Eat your heart out, Tim

A review of Sam Harris'

"The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason"

(August 28, 2005)

Religion in one form or another has been with us for tens of thousands of
years, ever since humanity began to be overwhelmed by awareness of the
unknown. For all of its life it has been based on ignorance, fear,
superstition and pure wishful thinking. Social and scientific progress has
largely been accomplished in spite of it. But in the opening years of the
21st century it has reached a kind of critical mass which makes it a danger
not only to further progress but to our very survival. Islamic terrorism has
come into its own, and may well be in sight of getting hold of nuclear
weapons; in the hands of those who are willing and eager to die in the cause
of destroying the infidel and establishing an Islamic world state, they
threaten the survival of civilization, for all-out war and catastrophe would
certainly result. But Islam is not the only threat. Christian fundamentalism
in the United States is also reaching a critical mass. It threatens to
destroy two centuries of enlightened democratic government, halt social and
scientific progress, and rend American society in the cause of establishing
a regressive Bible-based fascism. Its policies will be governed by the Book
of Revelation, and its science and human rights will revert to a medieval
state. It, too, has its audacious ambitions, envisioning world conquest for
Christ and an apocalyptic upheaval accompanying his return. When two such
forces are let loose in the modern world, each with its own fanatical
convictions and irrational bases, mutually exclusive and incapable of reason
and accommodation, we are all in very deep trouble.

This recognition of crisis prompted Sam Harris to write The End of Faith,
and a powerful piece of writing it is. The book is a courageous analysis of
what religion is based on, what it has produced and what it threatens to
produce in the near future. None of it is pretty. While Harris offers no
easy or magical solution, an awareness and fearless examination of the
problem would put us halfway there, and one can only hope that books like
this will eventually lead us to that halfway point. But The End of Faith is
more than just an indictment. In analysing why the pitfalls of the human
condition have brought us to these destructive and perilous straits, Harris
gives us much in the way of understanding, and perhaps even a sense of how
we can escape our own traps. The cover design of the hardcover edition,
behind the author and title words, conveys a hopeful, if mixed, message. It
is almost entirely black, with a sliver of light off in the distance
entering a short way into the blackness, like a beckoning open doorway at
the end of a dark narrow hall. There is a way out, but can it be reached?
And can it be reached in time?

I am not going to say too much by way of analysis, but mostly let Harris
speak for himself. He is a brilliant writer, a master of vocabulary and
imagery, with a very fresh and readable style. The book is a page turner,
though the disturbing subject matter prevents it from being what one would
call an enjoyable read. Yet the latter part of the book manages to lift our
spirits. Certainly, its insights into the nature of ethics and consciousness
open up new vistas and new hope. Perhaps the 'end of faith' lies not too far
in our future, simply because we face disaster if we do not recognize that
the irrationalities of religion have brought our species to a tipping point.
Our choice is either their abandonment or the abyss.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the
Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having
many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its
infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to
which of these incompatible claims they accept*rather than on the basis of
language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of
tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of
beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All
are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however:
"respect" for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an
attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and
there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious
tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best,
dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a
person believes*really believes*that certain ideas can lead to eternal
happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the
people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers.
Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this
one. [p.13]

The only reason anyone is "moderate" in matters of faith these days is that
he has assimilated some of the fruits of the last two thousand years of
human thought (democratic politics, scientific advancement on every front,
concern for human rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation,
etc.). The doors leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the
inside. The moderation we see among non-fundamentalists is not some sign
that faith itself has evolved; it is, rather, the product of the many hammer
blows of modernity that have exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not
the least among these developments has been the emergence of our tendency to
value evidence and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there
is evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason
in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been partitioned to
accommodate the profligate truth claims of their faith....Religious
moderation springs from the fact that even the least educated person among
us simply knows more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand
years ago*and much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture.
[p.18-19]

With each passing year, do our religious beliefs conserve more and more of
the data of human experience? If religion addresses a genuine sphere of
understanding and human necessity, then it should be susceptible to
progress; its doctrines should become more useful, rather than less.
Progress in religion, as in other fields, would have to be a matter of
present inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true
now should be discoverable now, and describable in terms that are not an
outright affront to the rest of what we know about the world. By this
measure, the entire project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot
survive the changes that have come over us*culturally, technologically, and
even ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will
survive it. [p.22]

