I'm on vacation this week and today we're heading across the border into the U.S. of A. to spend some time at the Buffalo Zoo. And, if we have some time left over, we'll swing by Niagara Falls since we haven't taken the kids to see that site in some time. Today I just wanted to post a short review I wrote quite a while ago but haven't yet had opportunity to post. It's a short review because the book was just so utterly stupid, three paragraphs was all I could stand to write.

This may well be the dumbest book you're ever likely to read. And that is saying something if you've read Hedges previous effort American Fascists. In American Fascists Hedges took on the Christian right, a group he (rather conveniently) left undefined, though he seemed to indicate that it was really any Christian who actually took his faith seriously. His purpose in writing the book was to warn Americans that Christians are rising in great numbers and are waiting only for the next national disaster before attempting to seize power and to create some kind of an American theocracy. He offered little proof and gave the reader little reason to trust or believe him.

David Robertson, a Free Church of Scotland pastor who lives in Dundee, wanted there to be an intelligent Christian response to Richard Dawkins’ bestselling The God Delusion. To that end he wrote an open letter to Richard Dawkins and subsequently posted it on his church’s web site. The letter somehow found its way to Dawkins who posted it on his own website where it generated a response that was massive in scope and in passion. According to the back of The Dawkins Letters, “The ferocity, and shallowness of thinking, of some of the responses spurred David to write further letters, which form the basis of this book. They explain a credible basis for faith that counteracts the ‘atheist myths’ that so much popular discussion is based upon.”

The atheistic literary pantheon is currently comprised of three men: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. All three men have written bestselling books and all three have published their most recent efforts in the past year. While I have no reason to believe that they have planned their books to coincide thematically or chronologically, their books do resemble each other in several ways. All three men believe that religion is a blight on society and all of them choose to deal most specifically with the evils of Christianity and its adherents. All three believe that religion harms far more than it hurts and all of them are angry and unwilling to be silent about all of this. Of these three, Dawkins is the most influential and we can rightly say that he is currently the most prominent atheist in the world.

I found Letter to a Christian Nation a difficult book to read. It is, after all, a book whose purpose is to criticize one of the things I hold most dear—the church of Jesus Christ. While certainly deliberate and measured as these things go, it is still something of a rant against religion in general, Christianity in particular, and, at its narrowest focus, those who call themselves by the name of Christ (and hence, the one they call themselves after).