The End of Faith.

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (New York, NY: Norton, 2004); 325 pp.; $24.95 cloth.

THE END OF FAITH, the not-so-subtle title of Sam Harris' first book, is heating up the debate in Humanist circles over just how tolerant of religion secularists should be. Harris opines that religion has become so outdated and dangerous that those inclined toward reason-based beliefs and values should make a concerted effort to toss all faith-based religious thinking--not just fundamentalist but moderate religion as well--into the trash heap of history.

This kind of talk is controversial even within the secular community, where many believe that nontheists should stand together with moderate religionists to confront fundamentalism. To add to the provocation, Harris is brash and unapologetic not just in his central thesis--that traditional religion has outlived its usefulness--but also in his ancillary arguments, where his targets include much more than religionists.

Harris has no room for the commingling of reason and religion by so-called moderate religionists. Moderates within the religious community are a major part of the overall problem, he argues. By structuring their beliefs around unfounded myths and creeds, moderate religionists are simply perpetuating the acceptability of irrationality as a foundation of society. It should be no surprise, he says, that, with irrationality so firmly imbedded in the social fabric and with religious belief uniquely immune from any test of reasonableness, dangerous fundamentalism thrives in the modern world.

To Harris, the moderate's attempt to accommodate modern rationalism with ancient myth and dogma is, well, almost sacrilegious:

The benignity of most religious moderates does not suggest that religious faith is anything more sublime than a desperate marriage of hope and ignorance, nor does it guarantee that there is not a terrible price to be paid for limiting the scope of reason in our dealings with other human beings.

Harris faults religious moderates for creating a social environment that places religious belief beyond the scrutiny of reason, saying moderates

   do not want anything too critical said
   about people who really believe in the
   God of their fathers, because tolerance,
   perhaps above all else, is sacred. To
   speak plainly and truthfully about the
   state of the world--to say, for instance,
   that the Bible and Koran both contain
   mountains of life-destroying gibberish--is
   antithetical to tolerance as moderates
   currently conceive it. But we can no
   longer afford the luxury of such political
   correctness.

Unfortunately, Harris' passion sometimes rises to the level of obsession, leaving him with arguments that seem too pointedly directed at religion alone, to the exclusion of other targets. While certainly religious faith has a long track record of perpetuating ignorance, stunting scientific inquiry, and affirmatively causing unimaginable pain and horror, Harris seems to suggest that religion is just about the only cause of such misfortunes.

In his rant against religion, Harris almost completely ignores other forces--imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, militarism, economics, politics, as well as social and psychological factors--in bringing about the ills of the world. As such, many of his arguments smack of oversimplification and imbalance. To Harris, religion is rarely a symptom of a larger problem, or even one important factor in a complex web of causation; rather, it simply is the problem.

Of course, there is an argument (and, to be sure, Harris makes it) that religion truly is the main problem--that, but for the enormous price that the world pays for its continuing, indefensible infatuation with irrationality, desirable ends such as peace, social justice, prosperity, and maybe even enlightenment would be much more commonplace. To those within the Humanist community who agree with such a position, Harris' diatribe will be an affirmation.

Indeed, The End of Faith is a call to arms: an energetic and persuasive argument in favor of assertively fighting irrationality. For those who believe, or at least hope, that an Age of Reason is nearing, Harris' arguments could provide much inspiration and, to a lesser extent, some direction. Harris hits the nail on the head, for example, when he suggests that Humanists must learn to reframe the debate, to make it acceptable to publicly question traditional religion's truth claims. The challenge for the community of reason isn't winning the debate; rather, the problem is simply getting a debate started, getting average people thinking and talking about what is true.

If Harris is trying to give secularists something that could inspire them to think big, he succeeds. While others ponder how to win the next church-state battle, Harris is contemplating the downfall of traditional religion. He doesn't even try to convince the reader that this glorious day is imminent, but he does make it seem that such a goal is worth thinking about, even necessary.

But it's doubtful that Harris' views will be welcomed in the mainstream of the freethought community, let alone the mainstream of society at large. As an evangelist he is unlikely to win many converts. Indeed, for starters, if Harris were trying to inject his daring ideas into any mainstream public dialogue, he could have found a title that would sound less like fingernails on a chalkboard to the average person. The End of Faith is unlikely to get a fair hearing in the marketplace of ideas; the title alone is too extreme for the average person.

Much more importantly, Harris' exuberance sometimes results in his making statements that are just plain shocking. Humanists and Religionists alike might shudder with Harris' quip: "The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them."

Ethical to kill people for their beliefs? In other words, Harris is suggesting scrapping the notion of freedom of conscience, which only happens to be one of the most fundamental tenets of Western democracy. This type of extremism, justified by the 9/11-changed-everything mentality, reflects either an ignorance of basic civics (in free countries, we punish actions, not beliefs and opinions) or a willingness to take a step in the direction of Orwellian thought police. To so casually suggest that killing people for their opinions is ethical deflates Harris' credibility.

