Recently read and recommended

"The End of Faith" by Sam Harris. He says the sooner we get rid of Christianity and Islam, the quicker we’ll stop war and terrorism, because like most bad things, they’re caused by religion. He shows how violent, exclusionary and evil Christianity and Islam are.

“Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything be more ridiculous? Yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.”

Will we ever get rid of religion? In the U.S. it’s more likely assholes get cloned with roses so our farts smell like Chanel No. 9. But in Europe they’re secularists, and they don’t start wars.

Harris’s projectile vom of rancid bile at the idiocy of faith also includes two interesting points: you can be more moral without religion, and more spiritual, too. The discussion on spirituality without religion may change your life. Check this out, too: a mother’s speech about raising her child as an atheist. For a view from a moderate Christian (whom Harris despises more than extreme ones, because moderates create the context in which fundamentalists thrive) see "God's Politics:" Why the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it” by Jim Wallis, “a sort of Pat Robertson for the religious left.”