Feature
Faith of the Faithless
Why Sam Harris Can’t Stamp Out My Religion with His Own by Graeme Hunter
Many Christians will be aware of a stepped-up attack on the Christian faith in the recent secular press. As one observer says, “They estimate that the time is ripe and that professed believers have lost the will to resist.” One example is Sam Harris’s recent book The End of Faith. Having reached the New York Times bestseller list, won the PEN/Martha Albrand award for nonfiction, and sold upwards of 300,000 copies, it has made the author famous and a good deal richer as well.
Harris’s main contention is that our weapons of mass destruction have made tolerating intolerant faiths—Christianity as well as Islam—an unaffordable luxury. “Given the power of our technology, we can see at a glance that aspiring martyrs will not make good neighbors in the future. We have simply lost the right to our myths, and to our mythic identities.”
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Graeme Hunter is a contributing editor to Touchstone and Research Professor of Philosophy at Dominican University College in Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate).
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