In the 2004 New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith, Sam Harris wrote that
…120 million of us place the big bang 2,500 years after the Babylonians and Sumerians learned to brew beer. If our polls are to be trusted, nearly 230 million Americans believe that a book showing neither unity of style nor internal consistency was authored by an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent deity.
Harris, author of the Atheist manifesto, was interviewed by Truthdig.com. [1] Despite the above-described unsubstantiated beliefs of many theists, it is somehow the atheists who have become “America’s least trusted minority group, “trusted less than Muslims, recent immigrants and homosexuals.”
Harris lays much of the blame for the success of fundamentalists on religious moderates [2], whose “political correctness” serves to protect long-overdue criticism of the fundamentalists:
religious moderates are giving cover to fundamentalists because of the respect that moderates demand of faith-based talk. Religious moderation doesn’t allow us to say the really critical things we must say about the abject stupidity of religious fundamentalism. And as a result, it keeps fundamentalism in play, and fundamentalists make very cynical and artful use of the cover they’re getting by the political correctness in our discourse.
Harris also takes aim at those who call themselves “agnostic,” because they are not “intellectually honest.” Per Harris, agnostics refuse to disavow claims for which there isn’t a drop of evidence.
[E]veryone is walking around presuming to know that there isn’t a Zeus, there isn’t a Poseidon, and there isn’t a Thor. Can you prove that Thor with his hammer isn’t sending down lightning bolts? No, you can’t prove it. But that’s not the right question. The right question is, “Is there any reason whatsoever to think there’s a god named Thor?” And of course there isn’t. There are many good reasons to think that he was a fictional character. The Batman of Scandinavia. The problem for religious people is that the god of the Bible is on no firmer footing, epistemologically, than these dead gods. Which is to say that nobody ever discovered that Thor doesn’t exist, but that the biblical god really does. So we have learned to talk and use the word ‘god’ in a way so as not to notice that we’re using a very strange word and evoking a very vacuous concept, like the concept of Thor.
Harris also points out that religion is treated differently in many places outside of the United States. In America, there is “a thriving marketplace of ignorance.” For instance, in the U.S., “83 percent of people believe that Jesus literally rose from the dead, while the Swedes are living in a society where basically that same percentage of people are atheists.”
Click here [3] to see the full interview at Truthdig.com.
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