Ordered some books. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel Dennett and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris. Richard Dawkins, author of the famous The God Delusion, Dennett, Harris, and the hilariously amusing, witty, snobby, over zealously intellectual Christopher Hitchens combined forces to produce The Four Horsemen (and surely also to promote their books) a taped discussion of religious faith, its influences, and the vulnerable state of open-minded reason in America today. I've watched some of it on YouTube, as well as some of Hitchens' and Dawkins' debates with intellectual priests and rabbis.

What's frustrating is the dearth of analytical books that propose a positive overall value of faith and religion today, and thus a balance to the message above. What does exist either collapses under the same simple, convincing arguments or is thoroughly unscientific or thin with little compelling evidence. So I'm reading multiple translations of the New Testament, striving to maintain an analytical eye, yet cannot get through more than a couple pages at a time without laughing out loud.

I'm about to finish The Elegant Universe, on superstring theory by Brian Greene (awesome), and Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman, not that I'm particularly interested but it's a classic. Up ahead is Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who, interestingly, is a professor of Sciences of Uncertainty.