Book Review of Letter to a Christian Nation

doi:10.15406/jpcpy.2017.06.00397

Journal of

eISSN: 2373-6445

Psychology & Clinical Psychiatry

Opinion Authors String Book Reviews - XI

Book Review of Letter to a Christian Nation

Samuel A Nigro M D

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Retired, Assistant Clinical Professor Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, USA

Correspondence: Dr. Samuel A Nigro M.D., Retired, Assistant Clinical Professor Psychiatry, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, 2517 Guilford Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio 44118, USA, Tel 216 932-0575

Received: June 20, 2016 | Published: February 6, 2017

Citation: igro SA (2016) Book Review of Letter to a Christian Nation. J Psychol Clin Psychiatry 6(6): 00397. DOI: 10.15406/jpcpy.2017.06.00397

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Opinion

I engage Christianity at its most divisive, injurious and retrograde. In this, liberals, moderates, and non-believers can recognize a common cause (Pg. ix).

And that sums them all up! They "engage Christianity" at its straw-man worst. The arrogant animus and prejudice of these secularists/atheists is plainly admitted. The "common cause" is nothing more than "Ethnic Cleansing, American Style." And Harris' superficiality and feigned intelligence are transparent throughout the rest of the book from praising the scientific fraud Richard Dawkins to ignoring completely, among other books, The Hidden Face of God by Gerald L. Schroeder, a believing scientist par excellence who totally rebuts Harris' "There is no compelling evidence for an intelligent design..." (Pg. x) -- rendering that statement nothing more than opinionated pathological denial. (The improbability of evolution is also unscientifically denied -- see my article "Why Evolutionary Theories are Unbelievable", Social Justice Review, Jan/Feb 2004, Pg. 148-151.)

Harris misuses Matthew 5:18-19 to bludgeon all believers (Pg. 10). He thinks the Inquisition really happened as anti-Catholics have presented (Pg. 11). His understanding of slavery is plain silly, at best, and he does not understand the differences between economic and exploitative slavery (Pg. 16-18). Harris has not the faintest idea of the longstanding papal stand against slavery (Read my article "The Popes and Slavery", Social Justice Review, July/August, 2000, Pg. 109-111).

He seems to be totally oblivious to Natural Law as a basis for morality without scripture, and he does not want to hear that the Roman Catholic Church has promoted Natural Law as ingrained in the hearts of men.

Perhaps you think that the crucial difference between a fly and a human blastocyst is to be found in the latter's potential to become a fully developed human being. But almost every cell in your body is a potential human being, given our recent advances in genetic engineering. Every time you scratch your nose, you have committed a Holocaust of potential human beings. This is a fact. The argument from a cell's potential gets you absolutely nowhere (Pg. 30).

Me thinks he doth protest too much. The natural history of a blastocyst is totally different from that of the nasal mucosal cell.

Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs (Pg. 51).

Atheism (and secularism) is "noise" all right. But, for some, the "obvious" is that God exists. And for many more, religious beliefs are clearly "justified."

Harris maintains that "intellectual honesty" is the core of science (Pg. 64) (excluding of course Richard Dawkins unscientific smug disregard for the technical definition of "delusion" in his book The God Delusion). Harris' dogma is his own infallible "intellectual honesty." He should read The Hidden Face of God (supra).

He revels in the "limbo controversy" concerning the eternal fate of unbaptized children.

When one considers the fact that this is the very institution that has produced and sheltered an elite army of child molesters, the whole enterprise begins to exude a truly diabolical aura of misspent human energy (Pg. 66).

I think he just failed his high fallutin secularism/atheism "intellectual honesty" again. There is no "elite army of child molesters" unless it is in the public school system with a rate of sex abuse of children at least three times that of the homosexual teenage boy problem in about 2% of Catholic priests.

It is time we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail (Pg. 67).

This is an incredibly immature understanding of faith and the psychological basis for it. One must wonder what on earth did Sam Harris do to be so unaware of his theophobia. Secularists/atheists like him are projecting their own huge inferiority and humiliating spiritual dearth. One must ask "What are their sins?" ... that deprives them of spirit? (In your face: "It is time we admitted that secularism/atheism is nothing more than the inflated affirmation non/anti-religious people give one another to keep believing that there is nothing greater than oneself.) If Sam Harris is the typical secular atheist, then they all must be "fact fools" suffering from the Spiritual Deficiency Syndrome (SDS) able to vision well only the end of their noses. Harris thinks he knows a lot about religion, but this book offers no evidence that he understands much about it except its "worst," unfairly, unhistorically, and unscientifically distorted at that.

That Harris can parrot selected excerpts of religious beliefs hardly makes him an expert. Of course he does not want to know and certainly flees from the idea of a genuine religious experience. His mindless selfishness is against all patrimony of religion especially Catholicism about which he neither knows nor cares nor understands. Harris is himself unwittingly anti-science, anti-class, anti-culture, anti-transcendental and anti-tolerance. He should never be allowed to experience anything which has its roots in Catholicism whether it be Isaac Newton's physics, Beethoven's 9th, monogamy, the U.S. Constitution, the spiritual and corporal works of mercy, or science itself (Take that, dummy). Harris would silence the Cleveland Heights (Ohio) High School Gospel Choir singing “God Is” (And for that alone, he should rot forever in the nothingness in which he believes).

Actually secularists/atheists are amazingly cruel -- they want to take away that which gives people comfort, that which offers support and understanding, and a theory of the universe which pleases and creates value. He does not understand that spirituality solves the problem of the innate love and hate in everyone. What is important is what one does with one's love and hate. Humans need to love something greater than one's self -- best of all when it is God and the Natural Law given by God. And every human needs to hate ... it is an emotional excitatory component of emotional relief -- we will hate someone or some thing whether we want to or not...and hopefully it will be the devil and all the demonic words flooding the universe and not what Harris hates. To take away the super-mentality and the human spirit is to deprive people of their humanity. Christianity solves the intrinsic innate love/hate component of every human being. To deprive people of the comfort and happiness of their transcendental religions is barbarism and not science.

But secularists/atheists are not better than the religionists condemned. Secularists/atheists are suggestibility/gullibility promoters for the most selfish of reasons. And they offer their own religion with their own clergy and priests commonly known as journalists. Secularists/atheists have their own bishops known as editors. And they have their own pope running The New York Times. Quite frankly, the fantasies of secularists/atheists have less validity and history to sustain them than any religion worthy of the name. The end result of secularism (or any group without genuine Catholicism or its equivalent) is an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, poor impaired family life, and a spiritless anything goes boring dullness with nothing to look forward to. Secularism/atheism is a form of subhuman pollution which is basically "whatever you can get away with." Such has been the disastrous outcome wherever Roman Catholicism (or Western Civilization) has not flourished.

Secularists/atheists have nothing and believe nothing except that you should imitate them. Do not. They have nothing but their science which by their own thinking is nothing also. They survive by gullibility and suggestibility promoted by a press and media rendering their nothingness to be glitzy and spurious non-being excitement. Again: Secularism/atheism is nothing but Ethnic Cleansing.