The Endless Faith

Sam Harris made a name for himself by writing The End of Faith. That was back in 2004. 2004 came and went, but faith is still here. Followed by 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010...

So I’m curious about his timetable. When does the end of faith end, exactly?

Riding on the coattails of Harris, Loftus is slated to publish The End of Christianity this summer. Evidently, he doesn’t believe it will end before his book hits the shelves. What about this autumn? Is that when Christianity will self-terminate? 

Aren’t these prognostications a secular parody of the street preacher with his End of the World placard?

Before Harris, you had the death-of-god movement in the Sixties. Well, that came and went, but faith is still here. Long before that you had Nietzsche and Durkheim.

So when do we come to the end of the end of faith? Seems as though the end of faith is confidently predicted every generation or so, yet it never comes to an end. The infidel equivalent of millennial cults that make short-sighted predictions about the future, then repackage the oracle to accommodate empirical failure.

Perhaps Gary North, Sam Harris, John Loftus, Hal Lindsey, and Harold Camping could economize by pooling their resources.

Shouldn’t the secular heralds of Christianity’s imminent demise at least set some empirically testable expiration date? Or do they prefer the studied ambiguities of the psychic hotline and the horoscope?