An Open Letter to Sam Harris
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(this guy)

Sent: 2006 09 28

Greetings,
First of all, I'm very sorry to hear that Christians writing you have been so offensive; such is people, sadly. For my part, I'm committed to not being abusive (at the very least!), and I suppose by your reasoning that would mean that I'm not really a Christian, but that would be like me accusing you of having particularly debased morals simply on account of not believing in any deities, which I'm not about to do.

ANYWAY, from what I can gather, you think it's part of the moral responsibility of intellectually superior atheists (a pleonasm of a phrase, so you would think, right?) everywhere to destroy religion with reason. What I really want to know is (really, I do) : How do you propose to do this? For, by your lights, religious people everywhere are ipso facto unreasonable, so you can't reason with them. The only other thing I can think of is that you propose to round us up and sequester us in internment camps (or worse) so as not to infect Brights like yourself. (Daniel Dennett, I'm given to understand, has more or less made such a suggestion.) Your fellow atheist Quentin Smith would presumably like to know the same thing; read here.

Another burning question on my mind is: if Christians are so inherently unreasonable, why are there so many Christian philosophers? Quentin Smith, in the article cited above, cites "exceptionless, educated guesses of every atheist and theist philosophy professor I have asked" that between one-quarter and one-third of philosophers in academia today are theists (and most of them are Christians). [What I am claiming here is not that Christianity is true, (although I think it is, of course), but that it can be held with intellectual cogency.]

I don't think you're being intellectually honest in the slightest if you can't, don't, or won't answer these two fundamental questions.