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

[Guest guest]

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

By Sam Harris

 

Norton, 336 pages, $36

 

In a scene from Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire,

Stella Kowalski relates her sister's account of having been raped by

Stella's husband.

 

" I couldn't believe her story and go on living with Stanley, " Stella

tells her neighbour, Eunice.

 

Fiercely, the older woman responds: " Don't ever believe it. Life has

got to go on. No matter what happens, you've got to keep on going. "

 

That's faith; and in obscuring certain things and brightening

others, faith can make a normative way of living possible.

 

Not always benign for individuals, however, the consolations of

faith can become actively destructive when codified in religious

authoritarianism. In our current global predicament it is religious

faith that must be abandoned if civilization is to endure, argues

Sam Harris, a young U.S. academic in philosophy and neuroscience,

whose debut book champions floodlit rationality.

 

" To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world -- to

say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain

mountains of life-destroying gibberish -- is antithetical to

tolerance as moderates currently conceive it, " Harris writes. " But

we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. "

 

The End of Faith is unmistakably a post-9/11 book, with considerable

emphasis on the delirium of Islamic fundamentalism, but Harris is

more equitable than that may sound. Here, all religion represents

irrationality, even madness. Through a prism of evidence-based

reality, Harris sees religion's stories as not only ludicrous but

murderous, permeated with toxic intolerance for differing views.

 

That's easy enough for Harris to show with a few sacred texts and a

highlight marker. In passages, the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and

Koran all verge amply into what we, in other contexts today, call

hate literature. When not immediately calling for the sword for

unbelievers, they're stoning their co-religionists for any social

infraction and brandishing Hell to dissenters on an apocalyptic Day

of Judgment.

 

History also provides Harris's bushel basket of destructive

irrationality with much low-hanging fruit, from Christianity's

ghastly inquisitions and crusades to the Jews' implacable fixity on

a personal god who can't hear screams or smell burning human flesh.

 

Religious moderation exists, but Harris insists moderation comes not

from faith but everything external to it, a dilution attained

through a forced infusion of modernity. Moreover, religious

moderates still defend irrational belief as a guide to human

behaviour, removing the means to effectively oppose fundamentalism.

 

" Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape

velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse --

constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility and

candour, " Harris writes in a characteristically stinging

construction.

 

Dogmatic atheists -- is there another kind? -- will revel in the

pointed polemic here, and religious moderates may feel in places

justly admonished. People of great rectitude will be enraged, a

state they fortunately find congenial.

 

Above all, secular humanists will find in The End of Faith a

revisiting of 's resonant plea in The Fate of the

Earth. As Schell argued in 1982 that nuclear proliferation meant we

must give up nation-states, our present nightmare of radical

theocracies seeking weapons of mass destruction prompts Harris's

call for a global parting from religion.

 

Overlook the fact that neither of these highly intelligent writers

knows how such transformations can occur. The End of Faith has other

important gaps, Stalin and Hitler being resident in one of them.

Harris glancingly refers to communism and fascism as cults, but

essentially ducks the problem of secular monstrosity.

 

As for the supporters of malign secular deities, nationalism has

often been as effective an animating force for atrocity as religion,

a point Harris never makes. Shinto and Buddhism hardly demanded

Japan's barbaric forays throughout Asia. For that matter, toxic

intolerance -- currently popular hereabouts as " zero tolerance " --

runs left and right around the world. It plays out more dangerously

in Tehran than in Toronto, but the dynamic is everywhere and

religion is hardly the only cudgel.

 

Yet what of the virtues religions plausibly claim? Harris doesn't

deny that ethical behaviour, community support and spiritual

experience can derive from religious practice, but argues that

religion is unnecessary to produce these. Unexpectedly, he not only

embraces the value of spiritual effort but -- again raising the flag

for empirical observation -- believes " investigating the nature of

consciousness directly, through sustained introspection, is simply

another name for spiritual practice. "

 

All this is betting that secular humanism can safeguard those well-

nurtured, ethical communities. Denmark or the Netherlands may have

pulled it off, of course, but it's no accident such countries have

bit parts on the world stage.

 

And underpinning if not overriding the discussion is nature. Our

pretensions to the contrary, animal nature continues to frame a

rather large window onto human nature. Tyranny, murder and rape are

all normative in the animal world, and pacifism, liberality and

monogamy are exceptional. Humans have demonstrated their distinction

in these regards mainly when their social structures vigorously

reinforce those distinctions.

 

That's where Harris gives the least credit where due. For all the

wretchedness that attaches to the great monotheistic religions,

there is a significant case to be made for their advancement of the

ideal of better things.

 

Still, for a brainy bookworm, Harris does a muscular job as a

warrior against religious authoritarianism. When he's finished

drafting the plan to defeat all authoritarianism, let's give the

distribution rights to Gideon.

 

Toronto writer Salem Alaton was born in the heart of the former

Ottoman Empire, where Christians, Muslims and Jews lived for a time

in peace.

 

Faithless

 

.. . . 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 . . . .

Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs

and practices. . . . 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 . . . with 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.

 

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

By Sam Harris

 

 

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