The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
by Sam Harris
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Book Summary Information
Author: Sam HarrisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-10-10
ISBN: 0393327655
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Book Reviews of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Book Review: The Religious Emperor has no Clothers
Summary: 5 Stars
Sam Harris, in this well thought out broadside against religion has touched a deep and sensitive nerve in American culture, which, arguably, along with violence, racism, and repressed sexuality, religion makes up the fourth leg of a matrix that defines the substrate of the American way of life. Unlike the others however, and despite a long history of hypocrisy, religion nevertheless is the only one of the four that remains a "sacred cow." So Mr. Harris gets three stars for bravery alone.
In demonstrating conclusively that the religious Emperor has no clothes (at least no rational ones), Harris unleashes a fuselage at religious mythology, iconography, the illogic and inanity of most of its cannons, its hypocrisy, and most importantly of all, the lack of any discernable positive impact on our collective morality. And, this is after nearly 3000 years of continuous organized religious teachings and practices.
Citing a litany that includes the Crusades, burnings at the stake, the role religion has played in enabling and maintaining slavery, and a Century of Apartheid in both the U.S. and South Africa -- one wonders from Harris' rendition how much better off the world might have been had there been no religion at all. According to him, religion has even been implicated in enabling and failing to intervene in Hitler's industrialized massacre of European Jews, the Colonialism imposed on most of the Third World, and the ejection of Arabs from the Holy land.
Add to this list, the recent religious scandals such as the U.S. Catholic pedophile escapades; the fights over abortion rights; the resistance to new developments in biotechnology and ethics; and the openly condoned hypocrisy of the likes of America's favorite televangelists -- Pat Robinson, Jimmy Baker, Jerry Falwell and Jim Jones. And then throw into this concoction the very real threat of nuclear war on the South Asian Peninsula between Muslims and Hindu, the new wave of suicidal terrorists, the fourth war in Lebanon, the genocide in Yugoslavia and Sudan, and one is inclined to take seriously Harris' claim that religion remains more a moral scourge than a source of moral enlightenment in the contemporary world.
Even today, the oath that one must swear to, as part of the Baptism ceremony in most Christian denominations (Do you believe in the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost?), is the same oath that would have gotten you burned at the stake or beheaded just two centuries ago.
Harris' strongest argument however is not just this bleak historical track-record. It rests also on the fact that the beliefs that define our current worldview are based on outmoded religious and moral ideas two millennia old; were developed by people who knew less about the world they lived in than today's elementary school kids know about theirs. Yet, it is these 2000-year old anachronistic views that define our moral vision of the World, anchor our contemporary worldview, and still dictate how we 21st Century people think, feel and behave.
According to him, most people of the world continue to believe, through their religious teachings, that there is a creator who has written a book containing "the infallible words of god" and that only THEIR god is the true god; and only THEIR book contains the true and final word - a word by which all "right thinking" people of the world must live. They also believe that through faith rather than through historical facts, reason and logic, everything about their god (myths about His life, the content of His books, and their interpretations), must be taken as the infallible gospel truth. And above all else, they believe that if one lives a life strictly according to "the book" at worst he will be rewarded in the afterlife (72 virgins, immorality and an everlasting life, a land of milk and honey, etc.). Many believe that doing so may even postpone or eliminate death altogether, or at the very least, make their journey beyond "this life" easier. Of course, doing the opposite, of not embracing the "correct god" is punishable by burning forever in hell, and worse.
The problem that Harris spells out for us in this volume is that these competing conceptions of god, and the competing books that are spawn by them, are conceived of in ways that make them mutually incompatible and thus serve to divide us in ways, that so far in our history, have led us to kill each other in brutal ways and on a massive scale.
Gods it seems do not suffer competing gods lightly. Yet, despite these deep and important differences across religious faiths, somehow devout people find ways to exclude religious incompatibilities and to excuse religious practices as being responsible for most of the slaughter ravishing the world across vast stretches of history, and including even today.
According to Harris. at least within the moderate religious community, there exists an unrealistic modus vivendi: to ignore, yet tolerate other gods and incompatible religious ideas. The author sees this feigned civility as unrealistic because the truth is that certainty about the meaning of one's own faith makes tolerance of another's impossible. The religiously inclined generally, and religious moderates in particular, seem to miss the point that self-imposed silence and a refusal to engage in rational discourse about theological differences is a poor excuse for, and is not quite the same thing as, tolerance. This false tolerance is the kind of passive-aggressive accommodation with outmoded religious ideas that Harris thinks is leading us down the path to a future of even more religious strife.
