Hartog’s Den

by Nalin Ratnayake

Fiery, aggressive, politically incorrect, and often downright offensive, “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” (W.W. Norton and Company, New York 2005, ISBN: 0-393-32765-5) is Sam Harris’ nuclear-strength lambaste against the forces of faith and organized religion, which he claims have no place in a non-Apocalyptic future. Despite a writing style that simply screams “arrogant bastard,” Harris makes several almost delightfully executed points against… well, pretty much everyone: the conservative right, destroying lives and nations through a righteous lens; the mainstream liberals, groveling before the faith-deluded and bumbling for ways to appear that they suspend their reason in favor of a millenia-old book; religious extremists of all faiths, for living out cults of death; religious moderates of all faiths, for providing a valid social context for the root of the extremists’ problem while betraying both reason and faith simultaneously; and reasonable, rational people for allowing all of this to occur. Few are the world-views that you can possess and not be angered by some passage in this book, and that’s exactly his point: why the hell aren’t you doing something rational about it already?

While Harris’ scope is neccessarily broad (and sometimes rambling… nay, ranting), his central theme is summed up early in the first chapter:

“…religion has been the explicit cause of literally millions of deaths in the last ten years. These events should strike us as psychological experiments run amok, for that is what they are. Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions of what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.”

Chapter 4 is entirely devoted to a scathing criticism of Islam in particular, and is what I considered to be the most controversial section of the book. Harris argues that while both Christianity and Judaism both have explicit injunctions towards the barabaric murder of the unfaithful (supported by many quotes from Leviticus and Deuteronomy), the majority of modern Christians and Jews do not do so because they have learned to ignore or consider symbolically large swaths of their respective holy texts. Indeed, he correctly asserts that the progress of humanity is directly a function of how much religion has been forced to yield literal interpretations to science, and even discard some sections altogether. In Islam however, the Koran is still taken to be the literal word of God by even the more liberal of imams, therefore (by his reasoning) Muslim societies are in many ways the modern equivalent of 14th century Christian nations in the very dark ages of their civilization (and simultaneous height of piety). Harris believes that all attempts to deny that the West is at war with Islam, not economics or politics, is nothing more than deft political manuvering for the sake of hiding greed. Furthermore, he highlights the hypocrisy of maintaining such a war for the sake of profit while under the guise of championing the supposed moral high-ground of our own religious myths, which we have largely discarded yet cling to for fear of reason.

Despite the endless barrage of hot-blooded rhetoric against faith in general, Harris acknowledges that religion has several positive effects on people and society, and moreover that “man cannot live by reason alone”; that is, there is an intrinsic need for something spiritual and humanistic in daily life. He argues however, that the good effects of religion (a code of ethics, human spirituality, sense of community, giving, service, etc) can all be had without the structure of religion itself and without the need to accept a deity or anything else without empirical and reproduceable evidence to suggest such. The last chapter is his attempt to lay the foundation for a study of ethics that is both secular and humanistic, at which he largely succeeds, though only through making some rather broad generalizations. While Harris is mainly concerned with ending our “childish cling” to organized religion, hardcore atheists will find much to argue with during the final chapter of the book, in which Harris attempts to rationally combine elements of Eastern philosophy with the spirit of scientific inquiry.

“The End of Faith” is provocative, controversial, insulting, and revolutionary all at once, and it is designed to challenge the reader’s perspective on the world around him or her. For sheer force of argument in the face of extreme arrogant assholeism, I award it three and a half stars out of five. Recommended for the open-minded with a grain of salt on hand.

Sam Harris is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University. He has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of spiritual disciplines, for twenty years. He is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty.