Stranger Than Fiction

While visiting a friend in D.C., we fell on the topic of how to make a million dollars (""How to make a million dollars: First, get a million dollars." -- Steve Martin). We had also been discussing religion, so the idea that Dan Brown (author of The Da Vinci Code) could produce a mass market novel based on a few twists and turns of the accepted story of Jesus and walk away with at least a million dollars was appealing. We came up with a few outlandish speculations for our own mystery/detective story with religious overtones, and, tastefully written, we were confident that it would garner us a million dollars.

Well, this morning, while surfing around, I stumbled upon this short article by Sam Harris (author recently of Letter to a Christian Nation). The literal text of the Abrahamic tradition outdoes, by a very large margin, any fiction we could have ever come up with. Someone tell me again how social values and morality are based on this stuff?