I recently heard the presentation that Sam Harris made at PopTech in 2006. I haven't read his book "The End of Faith" but I think I got the gist of it from his speech. Basically religious belief is fantasy, those who practice it are stupid and ignorant, and worse yet religion is dangerous [to the point where Harris actually advocates making religon socially and morally wrong] because it's fantasies undermine logical scientific reasoning and ultimately lead to [are basically the cause of] war, poverty, environmental disaster, etc. On the other hand, the Christain Science Monitor pointed out that German philosopher and secularist Jürgen Habermas wrote this in 2004 in his essay "A Time of Transition" Christianity, and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [to Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Ever