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Volunteer Editors Needed for The Scripture Project
Steve Wells, the creator of the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, Qur’an, and Book of Mormon, has donated the full contents of his website to the Reason Project. This is a very generous gift, as Steve spent the better part of a decade annotating these holy books and highlighted all passages notable for their historical inaccuracy, internal contradictions, scientific errors, absurdity, injustice, cruelty, sexism, intolerance, etc. (he also flagged the good parts).
At the Reason Project, we intend to refine Steve’s work in a section of our website entitled “The Scripture Project” where we will have religious scholars, historians, scientists, and other qualified people continue to annotate these texts on a Wiki. With the input of the right scholars, we are confident that the Reason Project website will quickly become the preeminent place for scriptural criticism on the internet. We are happy to say that Steve Wells will continue to supervise the Scripture Project as it moves forward.
In the meantime, however, we need help porting the full contents of the Skeptics Annotated Bible, Qur’an, and Book of Mormon over to the Reason Project website. We are seeking volunteers to help us edit each page of the Scripture Project Wiki to see that it correctly duplicates the parent-page on Wells’ site. This is a big job, but it will be quickly accomplished by a hundred or so volunteers. If you are familiar with adding to Wikis and are willing to donate a few hours over the next few weeks to the launch of the Reason Project website, we would be enormously grateful for your help (some knowledge of HTML would also be useful).
Instructions and relevant links can be found here.
The End of Faith
New York Times Best Seller
Winner of the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction
The End of Faith provides a harrowing glimpse of mankind’s willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when these beliefs inspire the worst of human atrocities. Harris argues that in the presence of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer expect to survive our religious differences indefinitely. Most controversially, he maintains that “moderation” in religion poses considerable dangers of its own: as the accommodation we have made to religious faith in our society now blinds us to the role that faith plays in perpetuating human conflict. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris draws on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and Eastern mysticism in an attempt to provide a truly modern foundation for our ethics and our search for spiritual experience.
”The End of Faith articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood… Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America… This is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of human reason.”
— Natalie Angier, The New York Times Book Review
Some of the arguments presented in The End of Faith have inspired controversy. Harris offers further comments here:
Letter to A Christian Nation
New York Times Best Seller
In response to The End of Faith, Sam Harris received thousands of letters from Christians excoriating him for not believing in God. Letter to A Christian Nation is his reply. Using rational argument, Harris offers a measured refutation of the beliefs that form the core of fundamentalist Christianity. In the course of his argument, he addresses current topics ranging from intelligent design and stem-cell research to the connections between religion and violence. In Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris boldly challenges the influence that faith has on public life in the United States.
“I dare you to read this book…it will not leave you unchanged. Read it if it is the last thing you do.”
— Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion, from his Foreword to the UK Edition.