Letter to a Christian Nation

Letter to a Christian Nation

I just finished reading Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. It is a short book, under 100 pages including notes, and it is brilliant.

I wonder if Christians will read it though. If you are a Christian reading this blog, will you read it? I would love to hear your opinion.

What if he had entitled it Letter to a Muslim Nation and used the same arguments? And then at the very end asked Christians to look at themselves in the same light?

Some of the things I liked and/or made me think:

  • Every devout Muslim has the same reasons for being a Muslim that you have for being a Christian.
  • So let us be honest with ourselves: in the fullness of time, one side is really going to win this argument, and the other side is really going to lose.
  • The truth is, you know exactly what it is like to be an atheist with respect to the belief of Muslims. Isn’t it obvious that Muslims are fooling themselves? Isn’t it obvious that anyone that thinks 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?
  • 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.
  • If you are right to believe that religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers. Are they?
  • Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.”
  • The truth is, some of your most cherished beliefs are as embarrassing as those that sent the last slave ship sailing to America as late as 1859.
  • I have no doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life…I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and every place, have had similar experiences - but they had them while thinking about Krishna, or Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature.

I suggest you pick up the book and give it a try. Try to read it with an objective mind and remember it could be a letter to any fundamentalist religion. What makes Christian mythology and different from Muslim or Mormon mythology? What makes Christian angel and miracle stories more true than Muslim or Mormon angel and miracle stories?


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One Response to “Letter to a Christian Nation”

  1. g.j.burke Says:
    January 26th, 2007 at 6:22 pm

    I liked Bruce Feiler’s books (Walking The Bible)(Abraham) much better (evidently PBS did too) than the current crop of recycled
    atheist apologetics. Nearly 40 years working in a good sized public library proves the old saying (from Ecclesiastes, by the way) that there are no new things under the sun. Books such as Harris, Brown and others write come out of the woodwork every 20 or so years. The really amusing thing would be if he thinks these ideas are all his own.

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