I agree with Karla, the book was a bit much.  I picked the book up because of my own sensitivities to the subject, and was hoping to see some “agreement” and “explanation” from someone else, which I did.  I got the feeling that Sam was trying to get something off his chest here.  A short read, can't say that I highly recommend it.  There is some depth of discussion that I feel is missing here, trying to work with folks where they are would be more to my preference.  There are some fine Christian teachings/principals that I think could be explored more sensitively.

When I purchased this book I already had an idea of what it’s message was going to be. I mean it’s pretty obvious the author’s feeling towards Christian right-wingers from what’s printed on the inside jacket. But the thing I liked about Letters to a Christian Nation was the author’s use of empirical and scientific evidence to back up his beef with God.

Half-way into the book, however, was a little to much of a poster-add for athieism than I had expected. The author’s views on the world are quite clear but just as Christians like to believe that their philosophy is always right, as does the author at time.

Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity–birth, marriage, dearth–without lying to our selves about the nature of reality.

I HAVE NO doubt that your acceptance of Christ coincided with some very positive changes in your life. Perhaps now you love other people in a way that you never imagined possible. You may even experience feelings of bliss while praying. I do not wish to denigrate any of these experiences. I would point out, however, that billions of other human beings, in every time and place, have had similar experiences–but they had them while thinking about Krishna, Allah, or the Buddha, while making art or music, or while contemplating the beauty of Nature. There is no question that it is possible for people to have profoundly transformative experiences. And there is no question that it is possible for them to misinterpret these experiences, and to further delude themselves about the nature of reality. You are, of course, right to believe that there is more to life than simply understanding the structure of contents of the universe. But this does not make unjustified (and unjustifiable) claims about its structure and contents any more respectable.

It is important to realize that the distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and spiritual experiences from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being honest about what we can reasonably conclude on their basis. There are good reasons to believe that people like Jesus and the Buddha weren't talking nonsense when they spoke about our capacity as human beings to transform our lives in rare and beautiful ways. But any genuine exploration of ethics or the contemplative life demands the same standards of reasonableness and self-criticism that animate all intellectual discourse.