Letter to Sam Harris

Sent: 2008 01 16

Mr Harris,

Recently I watched the video of your speech at the AAI 07 in DC posted by the RRS on youtube. Your message about not falling into the atheist label struck a deep chord because it is something I deal with on a personal basis every time I see my in-laws. Without soaking up too much time I mean that my fiance and I had a child out of wedlock and her extremely conservative christian family doesn't like or understand me. More's the pity.

However rejecting the term atheist for ourselves is a half measure. If we are truly going to make a dent in the pervasive ubiquity of religious belief I believe our words should reflect how we truly feel. As such I have stopped using the terms 'God' and 'Bible' and replace them in writing and conversation with 'christian deity' and 'christian holy text' (lowercase deliberately) to reflect a more objective appraisal of import.

This has been a recent change in my habits so the outcomes are undecided. I hope you'll consider this if you haven't already. Forgive me if that sounds terribly presumptuous.

Good day and good luck to you, sir.

-Seth

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The motivation for this contact relates to my new semi-long term project to answer and analyze a creationist propaganda series on youtube. Part one has so far yielded 4 pages of notes, comments and problems as I have seen. To be more accurate the first 7 minutes yielded 4 pages of notes, features both Kent Hovind and Ken Ham as 'scientists' and blithely accepted the bible as 100% true and accurate.

That was in a previous video which I may indeed comment on at some point. Until then my satire will remain focused on the 8 part (as far as I know at this point) series regarding evolution vs creationism.

Oh and the gloves...the gloves are off.