Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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226 of 300 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Smoke and Mirrors, May 14, 2007
This book is basically nothing that it claims to be. It is emphatically NOT a response to Sam Harris' book other than in title. Rather, Wilson essentially ignores all the hard issues that Harris raises, and instead goes on the standard nonsensical CS Lewis "Mere Christianity" line of argumentation, which basically goes that "look at what a wonderful society we have. Only Christianity could have produced this therefore Christianity is true," which, to anybody who bothered to actually be honest would realize that this argument is false on many levels.
One of the other reviewers wrote:
"Pastor Douglas Wilson's book 'Letter from a Christian Citizen' should be
a staple of any apologetics program and is great for Christians learning to defend their faith."
Notice how the reviewer is not interested in TRUTH. What's more important is "defending the faith." Truth is secondary to making sure that their team wins. This is a key distinction between the reasoned discourse that Harris presents, and the would-only-convince-the-choir contortions that this book is made of.
This book has no interest in truth, nor rebuttal, as there simply is no such thing. It makes a generic argument and has packaged it in a title to try to latch on to the sales of Harris' popular book. There's nothing new here but just more preaching the same old tired arguments. Most of the faithful will continue to believe them (and doubtlessly mark my review as 'not helpful', since it's mostly the faithful who find these things on amazon anyway) as they read this book and convince themselves that Harris' devastating critique is somehow rebutted, when nothing of the sort happened.
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62 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Near Miss, September 2, 2007
Wilson launches a predicable broadside to Harris' thorny "Letter to A Christian Nation." His central thesis - which he has showered on atheists from Hitchens to Dawkins and now Harris - is that in constructing a belief system, one must necessarily make value judgments about actions and ideas. To do so, Wilson argues, a standard such as Christian morality must be used to measure conduct, otherwise one person's personal belief is as valid as another's. Wilson totally eschews the collective innate morality argument made by Harris, and wonders by what standard can such a nebulous concept ever be measured. His answer is that Christian morality is preferable as it provides a dogmatic "bright line" between good and evil and devoid of individual idiosyncracies. Wilson's flaw is his implicit assumption that Christian morality is a unified, consistent belief system that inevitably provides uniform moral judgments on conduct. Unfortunately for Wilson, Harris anticipates and skewers this position with quotations directly from the Christian Bible, whose passages provide divine approval for such disparate things as love, compassion, self-sacrifice, freedom, slavery, genocide, fratricide, and sexual perversion. Christian morality, it seems, is in as great a state of flux as atheistic moral relativism. Perhaps more damning is Wilson's reluctance to take on Harris' main objection to religious dogmatism, namely that there exists no good evidence to suppose that its central tenets are true. Bertrand Russell's orbiting teapot analogy provides the most serious challenge to Wilson's arguments since it illuminates Wilson's fallacy of requiring Harris to prove there is no god-which of course is logically impossible. Harris properly points out that the burden of proof is on the proponent of such an extraordinary claim to support it with extraordinary evidence. Though forcefully and gamely attempted, Wilson cannot possibly meet this burden and ultimately fails in answering the skepticism that Harris so painstakingly articulates.
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101 of 141 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Just read the other reviews to know this book is garbage, August 19, 2007
See the 1st editorial review, which claims this country was "birthed and sustained through a Christian worldview". First of all, this was never set up to be a Christian nation. The founding fathers were deists, and they made sure that the constitution provided for the separation of church and state. And, the review mentions the "Christian worldview". If that means spreading Christianity throughout the entire world, that's certainly not what this country was set up to do. Yet, many Christians think it's okay for the US to invade other countries because we're supposedly on the side of Christ.
Also, read some of the customers' reviews to see how confused some of these people are. You'll see some of the most confused logic, like that the belief in evolutionary science and the belief in non-violence are somehow contradictory.
And notice how they like to label Harris as an atheist (instead of agnostic). If you read the book or listen to Harris's speech (which btw you'll find on YouTube, search "Sam Harris SALT"), you'll know Harris does not claim to have proof that God does not exist. It's not Harris's responsibility to prove that God does not exist. That's not what his book is about. His book is about the very real problem of ignorant people in this country taking on blind faith that there's an all-knowing, all-powerful God guiding our destiny, and using that to justify wars, and the rejection of science (like stem cell research and evolution), and the dumbing down of America to rally support for a President who has broken every virtue written down in the bible, and produce this kind of fascist state that we're living in today, where our rights that our Founding Fathers established have been stripped away one by one, and our constitution has been run through the White House paper shredder.
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