Regardless of the controversy and the non-compromising position of Harris when it comes to religion, The End of Faith is an important contemporary book. This book is not about Atheism. It's a book about exercising one's faculty of critical thinking on religion, science and ethics. It's a rude and crude initial attempt at integrating science and authentic spirituality. Read it. Critique it. Discuss it with your friends. Discuss it your school and universities. Discuss it in your congregation. Discuss it with your priests and pastors. Use it as a tool to separate the wheat of reason from the chaff of mythic hubris and the flatland of postmodernism. Godspeed ;)

(see also rest of my review of The End of Faith)

I suggest that anyone interested in the ideas of Sam Harris visit the writers webpage at http:www.SamHarris.org Sam has posted some good video, audio and articles that give a great overview of the ideas presented in his books.  I just finished his new “Letter to a Christian Nation” and I'm ordering copies each of my friends and family.  I highly recommend these books and give both 5 stars. 

Sam Harris is a philosopher par exellance: clear logical thinking shot through with a deep concern for humanity. he is the only public voice right now pointing out that at the center of the world's difficulty right now is human kind's desperate clinging to irrational (i would say pre-rational) religious beliefs. In his book The End of Faith, Haris makes a lucid case for humanistic non-religious spirituality.

i recommend The End of Faith in tandem with Jennifer Hecht's masterful Doubt: A History. It's time for trans-rational spirituality to awaken us from our dangerous trance!

here is an amazing short lecture from Sam Harris at Idea City!

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things.  This universe is shot through with mystery.  The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name.  The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and ground for any experience we may wish to call “spiritual.”  No myth needs to be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance.  No personal God need be worshipped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation.  No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.  The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered.  Whether the days of civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather to much, on how soon we realize this.

If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised too, it will be a matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith.  If our tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine inquiry and genuine criticism.  It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil.  Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis for human cooperation.  Where we have reason for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another.  People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power.  The only thing we should respect in a person’s faith is his desire for a better life in this world;  we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.