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The God Delusion Richard Dawkins. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Letter to a Christian Nation Sam Harris. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Is America a Christian Nation, or merely one tolerant of religious diversity? As Bill Moyers documented on his PBS Journal episode "Buying the War" (April 25, 2007), after 9/11 there was a conspiracy involving the Administration, the Pentagon, and, shamefully, the press to "sell" the war in Iraq to the American people. At a rigged press conference on March 6, 2003, one "friendly" reporter fed President George W Bush this patsy question: "Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you?" So, do Americans fight wars on the basis of faith? Is the role of religion in foreign affairs so influential? If religion "guides" our nation into war, then the American people had better be well informed about at least the three major faiths that divide the Holy Land and about what religious "logic" could result in such a catastrophe. Wasn't there an oddly overlooked passage in the New Testament about "Peacemakers" as being "blessed?" Richard Dawkins would reject the very notion of religious "logic," however, because for him religion depends entirely upon ignorance, fear, and superstition, decidedly a minority position today in the United States.
Free-thinkers should of course be outraged by the suggestion that foreign policy should be guided by faith rather than diplomacy, as was Sam Harris, who has now written two books challenging religious dogma and its role in American life and politics. Harris's first response was a national bestseller entitled The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (2004), followed by a smaller, almost pocket-sized sequel with a deceptively bland title, Letter to a Christian Nation. It belongs to the tradition of polemical pamphlets that were popular during the Enlightenment. Harris effectively orchestrates a mass of statistics to overwhelm the reader and to show agnostics that they are surely outnumbered: "More than 50%...