RE: "The Four Horsemen"
July 11, 2015 at 8:23 am
(This post was last modified: July 11, 2015 at 8:26 am by Excited Penguin.)
(July 11, 2015 at 4:23 am)Salacious B. Crumb Wrote: was curious if you had a recommendation what my next one should be.
I hate to repeat myself. I think I already gave a warm review to one book in my previous reply. Haven't read Hitchens' book yet, at least not thoroughly, so can't say much about that, but Hitch was surely a great writer.
Harris though seems to be the author that started the whole thing back in 2004, so he's fairly important. Also, at least to me, he seems to be the most down-to-earth one of the bunch. His interests are pretty scattered, it's very interesting to listen to him talk about them. He has followed his debut with Lettter to a Christian Nation in 2006, a marvelous little book, written in response to his critics of the first one, in the form of an open letter, in order "to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms." So you can read this one if you don't want to dig any deeper, though, at the risk of repeating myself, I thought The End Of Faith was simply mesmerizing with it's wit and scope. These are the only two books Harris has written exclusively about religion, so far.
He has also written about morality, lying, free will and spirituality in the capacity of both a philosopher and a neuroscientist, I guess. I recommend all of them, though I haven't as yet finished in reading them - I am fairly sure they are all as good as what I've managed to read so far.
Harris also has a blog, it would be good to check that out if you wanted to hear him "rant" on other subjects. He has a variety of interests, including superintelligence, defending himself against critics[=D], and commenting on foreign policy. He has been demonstrated to be able to change his mind on things when he realises his error in judgement about something, though that doesn't happen all that much. He's not some yippie who doesn't know anything about anything, after all. The man is in his late forties, and it's interesting to know about his life. Check out his wiki page.