Author: Natalie Angier
Publication: The New York Times
Date: September 5, 2004
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/books/review/05ANGIERL.html
THE END OF FAITH
Religion, Terror, and the Future
of Reason.
By Sam Harris.
336 pp. W. W. Norton & Company.
$24.95.
When I was 8 years old, my family
was in a terrible car accident, and my older brother almost died. The next
night, as I lay scared and sleepless on my paternal grandmother's living-room
couch, she softly explained to me who was to blame. Not my father's Aunt
Estelle, a dour, aging wild woman and devout Baptist, who, as usual, was
driving recklessly fast. No, the reason Estelle's station wagon flipped
over and Joe was thrown out the back window was this: my father had stopped
going to church the previous year, and God was very, very angry.
Dear old Grandma June. A compelling
lack of evidence for any sort of Higher Power may have steered my mind
toward atheism, but she put the heathen in my heart.
It's not often that I see my florid
strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but
''The End of Faith'' articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized
religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it,
vindicated, almost personally understood. Sam Harris presents major religious
systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned
lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important
when it comes to matters of humanity's long-term survival, mutually incompatible.
A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los
Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing
to say in contemporary America: ''We have names for people who have many
beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs
are extremely common, we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely
to be called 'mad,' 'psychotic' or 'delusional.' '' To cite but one example:
''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?'' The danger of religious faith, he continues,
''is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of
madness and consider them holy.''
Right now, if you are even vaguely
observant, or have friends or grandmothers who are, you may be feeling
not merely irritated, as you would while reading a political columnist
with whom you disagree, but deeply offended. You may also think it inappropriate
that a mainstream newspaper be seen as obliquely condoning an attack on
religious belief. That reaction, in Harris's view, is part of the problem.
''Criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our
culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare
consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse.
Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to
be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history
is not.''
A zippered-lip policy would be fine,
a pleasant display of the neighborly tolerance that we consider part of
an advanced democracy, Harris says, if not for the mortal perils inherent
in strong religious faith. The terrorists who flew jet planes into the
World Trade Center believed in the holiness of their cause. The Christian
apocalypticists who are willing to risk a nuclear conflagration in the
Middle East for the sake of expediting the second coming of Christ believe
in the holiness of their cause. In Harris's view, such fundamentalists
are not misinterpreting their religious texts or ideals. They are not defaming
or distorting their faith. To the contrary, they are taking their religion
seriously, attending to the holy texts on which their faith is built. Unhappily
for international comity, the Good Books that undergird the world's major
religions are extraordinary anthologies of violence and vengeance, celestial
decrees that infidels must die.
In the 21st century, Harris says,
when swords have been beaten into megaton bombs, the persistence of ancient,
blood-washed theisms that emphasize their singular righteousness and their
superiority over competing faiths poses a genuine threat to the future
of humanity, if not the biosphere: ''We can no longer ignore the fact that
billions of our neighbors believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in
the literal truth of the book of Revelation,'' he writes, ''because our
neighbors are now armed with chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.''
Harris reserves particular ire for
religious moderates, those who ''have taken the apparent high road of pluralism,
asserting the equal validity of all faiths'' and who ''imagine that the
path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the
unjustified beliefs of others.'' Religious moderates, he argues, are the
ones who thwart all efforts to criticize religious literalism. By preaching
tolerance, they become intolerant of any rational discussion of religion
and ''betray faith and reason equally.''
Harris, no pure materialist, acknowledges
the human need for a mystical dimension to life, and he conveys something
of a Buddhist slant on the nature of consciousness and reality. But he
believes that mysticism, like other forms of knowledge, can be approached
rationally and explored with the tools of modern neuroscience, without
recourse to superstition and credulity.
''The End of Faith'' is far from
perfect. Harris seems to find ''moral relativism'' as great a sin as religious
moderation, and in the end he singles out Islam as the reigning threat
to humankind. He likens it to the gruesome, Inquisition-style Christianity
of the 13th century, yet he never explains how Christianity became comparatively
domesticated. And on reading his insistence that it is ''time for us to
admit that not all cultures are at the same stage of moral development,''
I couldn't help but think of Ann Coulter's morally developed suggestion
that we invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert their citizens
to Christianity.
Harris also drifts into arenas of
marginal relevance to his main thesis, attacking the war against drugs
here, pacificism there, and offering a strained defense for the use of
torture in wartime that seems all the less persuasive after Abu Ghraib.
Still, this is an important book, on a topic that, for all its inherent
difficulty and divisiveness, should not be shielded from the crucible of
human reason.
Natalie Angier has written about
atheism and science for The Times, The American Scholar and elsewhere.
