Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris

Loved the whole thing but this part especially struck me:

"Examples of God's failure to protect humanity are everywhere to be seen. The city of New Orleans, for instance, was recently destroyed by a hurricane. More than a thousand people died; tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions; and nearly a milllion were displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Hurrican Katrina struck shared your belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while Katrina laid waste to their city? Surely he heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Do you have the courage to admit the obvious? These poor people died talking to an imaginary friend.

Of course there had been ample warning that a storm of "biblical proportions" would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disasters was tragicaly inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Religion offered no basis for a response at all. Advance warning of Katrina's path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of God, they wouldnt have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, as will come as no surprise to you, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that 80 percent of Katrina's survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith.

As Hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. These pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before Him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God's grace.

It is time we recognized the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. It is time we acknowledge how disgraceful it is for the survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving god, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religion's fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all." (emphasis is mine) (p.55-57)