--but alas, perhaps I am but a mere mortal!

It is indeed a painful step to abandon the comforting thought that God has given us a blueprint by which to live (the Bible in Christian tradition), and to make sense of all of the cruelties of this world. I currently live in Africa and have seen and experienced a fair portion. On the other hand, there is something very liberating about finding a consistent truth revealed through all of creation. Religion seems to me to be to be man creating God in his (man's) own image, rather than the other way around. These days, I don't believe in a blueprint. I believe that the meaningfulness of my existence is addressing a challenge: Use that brain! The truth is screaming at you from all directions, so relish putting the pieces together!

Read the book, join the fray! This book isn't the end-all on the subject,and was never meant to be, but it will get your heart thumping and mental cogs cranking, regardless of where you're at. Congratulations to the author, Sam Harris. You've touched a passionate subject in a unique way.

Harris' latest blast against religion, 'Letter to a Christian Nation', is a response to the Christians who wrote to Harris after publication of 'The End of Faith'. Harris has embarked upon an ambitious project - nothing less than "eradicating religion."

'Letter to a Christian Nation' is a short (91 small pages), but devastating critique of the absurdities of biblical religions that claim inerrancy for a 'book' written some 2000 years ago. It is easy to poke fun at belief in the literal truth of the Bible. A favorite quote is from J.B.S. Haldane that God must have "an inordinate fondness for beetles" given that there are some 350,000 species of beetles.

At times Harris fails to apply his own test of evidence such as when he paints broad strokes such as "most Muslims are utterly deranged by their religious faith." He also throws in some sloppy correlations between religion and various social problems in the US - which could just as arguably be due to other factors, like the disparity of wealth and free market ideology. It is still not clear that religous freedom would be safe with Harris at the helm.

Harris is at his best when sticking to specifics. The book is worth reading if you only learn that Dr. Reginald Finger, a thankfully-former member of the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, would consider opposing a hypothetical HIV vaccine on the grounds that such a vaccine would be a "disinhibition" to premarital sex. He also expressed reservations about the actual HPV vaccine against cervical cancer because it would detract from the religous right's abstinence message.

An appendix contains a handy listing of Harris' 10 recommended books, including the 'God Delusion' by Richard Dawkins and 'Freethinkers' by Susan Jacoby.

A recommended quick read for readers interested in a little freethinking.

This is maybe the best articulation of why dogmatic religion is such an obscene manifestation of human discourse. Harris does a better job of laying out the issues than anyone else I've read in the defense of scientific humanism and true morality. His discussions of Christian opposition to stem cell research and their other medieval moral crusades are perfectly contrasted to the morality of objective reason. If anyone doubts that we are in the midst of a moral crisis in America, Harris reveals fully and logically why the Christian agenda in particular and religions in general are such a bane to modernity and a free and progressive society. At heart, his logic points to the fact that fundamentalist Christianity, and in fact all religion, tacitly supports extremism and by extension supports the efforts of Islamic terorists to blow up whomever they please in their effort to bring on the apocalypse. A great point in the book is when he asks Christians to consider why they reject Islam as the true faith and then to consider how it feels to be an atheist with regard to all faiths. I love this book. A sample: "One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering." Amen, brother! "Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation." Right on! His discussion of the "Ten Commandments" is absolutely stellar. Half of them are nothing but theological commands! Why would we ever want them etched in marble and placed in a court house. Harris's discussion of Christ's philosophy is also refreshing. The ideas in the New Testament are nothing new, as he points out, and they are not even that well articulated. Socrates, the Jains, the Taoist Chinese, the Zen Buddhists, and many others said the same things in a better way and with more consistency. You have to ask, why did Jesus find it necessary to threaten people? Highly recommended book to those who think freely and who seek reason as a guide to life. Not recommended for the religious, as the power of logic in this little book will likely unhinge your delusional received world view. Bravo!

I thoroughly enjoyed "Letter to a Christian Nation." I am on board with everything Sam Harris writes. Imagine a world where everyone bases their beliefs on facts instead of myths. This is the one true hope for humankind. Sam Harris' book is a stepping stone toward that end.