Atheist criticism of Sam Harris

In the New Republic:

The End of Faith starts well and then becomes a bit predictable, because it begins to follow the rules of its rather thin genre. Letter to a Christian Nation, which is an open letter to the many Christians who wrote to Harris in complaint, is even thinner. I have an almost infinite capacity for the consumption of atheistic texts, but there is a limit to how many times one can stub one's toe on the thick idiocy of some mullah or pastor. There is a limit to the number of times one can be told that the Bible is a shaky text, and that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of really nasty things. Ratio vincit omnia, but the page-by-page demonstration of this rationalist conquering can become wearisome. This may be no especial insult to Harris so much as to his family; Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian made a great initial impact on me when I was a teenager--it was like seeing someone in the nude, for the first time--until I began to get bored with its self-exposure.

Agree or disagree, this writer dererves kudos for having more of a clue than the folks who think Harris represents a "New Atheism." And in a way, I suspect Harris would agree to an extent. He himself described his own book as "the product of a failure--the failure of the many brilliant attacks upon religion that preceded it..." I suppose the reasons for this should provide fodder for fruitful speculation, though for now I should point out that there are real signs that this generation may succeed where others have failed.

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