The End of Faith - Sam Harris

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005

“As a [North American] culture, we have clearly outgrown our tolerance for the deliberate torture and murder of innocents. We would do well to realize that much of the world has not (144).”

Sam Harris penned these two sentences before ISIS and the brutality that characterizes their determination to carve out a caliphate in Syria and Iraq through horrible acts of genocide and forced conversion. Had he written it today, he might well have added a chapter right after his most pointed one condemning  Muslim faith as a predictable generator of exactly what we're seeing in the Middle East.

      But this book is not primarily a denunciation of aspects of Islamic faith; it points to the danger represented historically and presently by the clinging to indemonstrable and irrational religious beliefs. By far the heaviest concentration of criticism is for the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and the most dangerous belief in all three—according to Harris—is the conviction that there is a life after death and that all persons will be judged by God and rewarded or punished for who they are, what they profess and what they do. 

     The bloodshed that has historically ensued from the exercise of religious dogmas is not difficult to research and demonstrate and Harris makes copious references to examples like the holocaust, the inquisitions, even the My Lai massacres, events that would not have been the horrors they were except for the under-girding of centuries of insupportable beliefs.

      Highly relevant to Harris' thesis is the observation that history is kinetic, religious holy books are static. Something as simple as the rethinking of the Biblical creation narrative in the light of modern archaeology, anthropology, etc., can bring faith up against a brick wall unless it has some resiliency, and the possibility of revising ancient understandings with the acquisition of new knowledge is made enormously more difficult by the presence of holy books that are considered to be inerrant, god-breathed and infallible. It's a conundrum that Abrahamic religions share and according to Harris, the very fact that people literally believe what is written—even if it was meant to be symbolic or metaphoric—represents enormous danger both to believers and to the world at large.

      Strident believers of all stripes will obviously find Harris offensive; I imagine many throwing it out after the first few pages: “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 (13).” He goes on to assert that whether one's religious views are liberal or conservative, a tacit understanding reigns that beliefs about an afterlife (for instance) are not criticized— in fact, not even discussed. This, to Harris, demonstrates the irrational nature of religious faith as well as its tenacious hold on orthodoxy.

      Obviously, a distinction needs to be made between those who unconditionally believe—in the inerrancy of the book, for instance—those who harbour some doubt and those who claim to be believers but don't participate in an appreciable way in religious activity or discussion. Harris takes a swipe at liberal believers as being enablers to fundamentalist atrocity by being politely silent, a criticism that I, personally, need to give some thought. Fundamentalism in North America has drawn hugely damaging lines in the sand on questions like homosexuality, reproductive rights, stem cell research to cite just a few examples; moderate Christians like me have been milksops when it comes to challenging people who are essentially members of our tribe, as it were. An even better case is made for the tepid response among moderate Muslims to the atrocities of Al Qaeda and other jihadist terrorist groups.

      ISIS has opened a whole new chapter in East/West relations and has encouraged us to think again about our response to the wanton murdering of innocents on the basis of their ethnicity, faith or whatever marks them as “not one of us:” infidels, in their terms. To Harris, the actions of jihadists follow naturally from literal belief in the irrational, brutal pronouncements so overwhelmingly evident in the Koran. He cites fully 5 pages of references from the Koran that can be seen to predict and—for more moderate Muslims—excuse certain atrocities. “Let not the unbelievers think that We prolong their days for their own good. We give them respite only so that they may commit more grievous sins. Shameful punishment awaits them – 3:178 (120)” 

     Similarly, Christians and Jews can find handy excuses for atrocities like the Spanish inquisition in their scriptures: “If it is proved and confirmed that such a hateful thing (leading fellow believers into idolatry) has taken place among you, you must put the inhabitants of that town to the sword; you must lay it under the curse of destruction—the town and everything in it – Deuteronomy 13: 12-16 (82).” Who can deny that in Christian and Jewish circles today, Biblically-inspired belief in chosenness and 'Godly' manifest destiny still plays a role in Palestine/Israel, making conflict resolution more than difficult? Who hasn't noticed that the current genocidal warfare being carried out by ISIS bears remarkable similarities to the conquest of Palestine by Joshua? (See Joshua Chapter 8, for instance.)

      Faith moderates under the influence of new knowledge and the passage of time. Most Christians with whom I dialogue don't take the beards, stonings and take-no-prisoners admonitions in parts of the Old Testament as prescriptive for them. At the same time, many of our teachers and preachers are bending over backwards to justify the inclusion of barbarous or absurd texts in our holy book by “contextualizing” them or shining the flashlight of the New Testament upon them. 

     Nevertheless, there remains in the Bible—a book that declares God to be a loving God—the suggestion that since he has counselled genocide, torture and destruction in defence of his people in the past, he might do so again. Who can safely predict that if ISIS grows and expands, the powers of the day in the West won't retreat to this understanding of God, this belief in the efficacy of righteous slaughter, only this time with weapons of mass destruction and not with swords and clubs?

      Warring faiths. Abraham's children butchering each other . . . again.

      The End of Faith was a New York Times best seller. I suspect that Sam Harris did very well financially on it and that many have read it. I'm curious about the way it was and is being read by both conservative and moderate Christians. 

     Some, of course, would proclaim that without an abiding, unquestioned faith in the reality of God as revealed in their particular holy book—as well as in the prospect of everlasting life—religion and even human life and consciousness are rendered utterly meaningless. 

     Those who see God and the book as the source and foundation of right and wrong, of ethics and morality might argue that without such beliefs, the world would quickly descend into bloodshed and chaos. 

     In his book, Can we be Good Without God, Robert Buckman proposes that “it might be a better world if we all believe whatever we wish, but behave as if there was no suprahuman deity to sort out our problems for us (Buckman: 264).” To that, many would undoubtedly say, “Don't hold your breath.”

      There is much to ponder in Harris' book. Reason vs. faith as opposed to faith in dialogue with reason, for instance. About one thing Harris is undoubtedly correct—if my experience is typical: Strident belief by its very nature pours cold water on dialogue, debate and a willingness to adapt.

      Harris sums up his central thesis in the afterword:

“Needless to say, my argument against religious faith is not an argument for the blind embrace of atheism as a dogma. The problem I raise in the book is none other than the problem of dogma itself—of which every religion has more than its fair share. I know of no society in human history that ever suffered because its people became too reasonable (231).”