In 2006, perhaps the most famous shot was fired at religious belief. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and then a fellow of New College, Oxford, released The God Delusion, a 406 page repudiation of belief in a personal God, calling such belief a delusion. In the same year, the cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett released Breaking the Spell, an analysis of religion based on empirical evidence, not so much a shot but the loading of a gun for others to fire. Still in that same year, the neuroscientist Sam Harris released Letter to a Christian Nation, an open letter to Christians in the United States with the stated aim “to demolish the intellectual and moral pretensions of Christianity in its most committed forms”. A year later, the journalist Christopher Hitchens argued in God Is Not Great that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children”.