As further proof of Harris' lack of ACLU credentials, he avidly argues in favor of torture. He backs the use of torture, he says, if the likelihood of getting useful information "is even one chance in a million." It isn't just Harris' support of torture that is unsettling but the ease with which he seems to approve of the tactic. "Why spare the rod with the suspected terrorists?" he offhandedly ponders. "If we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war," he declares, without explaining why.

Harris tries to justify his support of torture by claiming that it's no worse than the already accepted notion of collateral damage (the unintended killing of innocents in warfare, especially in bombings). Analytically, this argument is full of holes that Harris decides not to address. Even leaving aside the fact that torture and collateral damage bear no relation to one another except that they both involve violence toward human beings, Harris' argument breaks down at the elementary two-wrongs-don't-make-a-right stage.

If one ever needed proof that not all nontheists are Humanists, Harris has provided us with sufficient evidence. In eagerly supporting torture, he never considers the harm done not just to the victim of torture but to the culture that propagates such practices. What kind of a free, democratic society could so casually allow torture? Perhaps it is an overstatement to claim that "everything changed" after 9/11, because hopefully our definition of basic decency hasn't. Any public psyche that has room for torture as an acceptable practice would seem to be about one step away from 1933 Germany. What kind of men and women would be recruited to do the torturing? Are these folks tomorrow's political leaders? Harris obviously isn't troubled by such questions.

Surely, just a little restraint on Harris' part would have been prudent. Although he's a young scholar, we can almost see him years from now reflecting on this early work and regretting such shoot-from-the-hip remarks.

Thus, The End of Faith presents a dilemma for ambitious Humanist activists. Should it be embraced for its central thesis--advocating the toppling of the established religious faiths of the West--or should Harris be scorned for his quasi-totalitarian views? It would seem that, despite his vision of a reason-based society, Harris' means of getting there--utilizing torture and persecuting people for their beliefs alone--will make him about as welcome in the broad freethought family as Michael Skakel at the Kennedy Compound.

And the above examples aren't the only points where Harris can be accused of overselling his thesis. In his relentless attack on religion, he lashes out at two nonreligionists--Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy--both of whom Harris criticizes for their well-documented criticism of American policy. Laughably, Harris spends almost a full page listing some of the United States' worst humanitarian atrocities--from slavery to the massacre of Native Americans to military crimes in Southeast Asia--all for the purpose of agreeing with Chomsky. (Harris writes: "In this respect, we can more or less swallow Chomsky's thesis whole.... We can concede all of this, and even share Chomsky's acute sense of outrage") Then he proceeds to lambaste Chomsky for somehow being unfair in criticizing U.S. foreign policy. Harris' point seems to be that U.S. atrocities aren't exactly analogous to the atrocities of religious fanatics, but he fails to explain in any convincing way how this should negate Chomsky's valid criticisms.

Similarly, Harris digresses briefly into a defense of Israel that is unnecessary and irrelevant to his central thesis, impeaching his own credibility by suggesting simply that religious fanaticism is just about the only cause of the ongoing problems in the Middle East. Historical details that might show that this religious fanaticism was itself caused by other factors--such as the resentments that arose when globally dominant Western powers, all non-Muslim, arbitrarily decided to create the state of Israel in the middle of the Islamic world--never come up on Harris' radar screen.

Indeed, never does Harris seem to consider the complex causes of various instances of religious fanaticism. He doesn't even seem to acknowledge that, while Islam is a religion that has embraced violence in the past, fundamentalist Islam, at least in the form we see it today, is a relatively recent phenomenon that has root causes other than just the core Islamic doctrines that make violence justifiable.

Even the testosterone factor--humankind's seemingly innate predisposition toward violence--is a nonfactor in Harris' thinking. Harris has apparently never read that famous philosopher, Genghis Khan, who said: "Man's highest joy is in victory: to conquer one's enemies, to pursue them, to deprive them of their possessions, to make their beloved weep, to ride on their horses, and to embrace their wives and daughters."

Obviously, world peace will require a little more than the historical passing of religious faith. The human animal is a complex machine, hard-wired with a psychology and chemistry that produce a wide range of potentially destructive emotional states--anger, anxiety, depression, fear, jealousy--that make violence not just possible but probable.

Harris changes gears in the last chapter of the book to show a soft spot for Eastern religious beliefs and practices. Contrasting the faith-based religions of the West to the Eastern tradition, he shows that the latter is more consistent with reason and science. This is interesting but nothing new to the reader with even a rudimentary understanding of world religions.

The End of Faith is, if nothing else, unique and interesting. Harris' opinions could be described as courageous (though that's not the only adjective that comes to mind), for he obviously gives little indication that he is attempting to please anyone, nor is he concerned about ruffling feathers. If you read only one book this year by an anti-Jeffersonian, pro-Israel, ends-justify-means, militant nontheist with Buddhist inclinations, let it be this one!