bold statement

One thing I love about reading is that often you find little gems of thought that aren't even the products of thought of the author you are reading. It is like having your own brilliant researcher who finds for you the pithy statements of authors you would have had to read through volumes to find. One of these statements was in Phillip Yacy's unique book Soul Survivor. In one chapter where he recounts Dostoevsky's influence on his writing he quotes another Russian author whose work was also profoundly influenced by Dostoevsky's work. Having received the Nobel prize in Literature in 1970 Alexander Solzhenitsyn reflected on the fall of Russia in the Templeton Address saying:

"Over half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: 'Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened.' Since then I have spent well- nigh fifty years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."

This sentiment flies in the face the perspective I am now reading in Sam Harris book "The End of Faith" where the dominant concern is that religion is ruining the progress of free thinking society.