'The End of Faith': Against Toleration (book review)

[Henk Vreekamp]

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>New York Times, September 5, 2004 | Book Review Desk
>
>'The End of Faith': Against Toleration
>By NATALIE ANGIER
>
>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.

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