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“My goal in writing this book has been to help close the door to a certain style of irrationality. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.”

And thus starts the epilogue to Sam Harris’ book. And religious criticism it has on every chapter of it.

“The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” tries to uncover the bridge between the roles played by religious beliefs and their effects in the rationality of common men. At it’s worse, the abandon of reason for religion clashes with the very future of Men as a species. The main problem, as Harris points out a bit all over the book, is that whatever the religion (Christianism, Judaism, Islamism, etc), the passage of Men through the world is only temporary, and a better life always awaits after death. This dogma justifies every atrocity committed, as long as it is done in the name of religion. A pile of examples cited from any of the “holy books” provides him with enough leverage to go this deep in his criticism (and of course, provides a bit of a laugh to the reader too).

Although in general Harris targets religion as a whole, criticism of Islam is ever present, focusing on it’s demand for violence against infidels while cajolingly promising rewards. But again, every religion suffers in this book. Better, Harris goes after religious thinking.

Of course the book goes much further and tries to argue why religious thinking is still behind some of the decisions taken by policymakers which, again, defy reason, specially in fields like science and ethics.

But Harris doesn’t pull his ideas out of air. 29 pages (in the edition I have) of bibliographic references support his statements all over the book.

On the overall, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” is a well written book, pleasurable to read and hard to refute, although sometimes I had the feeling he tries so hard to highlight his ideas that the flow slows so much to the point of despair.

If you like books that challenge the world, this one is for you…

Get it here:

Germany - The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

UK - The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

USA - The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

I’m usually not that much to write about what I see in the news, especially if it doesn’t affect me to a great extent, but this one got my attention.

Al Qaeda? That’s old news… “Been there, done that” kind of thing… The new target? Satan himself…

According to this news site, Don Larsen has recently submitted a resolution to be discussed at the next Utah County Republican Convention where he states that “In order for Satan to establish his ‘New World Order’ and destroy the freedom of all people as predicted in the scriptures, he must first destroy the U.S.”.

Weapons of mass destruction? Also old news… Apparently, Satan has a much more stealthy plan: Illegal immigration. “The mostly quiet and unspectacular invasion of illegal immigrants does not focus the attention of the nations the way open warfare does, but is all the more insidious for its stealth and innocuousness.”

Well… what should we do? Laugh? Maybe a bit… But in the end it is somewhat disturbing to know that such power may lay in the hands of people like this Mr. Larsen.

The day an imaginary fiend can influence the fate of millions is a sad day indeed…

Saw it first in here… Read more about it here and here.

For all of you who like the horror fiction genre, there is something new coming up.

“Noctem Aeternus” is a a new digital magazine that has its first issue planned for January 2008. Good news? It’s free… Just drop your email address in the form and you’ll be sure to get your very own PDF copy of it.

In this first issue, one of the highlights seems to be a short story by Ramsey Campbell (”The Grin of the Dark”, “Banquet for the Damned”). It will also feature an interview with the author. So, maybe it’s worth checking it.

If you tend to write on this genre the good news continue: it’s a professional paying market at 10 cents per printed word. Of course that with this payment I’m expecting it to have extremely high editorial standards which means, your best work might not be good enough. Anyway, I’m not planning on submitting to them anytime soon.

Now, high-paying free-distributed market… Survivable? Don’t know… Let’s see if they manage past issue #1.

In here you can subscribe and check the magazine related news, as well as checking the submission guidelines.

Good luck to “Noctem Aeternus”…