Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris Reviewed by James Wood
The New Republic Online
"I have not believed in God since I was fifteen, and now, at forty, I suspect that I am too late to change. But the velocity of that flight from belief has not been constant: there have been hesitations, interruptions, acute nostalgias. Like many raised in a religious household, I often find myself caught in a painful, if comic, paradox, whereby I am involved in an angry relationship with the very God whose existence I am supposed to deny. There is the joke of the atheist out fishing with a believing friend. The atheist casts his net and draws up a stone on which is carved: 'I do not exist. Signed: God.' And the atheist exclaims: 'What did I tell you!' Contradictory this kind of atheism might at times be, but those contradictions feed, perhaps constitute, its brand of militancy; it is because God cannot be entirely banished that one is forced to keep on complaining rather than merely finalize one's elegies...." Read the entire New Republic Online review.