Thus, it could be argued that there is nothing new in "The End of Faith" that cannot also be found in Bertrand Russell's "Why I am not a Christian." It is true that Harris has updated the arguments made by Russell and has added his own philosophical twist, and has put it all together in one tidy easy to read package; and like Russell, he has done so without apologies, and without pulling any politically correct punches.
Harris' most telling point is that newer and morally more complex technological times bring with them new moral imperatives. When this need for a new morality is combined with the meager positive impact of religion compared with its much larger negative impact, the author argues convincingly that there is no longer any reason that can justify acquiescing to or even tolerating archaic, illogical, and rather useless religious ideas that are today's mainstay.
This is powerful medicine and paints an ugly but deserving picture of religion as it continues to be practiced. His point that we do so at our own peril must be given a great deal of weight and respect. However, Harris' message is not as flawless as at first sight it might seem. There are other aspects of "The End of Faith," that must be looked at rather more carefully.
For instance, because there is so much data supporting his case, it is easy enough for the author to attack the illogic of religion and the reliance on blind faith by its radical elements as the bogeyman of our modern existence. However, it is quite another matter and requires quite a more sophisticated analysis to argue that the moderate and the more nuanced faith practiced by most of the world's religious adherents would have the same or similar devastating effects.
Harris asserts that a world of logic and reason (or towards the end of the book a religion of logic and reason), as opposed to one based entirely on blind faith and religious doctrine, would not have the same negative effects and would lead us into a more enlightened, less problematic, more morally evolved, and thus a more civilized world. But these remain just that, assertions; and even when examined on his own favorite turf, logic and reason, Harris' assertions though plausible are nowhere near overwhelmingly convincing.
The difficulty with Harris' argument is two-fold and I believe rather obvious. A couple of religious reviewers have alluded to one of them. First, he fails to admit that there is very little at bottom that does not rest on a foundation of faith. Even with his more logical, and more avowedly scientific approach, it can be safely argued, in the end, that this too is just another "faith-based" analysis.
An equal concern -- whether one's analysis is based solely on "religious faith" or "scientific faith" -- is his failure to ask and answer the question about the utility of such faith: to what service is the faith actually being put? I believe this question is prior to that of whether or not the faith is factually based.
It seems to me that Mr. Harris stakes his claim on the much easier target: the irrationality of blind faith by religious radicals, the illogic of religious doctrine and the narratives upon which this irrationality and these doctrines are often based - most of which, as he correctly claims are no more believable than most children's fairy tales.
Yet, inasmuch as this may all be true, Karen Armstrong, a respected scholar of religious history makes a reasonable, though again not an altogether persuasive case, that it is not just the discrete facts of myths and parables of religious faith, that matter. She argues quite correctly that man is a symbolizing animal, who demands that his narratives transcend logic in his attempt to organize and then to lend a sense of wholeness to the meanings they impute to the world.
At some level, it cannot be easily denied or dismissed that religion is as much about how humans are connected to the larger universe as it is about validly grounded facts. Thus, recurring religious stories that at times seem childish, always seem to have meanings that transcend and go beyond mere logic and reason. Professor Armstrong's ideas are not just tantalizing, they demand a respect and a hearing in the same market place that suggest that logic and reason are "the end all and be all" of man's intelligence. As Godel's Incompleteness Theorem suggests, we may yet discover that logic and reason may not be at the end of our intelligence, but perhaps at its very beginning.
There are several other examples in the scientific world that seem to resonate with Armstrong's suggestion: The notion of Symmetry in both mathematics and physics, and the notion of Simultaneity in Particle physics for instance, or the whole world of Quantum Physics, as well as David Bohm's idea of an "Implicate Order" are just a few very sobering examples of non-religious ideas of wholeness that do not yet fully yield to the logic and reason of discrete facts or even to our best designed scientific experiments.
Although my sympathies lie fully in the Harris camp, successfully defeating arguments that take these aspects of religious illogic fully into account is a lot trickier than simply attacking its lack of any discernable factual basis, or demonizing its radical elements. More to this point, if one reads between the lines even of T.S. Kuhn's The Nature of Scientific Revolutions, we see that many scientific revolutions were in fact equally inspired by dreams, myths and other non-scientific modalities of conceptions --including most importantly religious ideas and myths. All of these might have been dismissed by Mr. Harris as nonsense or childish.
