If there’s been a better-written essay recently than “The Celestial Teapot” by James Wood in The New Republic ($$), then I’d like to know about it. Of course you may have to be an atheist, as I am—or at the very least to have questioned your faith—to enjoy it as much as I did. (It’s a review of Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation and, as always with Wood’s essays, a lot more.)
Here’s my favorite bit:
[A]ll these writers are correct to argue that religion is unfairly protected by a cordon sanitaire of “respect.” In America, all you need to do is intone the word “faith” and your opponent will start backing away from you in terror, like a vampire before a crucifix. In these books the vampire bites back, and Harris has an Orwellian robustness and a good journalistic way with his one-liners. To the creationists who believe that the world is six thousand years old, he says: “This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.” The principal concern of American Christians “appears to be that the creator of the universe will take offense at something people do while naked.” Twenty percent of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, he writes: “if God exists, He is the most prolific abortionist of all.”
There’s much more, most of it a lot more serious. Read it if you can.
