markm reviewed Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris
Review of 'Letter to a Christian Nation' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
I hadn't read anything by Sam Harris before. I've seen him many times, mostly on YouTube videos of debates with his late colleague Chris Hitchens. Other reviewers are correct that there is nothing really new here, but Harris does have some interesting and well-made arguments.
I did find a few mildly disturbing things that stood out as falling short of an easily defensible argument.
Harris argues that the destruction of a human blastocyst is the same as scratching your nose since a human could be cloned from the skin cells that you destroy. This is silly. It isn't currently feasible to clone human skin cells, many think that it would be immoral to do so, and cloning human skin cells is not a natural evolved process. There is no clear moral solution to the question of abortion since there are good arguments on both sides, and I don't think any …
I hadn't read anything by Sam Harris before. I've seen him many times, mostly on YouTube videos of debates with his late colleague Chris Hitchens. Other reviewers are correct that there is nothing really new here, but Harris does have some interesting and well-made arguments.
I did find a few mildly disturbing things that stood out as falling short of an easily defensible argument.
Harris argues that the destruction of a human blastocyst is the same as scratching your nose since a human could be cloned from the skin cells that you destroy. This is silly. It isn't currently feasible to clone human skin cells, many think that it would be immoral to do so, and cloning human skin cells is not a natural evolved process. There is no clear moral solution to the question of abortion since there are good arguments on both sides, and I don't think any argument is satisfactory that fails to recognize that if you do not destroy an early fetal human, then you are likely to get an infant in 9 months.
Although the book is ostensibly a letter to Christians, it spends a considerable portion of its short length running down Muslims. I just find it hard to believe that if you somehow magically removed religion from the Earth, that people wouldn't find ample reason to kill each other.