The End of Faith? (EOF1)

Sam Harris' The End of Faith

Sam Harris' 2004-2005 screed against religion, all religion, has finally popped into my bedside reading stack. Called The End of Faith, it was recently a New York Times bestseller. Its subtitle is "Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason." Its premise is that religion qua religion is fatally flawed by virtue of its hostility to reason, and can never, ever stop underwriting terrorist bloodbaths.

Harris is a scholar, an academic, a graduate in philosophy at Stanford University. He has delved deeply into Eastern and Western religious traditions. Spirituality, both within and external to these faith traditions, interests him deeply, as does the basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty in our brain's functioning.

He quite apparently also is a committed — nay, militant — atheist.


The author directs much of his venom about religion at people like me, whom he would label a religious "moderate." (I would prefer to think of myself as a religious "liberal," but never mind.) To Harris, moderates are worse than fundamentalists because we moderates' watchword is "tolerance." We carefully avoid smiting those of other persuasions.

Harris can't stand that. Early on, he conspicuously cites language from chapter 13 of Deuteronomy, the fifth book in the Judeo-Christian Bible, in which God directs his chosen people to kill anyone trying to "secretly seduce you" over to the worship of rival gods. This sort of thing, he says, is what fundamentalists who spare not the sword get right about their religion ... and moderates who turn a blind eye to such divine adjurations get wrong.

In fact, "You must stone [the infidel] to death, since he has tried to divert you from Yahweh your God" (Deut. 13:10) stands for Harris as a sort of précis of what religion, at its very core, is. It's not just Judeo-Christian religion that sparks our thirst for blood to be drawn in God's name. It's also Islam, another well-known form of monotheism ... in which the blood is shed in Allah's name. And, with other necessary changes to the holy name, it is likewise true of every other world religion that demands that we call things true on faith rather than by seeking and finding incontrovertible empirical evidence.

If religions are fundamentally calls to vanquish other religions, Harris thinks the future of our world depends on jettisoning them all in favor of science, empiricism, reason ... and, yes, even a sophisticated spirituality which does not depend on unverifiable portions of Scripture.


We wouldn't be eliminating all spirituality, in Harris' longed-for world in which the old religions have vanished into oblivion, because:

There are undoubtedly spiritual truths that we would want to relearn ... and these are truths that we have learned imperfectly in our present state. How is it possible, for instance, to overcome one's fear and inwardness and simply love other human beings? (p. 24)

When I read this, I wanted to shout at Harris, "That's what Christianity is. It's a time-tested method of learning to overcome one's own fear and selfishness and replacing them with love for others."

But Harris doesn't see it that way. He goes on:

Assume, for the moment, that such a process of personal transformation exists and that there is something worth knowing about it; there is, in other words, some skill, or discipline, or conceptual understanding, or dietary supplement that allows for the reliable transformation of fearful, hateful, or indifferent persons into loving ones. If so, we should be positively desperate to know about it. There may even be a few biblical passages that would be useful in this regard — but as for whole rafts of untestable doctrines, clearly there would be no reasonable basis to take them up again.

In my next post in this "The End of Faith?" series, I'll take up the subject of why I totally disagree with Harris' understanding of what religion really is. As a foretaste of that, let me just say that I think ideologies which provoke hatred and bloodshed are a demonic parody of true religion ... never mind the extent to which they historically and currently have held millions in their grip.