The point is that most of what we currently hold sacred is not sacred for
any reason other than that it was thought sacred yesterday. Surely, if we
could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives around
untestable propositions found in ancient literature*to say nothing of
killing and dying for them*would be impossible to justify. What stops us
from finding it impossible now? [p.24]

Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would
stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an
elementary school education. That so many of us are still dying on account
of ancient myths is as bewildering as it is horrible, and our own attachment
to these myths, whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face
of developments that could ultimately destroy us....Give people divergent,
irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and
then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just
what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals
any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence
regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to
this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of
civilization. [p.25-26]

What can be said of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan if
their divergent religious beliefs are to be "respected"? There is nothing
for religious pluralists to criticize but each country's poor
diplomacy*while, in truth, the entire conflict is born of an irrational
embrace of myth. Over one million people died in the orgy of religious
killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two
countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous
bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one
another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that
are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer. And their
discourse is such that they are capable of mustering a suicidal level of
enthusiasm for these subjects without evidence. Their conflict is only
nominally about land, because their incompatible claims upon the territory
of Kashmir are a direct consequence of their religious differences. Indeed,
the only reason India and Pakistan are different countries is that the
beliefs of Islam cannot be reconciled with those of Hinduism....When will we
realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political
discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting,
the most prolific source of violence in our history? [p.26-27]

Let's say that I believe that God exists, and some impertinent person asks
me why. This question invites*indeed, demands*an answer of the form "I
believe that God exists because..." I cannot say, however, "I believe that
God exists because it is prudent to do so" (as Pascal would have us
do)....Nor can I say things like "I believe in God because it makes me feel
good." The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does not give me
the slightest reason to believe that one exists. This is easily seen when we
swap the existence of God for some other consoling proposition. Let's say
that I want to believe that there is a diamond buried somewhere in my yard
that is the size of a refrigerator. It is true that it would be uncommonly
good to believe this. But do I have any reason to believe that there is
actually a diamond in my yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet
discovered? No. Here we can see why Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap of
faith, and other epistemological ponzi schemes won't do. [p.62-63]

This demonstrates that faith is nothing more than a willingness to await the
evidence*be it the Day of Judgment or some other downpour of corroboration.
It is the search for knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an
untestable hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you
were right. But in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that
everyone insists upon cashing this side of the grave: the engineer says the
bridge will hold; the doctor says the infection is resistant to
penicillin*these people have defensible reasons for their claims about the
way the world is. The mullah, the priest, and the rabbi do not. Nothing
could change about this world, or about the world of their experience, that
would demonstrate the falsity of many of their core beliefs. This proves
that these beliefs are not born of any examination of the world, or of the
world of their experience. (They are, in Karl Popper's sense,
"unfalsifiable.") It appears that even the Holocaust did not lead most Jews
to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent God. If having half
of your people systematically delivered to the furnace does not count as
evidence against the notion that an all-powerful God is looking out for your
interests, it seems reasonable to assume that nothing could. How does the
mullah know that the Koran is the verbatim word of God? The only answer to
be given in any language that does not make a mockery of the word "know"
is*he doesn't. [p.66-67]

It takes a certain kind of person to believe what no one else believes. To
be ruled by ideas for which you have no evidence (and which therefore cannot
be justified in conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign
that something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly there is sanity in
numbers....Jesus Christ*who, as it turns out, was born of a virgin, cheated
death, and rose bodily into the heavens*can now be eaten in the form of a
cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can
drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that a lone subscriber to these
beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is there any doubt that he would be
mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human
beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each
new generation of children is taught that religious propositions need not be
justified in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by
the armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over
ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically absurd
could be possible? [p.72-73]

The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184 under Pope Lucius III, to crush
the popular movement of Catharism....There seems, in fact, to have been
nothing wrong with these people apart from their attachment to certain
unorthodox beliefs about the creation of the world. But heresy is heresy.
Any person who believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God
will understand why these people had to be put to death....The question of
how the church managed to transform Jesus' principal message of loving one's
neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder and rapine
seems to promise a harrowing mystery; but it is no mystery at all. Apart
from the Bible's heterogeneity and outright self-contradiction, allowing it
to justify diverse and irreconcilable aims, the culprit is clearly the
doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe
the truth of a proposition, without evidence*that unbelievers will go to
hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants*he becomes capable of anything.
[p.83/85]

With passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935 the transformation of German
anti-Semitism was complete. The Jews were to be considered a race, one that
was inimical to a healthy Germany in principle....And it is here that we
encounter the overt complicity of the church in the attempted murder of an
entire people. German Catholics showed themselves remarkably acquiescent to
a racist creed that was at cross-purposes with at least one of their core
beliefs: for if baptism truly had the power to redeem, then Jewish converts
should have been considered saved without residue in the eyes of the church.
But, as we have seen, coherence in any system of beliefs is never
perfect....But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its
willingness to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby enable
them to trace the extent of a person's Jewish ancestry....Goldhagen also
reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before,
during, or after the war, "after committing crimes as great as any in human
history." This is really an extraordinary fact. Throughout this period, the
church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for
holding unorthodox views and to proscribe books by the hundreds, and yet not
a single perpetrator of genocide*of whom there were countless
examples*succeeded in furrowing Pope Pius XII's censorious brow. [p.102-4]

Of course, like every religion, Islam has had its moments. Muslim scholars
invented algebra, translated the writings of Plato and Aristotle, and made
important contributions to a variety of nascent sciences at a time when
European Christians were luxuriating in the most abysmal ignorance. It was
only through the Muslim conquest of Spain that classical Greek texts found
their way into Latin translation and seeded the Renaissance in western
Europe. Thousands of pages could be written cataloging facts of this sort
for every religion, but to what end? Would it suggest that religious faith
is good, or even benign? It is a truism to say that people of faith have
created almost everything of value in our world, because nearly every person
who has ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of
one or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do
the job. We can also say that every human achievement prior to the twentieth
century was accomplished by men and women who were perfectly ignorant of the
molecular basis of life. Does this suggest that a nineteenth-century view of
biology would have been worth maintaining?...The fact that religious faith
has left its mark on every aspect of our civilization is not an argument in
its favor, nor can any particular faith be exonerated simply because certain
of its adherents made foundational contributions to human culture. [p.108-9]

To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the text
of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in order of
their appearance in the text. This is what the Creator of the universe
apparently has on his mind... [There follows over five pages of direct
quotes from the Koran, from God consigning unbelievers "to the Fire" to
directives to "Slay them wherever you find them."] ...On almost every page,
the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise non-believers. On almost
every page, it prepares the ground for religious conflict. The Koran's
ambiguous prohibition against suicide*[the Koran contains a single ambiguous
line, "Do not destroy yourselves" (4:29)]*appears to be an utter non-issue.
Surely there are Muslim jurists who might say that suicide bombing is
contrary to the tenets of Islam (where are these jurists, by the way?) and
that suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs but fresh denizens of hell.
Such a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that suicide
bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world (where they are
called "sacred explosions')....The bottom line for the aspiring martyr seems
to be this: as long as you are killing infidels or apostates "in defense of
Islam," Allah doesn't care whether you kill yourself in the process or not.
[p.117-124]

It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims pose a
special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little possibility of our
having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear
weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the
threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic
that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century
perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if
an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise,
ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If history is any guide, we will
not be sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of
readiness is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional
weapons to destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to
ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to
say, this would be an unthinkable crime*as it would kill tens of millions of
innocent civilians in a single day*but it may be the only course of action
available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an
unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim
world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal
crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very
perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state
that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this is
perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible scenario in
which much of the world's population could be annihilated on account of
religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with Batman, the philosopher's
stone, and unicorns. That it would be a horrible absurdity for so many of us
to die for the sake of myth does not mean, however, that it could not
happen. Indeed, given the immunity to all reasonable intrusions that faith
enjoys in our discourse, a catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly
likely. We must come to terms with the possibility that men who are every
bit as zealous to die as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands
on long-range nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must
anticipate this possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the
steady proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on
our side. [p.128-9]

The degree to which religious ideas still determine government
policies*especially those of the United States*presents a grave danger to
everyone....For many years U.S. policy in the Middle East has been shaped,
at least in part, by the interests that fundamentalist Christians have in
the future of a Jewish state. Christian "support for Israel" is, in fact, an
example of religious cynicism so transcendental as to go almost unnoticed in
our political discourse. Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because
they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy
Land*specifically, the rebuilding of Solomon's temple*will usher in both the
Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews. Such smiling
anticipations of genocide seem to have presided over the Jewish state from
its first moments: the first international support for the Jewish return to
Palestine, Britain's Balfour Declaration of 1917, was inspired, at least in
part, by a conscious conformity to biblical prophecy. These intrusions of
eschatology into modern politics suggest that the dangers of religious faith
can scarcely be overstated. Millions of Christians and Muslims now organize
their lives around prophetic traditions that will only find fulfillment once
rivers of blood begin flowing from Jerusalem. [p.153-4]

