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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.

Today “Inspiration: ambiguity” saw a big change in layout…

To justify why these changes were made let’s just say that I hope the functionality of the site increases as well as the visual appealingness.

The first big change had to do with the front page (probably you have already noticed that). Visual links with content related images might prove more functional. And the looks got better…

Also, the previous “Reviews: blaspheme” site has migrated to “Words: blaspheme”. Since it was just a side site, and who’s main purpose can be fully achieved in “Words: blaspheme” there was no point in having more divisions.

These were the major changes… as for the small ones: If you get lost around or want to know just a little bit more about each individual pages just find the link to the “sitemap” and navigate from there to anywhere on the site; the “about” page was also updated to integrate these changes; the links page also saw an improve in layout and much more links are expected to join the crowd…
As always, I’d appreciate immensely if you could leave your comments on the changes of layout. It got better, worse, the same? More functional? As well as any other suggestions…

Now, I hope I can dedicate myself completely to content. After all, that’s all a site like this is about…