Richard Dawkins has penned a no-pulled-punches Forward to Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, UK edition.

More importantly, the world’s only superpower is close to domination
by electors who believe the entire universe began after the
domestication of the dog, and believe that they will be personally
‘raptured’ up to heaven within their own lifetime, followed by an
Armageddon welcomed as harbinger of the Second Coming. Even from this
side of the Atlantic, Sam Harris’s phrase, ‘moral and intellectual
emergency’ begins to look like an understatement.

I began by saying that Sam Harris doesn’t mess about. One of his
points is that none of us can afford to. Letter to a Christian Nation
will stir you. Whether it stirs you to defensive or offensive action,
it will not leave you unchanged. Read it if it is the last thing you
do. And hope that it won’t be.

If it’s true, as I suspect, that the world is a changin’, some of it even for the good, I’m at least glad to witness it.

To be relatively sure, if we survive, the sort of fervent and literal religious belief that Dawkins and Harris are aggressively attacking will be seen, in a thousand years, no differently than we would regard belief in Zeus today. Can you imagine that? Well, if you can, then the only real variable is time. There’s nothing preventing such change within a matter of years.

Will it matter? I don’t know. One god tends to be replaced with another. But I have to believe that overcoming any falsehood is a good thing. What comes after will just have to be dealt with then.