Five books in five days (4)

The End of Faith by Sam Harris was NewMexiKen’s third book in my project to read five books in five days. I began book four, M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn last night, so am almost back on target.

In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris argues that religious faith is the problem in the world — a problem that endangers us all. The more fundamental the belief — Judaism, Christianity and Islam most of all — the more threatening it is.

Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. 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.

Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because 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. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.

Harris is unlikely to make many converts, nonetheless he is convincing in his analysis of the danger. He is less convincing in his later chapters when he discusses alternative forms of belief and spirtuality, once we are weaned from the religious beliefs of our ancestors. Still, it’s a remarkable and worthwhile book.

“The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself….”

“Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls [i.e., rape victims], rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other things—like how to read. Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. Its is a failure of ethics.”