Three-quarters of all Americans believe the Bible is God's word, according to a recent Pew poll. Numbers like that make an outspoken atheist like Sam Harris seem either foolhardy or uncommonly brave.
Two years ago, when the 39-year-old launched a full-scale attack on religious belief in his provocative book "The End of Faith," he was an unknown. That changed overnight when his book shot up the New York Times bestseller list and later went on to win the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Since then, "The End of Faith" has earned an avid following among atheists and lapsed churchgoers; it's the kind of book that gets passed around from one friend to another to another. Here, finally, was someone willing to do the unthinkable: to denounce religious faith as irrational -- murderous, even.
The heart of Harris' book is a frontal assault on Islam and Christianity, carrying both pages and pages of quotations from the Quran imploring the faithful to kill infidels, and a chilling history of how Christian leaders have brutally punished heretics. Harris argues that much of the violence in today's world stems directly from people willing to live and die by these sacred texts.
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