Sam Harris' latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation doesn't hit bookstore shelves for another week and a half or so but he's had some exposure in the media as of late. He is one of subjects of an article in Newsweek magazine's 11 September issue called "The New Naysayers". It's not a bad article, in my opinion, but it is short and written for a mass audience so there's a lot of pigeonholing and very little nuance. It gets in my craw that news magazines will devote pages and covers to religion but non-believers get an article like this. The past few years have seen countless cover stories relating to The Da Vinci Code with lengthy articles with colorful illustrations and sidebars aplenty giving the history of Catholocism as it relates to the tale. One thing that the piece at hand does, which is all-too common, is to give the notion that non-belief begins with Darwin or that logic & reason only started addressing religion in the light of Darwin. This is, of course, nonsense. People have seen through the superstition and ridiculous claims of religion for years. How about a little context and history of non-belief?
Harris is also the subject of a piece called "The Temple of Reason" in The Sun Magazine. (PDF) I haven't read it yet so I can't comment.
A new book of interest is The Path of Reason: A Philosophy of Nonbelief by Bruce A. Smith. Again, I haven't read it an have only seen blurbs about it so I can't really comment on it too much other than to say that it seems that Smith is offering reason as a substitute for religion in explaining the "big questions" and for providing guidance in daily life.
Lastly, I see that Jonathan Miller's Brief History of Disbelief can now be watched online here. Although I haven't seen it, I recently obtained a copy of the series which I plan on burning onto DVD and watching on my big screen TV along with the series' companion shows, The Atheism Tapes.
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