He switches between history and scripture in claiming to understand why people of faith did things. He rightly makes it clear that Christianity is a fragmented whole, but he then attacks the worst excesses of it as being representative of that whole. This is a serious list of flaws!Īnother area of weakness is with what Harris takes issue with. Context is ignored, any sense of covenant history is ignored, and the ‘worst bits’ of the bible are held up as representative of the whole. The most important one, seeing as he focuses on the Bible, is his way of doing exegesis.
There are a number of areas where Harris misses the point, or outright misrepresents the truth. In terms of my personal response to the book, that will be dealt with later. It is a slim volume, less than 100 pages, but does not seem to have any really meaty engagement.Īt the time of originally writing this review, the book infuriated me. Sam Harris, a New York Times Bestselling author, and author of ‘The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason’, has written a slim volume, aimed specifically at American Christians, with the intention of arguing them out of their faith, it seems. This book review will be a little different to previous – I do not actually want people to read the book! I hope it is still of use to someone! It originally appeared on my old blog, and is dated accordingly…
I’ve reproduced it for reference, and as an experiment.
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