From Sam Harris: A Letter to a Christian Nation. Alfred A. Knopf. New York 2006. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 12 percent of Americans believe that life on earth has evolved through a natural process, without the interference of a deity.Thirty-one percent believe that evolution has been "guided by God". The same Gallup poll revealed that 53 percent of Americans are actually creationists. This means that despite a full century of scientific insights attesting to the antiquity of life and the greater antiquity of the earth, more than half of our neighbors believe that the entire cosmos was created six thousand years ago. Among developed nations, America stands alone in these convictions. Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim-witted giant. Anyone who cares about the fate of civilization would do well to recognize that the combination of great power and great stupidity is simply terrifying, even to one´s friends. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist". The conflict between science and religion is reducible to a simple fact of human cognition and discourse: either a person has good reasons for what he believes, or he does not. If there were good reasons to believe that Jesus was borne of a virgin, or that Muhammad flew to heaven on a winged horse, these beliefs would necessarily form part of our rational description of the universe. Everyone recognizes that to rely upon "faith" to decide specific questions  of historical fact is ridiculous - that is until the conversation turns to the origin of books like the Bible and the Koran, to the resurrection of Jesus, to Muhammads conversation with the archangel Gabriel, or to any other religious dogma. It is time we admitted that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give one another to keep believing when reasons fail... Competing religious doctrines have shattered our world into seperate moral communities, and these divisions have become a continual source of human conflict. In response to this situation, many sensible people advocate something called religious tolerance. While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its problems. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us unwilling to criticize ideas that are increasingly maladaptive and patently ridiculous. It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves - repeatedly and at the highest levels of discourse - about the compatibility between the religious faith and scientific rationality. Our competing religious certainties are impeding the emergence of a viable, global civilization. Religion raises the stakes of human conflict much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics ever can, as it is the only form og in-group/out-group thinking that casts the differences between people in terms of eternal rewards and punishments. One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religious faith. Consequently, faith inspires violence. Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity - birth, marriage, death - without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.