The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

The God Delusion Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press, 2006. Letter to a Christian Nation Sam Harris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006. Is America a Christian Nation, or merely one tolerant of religious diversity? As Bill Moyers documented on his PBS Journal episode "Buying the War" (April 25, 2007), after 9/11 there was a conspiracy involving the Administration, the Pentagon, and, shamefully, the press to "sell" the war in Iraq to the American people. At a rigged press conference on March 6, 2003, one "friendly" reporter fed President George W Bush this patsy question: "Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you?" So, do Americans fight wars on the basis of faith? Is the role of religion in foreign affairs so influential? If religion "guides" our nation into war, then the American people had better be well informed about at least the three major faiths that divide the Holy Land and about what religious "logic" could result in such a catastrophe. Wasn't there an oddly overlooked passage in the New Testament about "Peacemakers" as being "blessed?" Richard Dawkins would reject the very notion of religious "logic," however, because for him religion depends entirely upon ignorance, fear, and superstition, decidedly a minority position today in the United States. Free-thinkers should of course be outraged by the suggestion that foreign policy should be guided by faith rather than diplomacy, as was Sam Harris, who has now written two books challenging religious dogma and its role in American life and politics. Harris's first response was a national bestseller entitled The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), followed by a smaller, almost pocket-sized sequel with a deceptively bland title, Letter to a Christian Nation. It belongs to the tradition of polemical pamphlets that were popular during the Enlightenment. Harris effectively orchestrates a mass of statistics to overwhelm the reader and to show agnostics that they are surely outnumbered: "More than 50% of Americans have a 'negative' or 'highly negative' view of people who don't believe in God; 70% think it important for presidential candidates to be 'strongly religious'; 44% of Americans think Christ will return in the next fifty years; more than 50% of Americans believe that the universe was created six thousand years ago (putting the starting point of creation about one thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue); 62% of Americans want creationism taught in schools, while 44% want it taught exclusively; 73% of Americans believe in the existence of Hell; only 28% believe in evolution (and twothirds of these believe evolution was "guided by God." Such was the promotional copy published in the Atlantic Monthly (December 2006), intended, of course, to hype the book, but absolutely reflective of the book's tone and content. Harris promoted his first book extensively on cable television, with effective readings and discussions on C-SPAN, so by the time the second book appeared, skeptical readers would recognize the author's name. Please note, though, that Letter to a Christian Nation offers little additional insight for anyone who has already read The End of Faith. It's rather like a less-expensive digest and abridgement. Or maybe an easily digested codicil. Economy of style is not Harris's forte. In both books, Sam Harris was effective in a kind of outraged, dumbfounded, vox populi way; but Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and Fellow of both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature, is an even more formidable nemesis of the Christian Right. As a well-educated Brit, Dawkins has a better command of the English language than most of his devout competitors, those who would presume to refute him. As a scientist and logician, Dawkins understands Darwin in a way those who might argue for "intelligent design" could probably never grasp. He explores the rise of religious fundamentalism in the Middle East and in Middle America, while Europe, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly secular. …