I'm in the first third of the book- about page 60 or so. Please take that into consideration.
There are a couple of....possibly worrisome ideas he comes up with- Ok, *actually worrisome*- at one point he says (rightly) that there is no talking to some people. No kidding, eh? But where he goes with it is the worrisome part-it might be necessary to continue the war against al quaida and keep killing them because they are untalk-to-ables!! Overall he presents a good case that there is a direct link between belief and action- but he seems (again, I'm only at 60 or so, so this could change) to put forth a fair number of assumptions about there only being one possible course of action connected to any given belief. I disagree.
Obviously, Al Qaida presents a special problem, but just commiting ourself to killing them all- if that's even possible, which I rather doubt, given its ever-growing nature- is as mad as he claims the religion backing Al Qaida operatives when they blow themselves (and others) up to be. One would rather hope that in his (Harris') quest to bring about a state of 'reason', reasonableness would be a a hallmark of his arguments. Instead, so far, he presents a number of pugnacious and dogmatic arguments. Granted these come primarily in the form of Al Qaida condemnations, (and I mean, their methods are madness indeed, so they do rather bring this upon themselves), but my hope is that he will present more reasoned arguments against faith as a means to action.
One thing which I do agree with is his position that faith will lead directly to action- ie, if you think that you will find 70 virgins after martyring yourself, you're more likely to do so than if you believed that life on this earth at this time is all there is. He deals mostly wth "religious extremeists" when presenting examples, but he also takes religious moderates to task for preaching tolerance for all kinds of beliefs, when - as he does show- and not just with Islamic examples (though 9/11 is foremost on his mind at this point, and so it follows that Islam is as well, though I am about to start a chapter on the Holocaust, wherein, he says, he will prove that the Nazis were, whether they realised it or not at the time, engaged in a religious war. I'll get to that when I get to it, though, right?) that tolerance for untenable things like killing women who show their hair, or waging war on your neighbor *just because* they are Jewish, Christian or whathave should not be tolerated. He also deplores the moderates of any religion in that they are diluting their own texts to bring their beliefs more into line with modern times- which he says only serves to rile the more fundamentalist elements. His claim that this "updating" serves neither reason nor faith well. I am inclined to agree with that view.
Along the way he makes pleas for more proof-based thought. Again, I am inclined to go with this.
That's what I have so far, I'm sort of in the middle of it....more later.
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