There's some interesting arguments in this short book, and they're mostly in the front half:

1. American Christians aren't any more moral than anyone else on average.
2. American Christians do not have moral authority simply by virtue of religious literacy.
3. It's entirely possible to be a moral person without religion.

There's nothing really earth-shattering for me here, but it's a good summation of the fact that the Bible is not, by itself, a particularly coherent rule book for good morals. It's sprawling, messy, at times self-contradictory, and unclear enough to cause dozens of schisms since it's creation.

I think people who feel their religion created their moral compass don't give enough credit to those who loved them, the huge number of moral lessons they absorbed from media they consumed during development, and their own basic capacity for ethical reason and empathy.

And on a personal note, as a person raised without religion, and who generally tries to behave as ethically as possible, I find it offensive to suggest that I'm incapable of knowing right from wrong.

But this book falls apart for various reasons in the back half, and it makes me want to ask:

Can we please hand the atheist megaphone to someone who's not a bigoted old white jerk?

There's a sort of smug hostility to some elements of this book that ultimately become toxic by the end. It's everything short of calling people idiots for not seeing things his way. For someone who argues that Christian doctrine is bad for reducing suffering and maximizing compassion, he doesn't seem to really exude much of either quality.

And the sections on Islam make him sound like a straight-up bigot. Saying that Muslims are out-breeding non-believers in Europe is a toxic sentiment, and his willingness to paint an entire faith with one brush doesn't speak to the sort of rationalism that he's trying to encourage in American Christians.

While there's many of Sam Harris' points I agree with, I'm just sick of men like him being the face of non-believers.