CONFRONTING RELIGION.

Byline: Jeff Wright The Register-Guard

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason By Sam Harris (Norton, 224 pages, $13.95 softcover)

Sam Harris worries that The End Is Near - but not for the reasons you might think.

It's not the apocalypse prophesied in the Bible that concerns Harris, but rather the fact that millions of Christians believe in the idea. Also, that millions of Muslims believe a heavenly paradise awaits them should they die a martyr in defense of Islam.

In "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason," Harris has written a book that moves beyond provocative to downright heretical - by railing against the "lethal absurdity" of most religious beliefs.

Criticizing someone's religious faith, he says, is the one cultural taboo that just about everyone tries to duck. But in the 21st century, do we avoid such criticism at our own peril?

``If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us,'' Harris writes. ``Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.''

Harris has somehow written a book that's potentially offensive to just about everyone - Christians and Muslims, fundamentalists and moderates, atheists and pacifists.

But, given its current perch on The New York Times bestseller list for paperback nonfiction, it apparently has found a sizable audience as well.

The book earlier this year won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction.

It's a work that seems ripe for the Northwest, home to many ``nones,'' that is, people who claim no formal religious affiliation, and to many religious moderates with an ecumenical bent.

Not that such moderates get much support from Harris, who views them as part of the problem. His reasoning: In touting tolerance, they provide the cover that allows more fundamentalist believers to spout scriptural literalism and the religious violence it breeds.

Harris, who calls most religious beliefs "impossibly quaint and suicidally stupid," is obviously not one to mince words.

"Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else," he writes. ``Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence at all.''

Harris argues that tenets found in the Bible, Quran and other holy books would be dismissed as delusional if embraced by a single person rather than millions.

``Clearly, there is sanity in numbers,'' he writes. ``The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.''

Such assertions may prompt the question: Who the heck is Sam Harris?

A graduate in philosophy from Stanford University, Harris says he has studied Eastern and Western religious traditions for 20 years. He's now completing a doctorate in neuroscience, studying the neural basis of belief, disbelief and uncertainty.

He devotes a chapter of his book, in fact, to the nature of belief and how humans try to make sense of their world and their mortality.

``A kernel of truth lurks at the heart of religion,'' he allows, ``because spiritual experience, ethical behavior and strong communities are essential for human happiness.''

But Harris rejects the idea that religion must be the sole source of ``our deepest ethical intuitions.'' He also draws a distinction between the "rational enterprise" of mysticism - a scientific way of exploring spiritual discipline - and what he considers the irrationality of religious dogma.

With 62 pages of footnotes, it's hard to fault Harris' book for lack of specificity. He tends to go far afield in his later chapters, however, digressing on such themes as whether dropping bombs on enemy cities is more or less defensible than torture.

The meat of his book dwells on religious intolerance, including a historical review of the Inquisition, the burning of witches in Europe and early America, and the Holocaust. The latter, says Harris, could not have happened if not for the inherent anti-Semitism - ``The Jews killed Jesus'' - found in Christianity.

Today, the United States is a country where more people believe in angels than in evolution, Harris notes. The extent to which religious beliefs dominate current government policy - from family planning to stem-cell research to the war on drugs (but not alcohol) - is hard to overstate, he says.

But if Christianity gets a poke in the eye, Islam has its eye blackened by Harris, who devotes a full chapter to ``The Problem With Islam.'' That problem, in a nutshell: a faith that teaches that murderers of innocents can expect an eternal reward in paradise.

To make his point, Harris devotes five pages to Quranic verses describing God's view of things (samples: ``God is the enemy of the unbelievers''; ``The only true faith in God's sight is Islam''). He also cites a 2002 Global Attitudes Project conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. In polling Muslims in a dozen countries, the center asked if suicide bombing in defense of Islam was ever justifiable. The percentages who said it was never justified ranged from 64 percent in Turkey to 12 percent in Lebanon.

The United States and the Soviet Union waged the Cold War for decades on the premise of mutual deterrence. But such a war, Harris notes, requires that all parties are actually deterred by that threat.

``What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry?'' he asks.

In the end, Harris may be guilty of wishful thinking; the title of his book isn't so much what he predicts will happen as what he hopes will happen. He says it's not impossible to imagine a world where religious dogma doesn't prevail - just very hard.

Where to begin? Harris says people should not let outrageous beliefs go unchallenged, because the alternative could be so much worse:

``As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on Earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.''