I don’t even know where to begin with Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. I usually take notes when I read books, and the only one I jotted down during this one pretty much sums it up: “Blah, blah, blah.” It’s tiny (96 pages), angry, and woefully misguided.
Sam Harris is one of the “new atheists,” a modern breed of aggressive, raging, evangelistic non-believers who aim, with their atheistic fury, to make non-believers of all the nations. But when you read Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins–two of Harris’ atheistic cronies–you at least find some semblance of serious thought once you get past the inflated rhetoric. (That’s even more true for the atheist philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.)
But not in this book. Harris’ little volume is packed with over-the-top accusations–the Church is “an elite army of child molesters”–and Biblical misinterpretations that were so bad, I couldn’t help but snicker at many points. For instance, Harris tries to disprove God’s power by condemning the Bible for not accurately defining “pi” (I’m not making this up.) Harris writes:
“In two places, for instance, the Good Book states that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is 3:1 (1 Kings 7:23-26 and II Chronicles 4:2-5). As an approximation of the constant “pi”, this is not impressive…..The Bible offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world.” (p.60)
Throughout Letter to a Christian Nation, Harris falls into the same trap as all Biblical fundamentalists: he critiques the Bible based on his own assumption of what the Bible should say rather than what it was actually meant to communicate. Did God inspire these holy writings just to make sure we could accurately define “pi”? Probably not. Should we read seemingly-violent Old Testament passages as journalism instead of metaphor, epic poetry, or theological history? Probably not.
So, in the same vein, should you consider reading this tiny rant? Unless you’re an atheist looking for shallow confirmation, or a Christian yearning for bad logic, probably not.