At this
website, you will find a number of reviews of Sam Harris’s book, The End of
Faith http://www.samharris.org/index.php . Last year’s
review of the book in the Globe is there.
Today
July2nd,2005, the Toronto Star ran a full page review
by Ron Csillag of the book (see below).
Losing faith in religion
Author
pleads for an age of reason that will render religious faith as archaic as the
worship of Odin Sam Harris says religious myths must die if we are to survive
as a species, Ron Csillag reports
Compared to Sam Harris, Karl Marx was a piker. The
19th-century political philosopher derided religion as the "opium of the
people." To Harris, organized faith is more like crack cocaine,
and its fruits every bit as ruinous. And we must quit the pipe, cold turkey,
before it's too late.
A
Stanford University philosophy graduate and now a doctoral student in
neuroscience, Harris has delivered a 323-page jeremiad against religion
entitled The End of Faith (W.W. Norton), a bracing, unsubtle yet
eloquent plea — more like a clarion call — for a stop to dogmatic religion as
we know it, and the start of an age of reason that will render religious faith
as archaic as the worship of Odin.
Winner
of the 2005
PEN Award for Non-Fiction, Harris's explosive book, as more than one reviewer has noted,
articulates fiercely and fearlessly what more and more people are thinking but
few are willing to say in polite company: religious faith is not only blind,
but deaf, mute, absurd, irrational, and threatens our very existence.
Like
other intellectuals traumatized by the 9/11 attacks, Harris began writing on
Sept. 12, 2001 — "the moment it became obvious we were meandering into a
religious war and not articulating the truth to ourselves," he told the Star
in an interview prior to addressing Toronto's three-day ideaCity
conference.
The
first draft of the first chapter was "an unpublishable
screed," the author concedes. He took a breath, cooled off as much as
possible, and produced a prolonged nuclear assault on religious extremists and
moderates alike, and the theology ("ignorance with wings") that
propels Muslim suicide bombers, Christian anti-abortion zealots and Jewish
settlers in
Harris
lists about two dozen violent conflicts around the world which pit one religion
against another. On the Indian subcontinent, for example, more than 1 million
Muslims and Hindus have died in three official wars and continuous bloodletting
between
While
religious pluralists — in these cases as in other hot spots — may cite failed
diplomacy, "in truth," writes Harris, "the entire conflict is
born of an irrational embrace of myth." These are just two countries
poised to exterminate each other "because they disagree about the `facts'
that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer."
Myths
die hard, Harris realizes, but die they must if we are to survive as a species. For now that millions
embrace the metaphysics of martyrdom or the truth of the book of Revelation —
and are armed to the teeth — "words like `God' and `Allah' must go the way of
`Apollo' and `Baal' or they will unmake our world," he warns. Faith-based
religion "must suffer the same slide into obsolescence" as alchemy.
If
not, and as long as it is acceptable for someone to believe that he knows how
God wants everyone on Earth to live, "we will continue to murder one
another on account of our myths."
Other
example of Harris's carpet-bombing:
· "There is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal
existence of Yahweh or Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his
mountain throne or Poseidon churning the sea ... we as a species have grown
perfectly intoxicated by our myths."
· "How can any person
presume to know that this is the way the universe works? Because
it says so in our holy books. How do we know that our holy books are
free from error? Because the books themselves say so.
Epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the light from our
world."
· "Given the link between
belief and action, it is clear that we can no more tolerate a diversity of
religious beliefs than a diversity of beliefs about epidemiology and basic
hygiene."
· "It is time we recognized
that all reasonable men and women have a common enemy. It is an enemy so near
to us and so deceptive, that we keep its counsel even as it threatens to
destroy the very possibility of human happiness. Our enemy is nothing other than faith
itself."
Harris,
a genial 38-year-old raised by a Jewish mother and Quaker father in a secular
environment, insists his goal was not be inflammatory. "I was at pains to
modulate the drastic terms in which I see our situation," he explains. He
calls his book "an argument for intellectual honesty. It's only on matters
of religion that we allow people to pretend to be certain of things they are
not certain about."
The
book delivers a hammer blow to fundamentalists of all stripes, but also to
moderates. Religious moderation, Harris argues, betrays both faith and reason
equally. Moderates are, in large part, responsible for religious strife
"because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism
and religious violence can never be adequately opposed" — all thanks to
the sacredness in which we hold tolerance.
Put
even more bluntly, Harris's view is that we can no longer afford the political
correctness that guards us from violating the taboo of knocking someone's
religion. He leads the way in the brave new front by flatly declaring that the
Bible and the Qur'an "both contain mountains of
life-destroying gibberish."
Harris
argues that the kind of intolerance he advances is merely a
"conversational" one.
"We
need to be more intolerant across the board," he offers. "One of the
taboos I'm breaking in my book — and it's more of a taboo among moderates than
fundamentalists — is noticing the differences among religions. I'm not willing
to say Islam and Christianity are alike. There's much to be said against
Christianity and Judaism, but at this moment, Islam presents some unique
problems to a global civilization forming. It's really taboo to point that out.
We have this multicultural, politically correct notion that there's no place to
stand where you can rigorously criticize another person's faith. But if you
can't go to the mat on something like honour killing, it seems to me that the rudiments of
civilization have been lost."
While
Harris is tough on Christianity (a story of "mankind's misery and
ignorance rather than of its requited love of God") and Judaism, which
prescribes death for a disturbingly long list of infractions, none of which,
Harris feels are meant as metaphors, he reserves his harshest appraisal for
Islam.
"We
are at war with Islam," he writes unflinchingly. "We are at war with
precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Qur'an." He follows that up with five solid pages of
citations from the Islamic holy text which purport to
call for violence against the non-believer. Anyone who reads those "and
can still not see a link between Muslim faith and Muslim violence should
probably consult a neurologist."
Calling
Islam a religion of peace, as U.S. President George Bush has done repeatedly,
"is really playing hide the ball with core dogmas of the faith: martyrdom
and jihad," he continued in the interview. "You just have to look at
the example of Muhammad. He was not a hippy who was crucified. He was the
Julius Caesar of the Muslim world. Clearly, many Muslims expect that kind of
victory in this world by Islam."
As
for the Bible, it's "really a deplorable document. There is no reason
whatsoever to abolish slavery if you consult the Bible. Clearly, the creator of
the universe expects us to keep slaves."
While
Harris doesn't deny that religions carry a large moral component, he believes
one does not have to be religious in order to be moral. "I don't think
everyday morality requires any irrationality. The morality of societies that are far more atheistic than my own attest to
this."
And
while he does dwell on all that is wrong with the major monotheistic faiths, he
does have some good to say about so-called eastern religions and various
mystical strains for their de-emphasis of the self.
But
there is hope, evidenced by the fact that "nobody's dying for
Poseidon." An utter revolution in our thinking can be accomplished in a
single generation if parents and teachers simply gave honest answers to
children. And there's little time to waste, Harris warns, for there's no reason
to think that we can survive our religious differences indefinitely.