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Religion & Spirituality. Nonfiction. When you pray, are you talking to a God who exists? Or is God nothing more than your "imaginary friend," like a playmate contrived by a lonely and imaginative child? When author Sam Harris attacked Christianity in Letter to a Christian Nation, reviewers called the book "marvelous" and a generation of readers�??hundreds of thousands of them�??were drawn to his message. Deeply troubled, Dr. Ravi Zacharias knew that he had to respond. In The End of Reason, Zacharias underscores the dependability of the Bible along with his belief in the power and goodness of God. He confidently refutes Harris's claims that God is nothing more than a figment of one's imagination and that Christians regularly practice intolerance and hatred around the globe. If you found Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation compelling, the book you are holding is exactly what you need. Dr. Zacharias exposes "the utter bankruptcy of this worldview." And if you haven't read Harris' book, Ravi's response remains a powerful, passionate, irrefutably sound set of arguments for Christian thought. The clarity and hope in these pages reach out to readers who know and follow God as well as to those who rejec… (more)
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Zacharias unabashedly sets out “to unpack the systematic contradictions between the atheistic worldview Sam Harris espouses and the assumptions he makes.” Indeed, Harris’s popular best-seller, "Letter to a Christian Nation", is full of sophomoric claims and mockeries. Zacharias begins by attacking Harris’s foundational assumptions with quotes from other powerful scientists and philosophers from around the globe. He shows that even the some of the most learned scholars, ironically from the opposite side of the debate, find Sam Harris to be an embarrassment to their atheistic cause.
The author then proceeds to answer many of Christianity’s critics’ most appealing arguments. His godly confidence, sprinkled with a refreshing dose of levity, is the perfect antidote for some of life’s most troubling quandaries. Zacharias doesn’t shy away from even the most controversial subjects as he addresses questions about the existence of pain and suffering, human cloning, the pursuit of pleasure, abortion, morality, Jesus’ deity, Evil, and even other religions.
Ultimately however, regardless of empirical evidence, science, mathematics, and philosophy, the crux of atheisms’ bankruptcy is its hopelessness. Ravi Zacharias, in stark contrast, shows the beauty of Jesus’ love for us and its inherent hope for the security of our future. My favorite quote from "The End of Reason" succinctly expresses this idea: “Given a starting point of primordial slime, one is forced to live apart from a moral law, with no meaning, no real understanding of love, and no hope.”
This little hardback will be the ideal addition to the library of any Christian who wants to better defend and understand his faith in the world’s constant onslaught of opposing “facts”. "The End of Reason" is chock full of food for thought for those, too, who have found themselves dazzled and tempted by the rationale of the new atheism as touted by the likes of Dawkins and Harris.
This is the ninth of the responses to the New Atheists that I've read, with six more waiting on my bookshelf. I'm glad that several people seem to love Zacharias's book, but from my perspective a 3-star "It's OK" rating was the appropriate one. He makes some good points,
While the book is fairly cheap, it's very short, so you're paying about ten bucks an hour for whatever enlightenment you're achieving. The book felt disorganized to me, with no real chapters but just one big section carved up into little 2- or 3- page thoughts. I felt it needed fewer expressions of indignation and fewer Indian folktales, and more historical, philosophical, and scriptural insights. What there were of the latter were generally good, but I felt they suffered from being presented sporadically rather than systematically.
I mean no offense to those who feel blessed by Zacharias's ministry, and, as they say, your mileage may vary.