At lunch with Sam Harris, one is struck by how personable, how familiar he seems—a soft-spoken, thoughtful man with pleasant manners, a man who wrote two best-selling books while pursuing a degree in neuroscience. He is, in other words, an unlikely infidel.
Can you imagine the outcry if author Lisa Miller were writing about Christians, Jews or Muslims? Apparently the Newsweek ombudsperson is not too worried about the persecution of us little old godless unbelievers.
I have to put up with overt religious expression all the time - even proselytizing - and I find it offensive, but I keep my mouth shut and play nice. I've spent my whole life tiptoeing around not telling the rest of the kids that there's no Santa Claus because I thought it was bad manners, and yet there's no quid pro quo.
But that's all old hat. The Newsweek article takes the total disregard of unbelievers to new levels by implying that we're all rude, loud, thoughtless, stupid losers. If that's really what Newsweek readers believe, what's next, lynch mobs and lobotomies?
Well that's my rant for the day. I also sent a much more polite version of this to Newsweek. But I sure ain't buying another issue for a while.