Lieutenant General William G. Boykin was recently appointed deputy
undersecretary of defense for intelligence at the Pentagon. A highly
decorated Special Forces officer, he now sets policy with respect to the
search for Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the rest of America's enemies
in hiding. He is also, as it turns out, an ardent opponent of Satan.
Analyzing a photograph of Mogadishu after the fateful routing of his forces
there in 1993, Boykind remarked that certain shadows in the image revealed
"the principalities of darkness...a demonic presence in that city that God
revealed to me as the enemy." On the subject of the war on terror, he has
asserted that our "enemy is a guy named Satan." While these remarks sparked
some controversy in the media, most Americans probably took them in stride.
After all, 65 percent of us are quite certain that Satan exists. [p.156-7]

Men eager to do the Lord's work have been elected to other branches of the
federal government as well. The House majority leader, Tom DeLay, is given
to profundities like "Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to
the realities that we find in this world. Only Christianity." He claims to
have gone into politics "to promote a Biblical worldview." Apparently
feeling that it is impossible to say anything stupid while in the service of
this worldview, he attributed the shootings at the Columbine High School in
Colorado to the fact that our schools teach the theory of evolution. We
might wonder how it is that pronouncements this floridly irrational do not
lead to immediate censure and removal from office. [p.157]

A rational approach to ethics becomes possible once we realize that
questions of right and wrong are really questions about the happiness and
suffering of sentient creatures. If we are in a position to affect the
happiness or suffering of others, we have ethical responsibilities toward
them*and many of these responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of
civil and criminal law. Taking happiness and suffering as our starting
point, we can see that much of what people worry about under the guise of
morality has nothing to do with the subject. It is time we realized that
crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do not even
exist. Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the private
pleasures of other consenting adults has more than just too much time on his
hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the nature of right and
wrong. [p.170-1]

The pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest
ethical intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong
from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two equals
four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone who does not harbor
some rudimentary sense that cruelty is wrong is unlikely to learn that it is
by reading*and, indeed, most scripture offers rather equivocal testimony to
this fact in any case....Concern for others was not the invention of any
prophet....We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us to live
ethical lives. Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and
suffering, we find that our religions traditions are no more reliable on
questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally.
[p.172]

Rather than find real reasons for human solidarity, faith offers us a
solidarity born of tribal and tribalizing fictions. As we have seen,
religion is one of the great limiters of moral identity, since most
believers differentiate themselves, in moral terms, from those who do not
share their faith. No other ideology is so eloquent on the subject of what
divides one moral community from another. Once a person accepts the premises
upon which most religious identities are built, the withdrawal of his moral
concern from those who do not share these premises follows quite naturally.
Needless to say, the suffering of those who are destined for hell can never
be as problematic as the suffering of the righteous. If certain people can't
see the unique wisdom and sanctity of my religion, if their hearts are so
beclouded by sin, what concern is it of mine if others mistreat them? They
have been cursed by the very God who made the world and all things in it.
Their search for happiness was simply doomed from the start. [p.176-7]

[M]any intellectuals tend to speak as though something in the last century
of ratiocination in the West has placed all worldviews more or less on an
equal footing. No one is ever really right about what he believes; he can
only point to a community of peers who believe likewise. Suicide bombing
isn't really wrong, in any absolute sense; it just seems so from the
parochial perspective of Western culture. Throw a dash of Thomas Kuhn into
this pot, and everyone can agree that we never really know how the world is,
because each new generation of scientists reinvents the laws of nature to
suit its taste. Convictions of this sort generally go by the name of
"relativism," and they seem to offer a rationale for not saying anything too
critical about the beliefs of others. But most forms of relativism*including
moral relativism, which seems especially well subscribed*are nonsensical.
And dangerously so. Some may think that it is immaterial whether we think
the Nazis were really wrong in ethical terms, or whether we just don't like
their style of life. It seems to me, however, that the belief that some
worldviews really are better than others taps a different set of
intellectual and moral resources. These are resources we will desperately
need if we are to oppose, and ultimately unseat, the regnant ignorance and
tribalism of our world. [p.178-9]