But in the end, let us admit it, all of this philosophical sparring and shadow boxing about religious fact or fiction is mere window dressing for the main event which incredibly and somewhat unconscionably Harris skirts altogether. There is a prior question begging to be asked. It deals with the issue of what is important about these stories, and myths? About religious books and cannons generally? About religion as a whole? And of course it gets right down to the bottom line, about GW Bush's faith-based initiatives for instance?
Arguably, the answer is this: that religion, whether based on true or false stories, whether manifested as good or evil, whether about the New or Old Testament, the Torah, or the Talmud, is not just morality tales of fact or fiction, only about heaven or hell; but is about an issue Harris neglected altogether: social control.
Most religions use their rapidly dwindling moral currency and authority in order to subtlely shape and maintain a particular kind of non-religious social order. Therein lies the rub: and need I say, the true nature of the evil of most religions. At bottom, our religions, whatever else they may be, are primarily dogmatic secularized ideological instruments of social and political control. They are used to help install and maintain the social and political orthodoxy of the day. They are nothing if not reliable instruments of the status quo, and little more.
That is the real reason the religious Emperor has no clothes. His nakedness has little or nothing at all to do with logic and reason, but everything to do with being a tool and an arm of evil governments.
Controlling what and how people think, feel and act is what religions do. That is their basic terrain; it is their primary utility. That is why in the U.S., most racists are also profoundly religious. It is why the Taliban worries about the length of women dresses in the West. It is also why religion is invoked when soldiers go to war; why kids are forced to go to Sunday school, etc. It is also why pseudo-religiosity and pseudo-patriotism go hand-in-hand.
Religion trains people to fear the unknown in socially sanctioned, proscribed and permitted ways, and it trains them how to respond to cues in coordinated non-thinking, automatic, and often non-logical (i.e., emotional) lemming-like ways.
In the U.S. at least, for the most part religion is nothing but a "cash-and-carry" secularized ideology of social control, a package of status quo orthodoxy masquerading as a spiritual institution supposedly being driven by higher appeals to other-worldliness and faith. But of course the proof is in the pudding: No religion within the U.S. would dare be judged only by its deeds. Only its propaganda and empty appeals to piety are given full expression. The word in the book is not about doing good, it is about feeling good about oneself for a few hours.
The control function of religion alone explains why religion has been impotent morally and why it remains the handmaiden of so much worldly evil. Small wonder that it should have so little effect on the morality of the nations in which it is practiced. Control, through a tyrannically imposed morality is its primary purpose and its primary modus operandi. At least the Europeans have gotten smart and have virtually given it up altogether.
Except for these minor flaws, this is a very good book. Five stars.
Summary of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Natalie Angier wrote in The New York Times: "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....Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say."
This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favor of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behavior and sometimes-heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion; an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism. While warning against the encroachment of organized religion into world politics, Harris also draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need. He calls on us to invoke that need in taking a secular humanistic approach to solving the problems of this world.Sam Harris cranks out blunt, hard-hitting chapters to make his case for why faith itself is the most dangerous element of modern life. And if the devil's in the details, then you'll find Satan waiting at the back of the book in the very substantial notes section where Harris saves his more esoteric discussions to avoid sidetracking the urgency of his message.
Interestingly, Harris is not just focused on debunking religious faith, though he makes his compelling arguments with verve and intellectual clarity. The End of Faith is also a bit of a philosophical Swiss Army knife. Once he has presented his arguments on why, in an age of Weapons of Mass Destruction, belief is now a hazard of great proportions, he focuses on proposing alternate approaches to the mysteries of life. Harris recognizes the truth of the human condition, that we fear death, and we often crave "something more" we cannot easily define, and which is not met by accumulating more material possessions. But by attempting to provide the cure for the ills it defines, the book bites off a bit more than it can comfortably chew in its modest page count (however the rich Bibliography provides more than enough background for an intrigued reader to follow up for months on any particular strand of the author' musings.)
Harris' heart is not as much in the latter chapters, though, but in presenting his main premise. Simply stated, any belief system that speaks with assurance about the hereafter has the potential to place far less value on the here and now. And thus the corollary -- when death is simply a door translating us from one existence to another, it loses its sting and finality. Harris pointedly asks us to consider that those who do not fear death for themselves, and who also revere ancient scriptures instructing them to mete it out generously to others, may soon have these weapons in their own hands. If thoughts along the same line haunt you, this is your book.--Ed Dobeas
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