by Larik Sonfar

Created on: May 19, 2008

Publicly challenging religion in the United States is impossibly difficult. It necessitates that one stand up to an outraged public backed up by millennia of tradition and power. Just questioning the truth of revered texts such as the Holy Bible, Koran, and Old Testament is enough to incur the wrath of two-hundred million Americans. As a result, most critics of religion choose to moderate their rhetoric and their arguments, suggesting courses such as mutual respect and tolerance. Unfortunately, the propositions of such moderates are logically inconsistent. They suggest that each person should believe what they please while not trespassing on the ability of their neighbors to do the same. But how can this be? Either a person must believe that his faith is unerringly true and right or he cannot truly believe and have faith in it. The logical corollary of one faith being held as true is that others mutually exclusive with it must be false. This is exactly the position that Sam Harris takes in An Atheist Manifesto. Choosing to adhere to logical consistency rather than political moderation in his scathing and merciless critique of people with faith, Harris dooms his own goals of religious erasure and world peace.

First, in his pursuit of logical coherence, Harris alienates the very segments of society that might have supported his viewpoints. It is evident to any reader that Harris's essay is persuasive in nature. His goal is to convince the reader that they should reject religion as factual truth. However, the rhetoric of the entire piece calumniates religious adherents, the only group whose conversion to atheism would strengthen Harris's cause. He repeatedly calls them "irrational" by direct and indirect means, suggesting that logical people and religious believers are mutually exclusive groups of people. To make matters worse, Harris goes on to label religious worshippers as filled with "boundless narcissism and self-deceit". Even if readers can calmly accept these insults to their faith, Harris goes so far as to shatter any remaining semblance of dignity believers can fall back on while trying to swallow Harris's tirade. He argues that not only are their occasional demonstrations of faith delusional, but that because religion permeates a person's entire life, they have only the "fantasy life" of a "madman or an idiot". Harris finally crushes his last hope of garnering good will from his readers by failing to acknowledge the obvious truth that many believers

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