The devil made me do it.

Sam Harris

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

W.W. Norton, 2004. 336pp. $24.95 (cloth)

With Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" raging away ever more apocalyptically, it's no surprise that religion in general and Islam in particular have been coming under hostile scrutiny of late, if not in academe, at least in the media and the blogosphere. Enter Sam Harris, a lively atheistic polymath, to lend some intellectual coherence and respectability to the gnawing sense, now shared by millions, that the world would be a far better place if all true-believers (or at least the hyperactive fanatics) would just GO AWAY.

Harris is a Ph.D. candidate in neuroscience (with an undergraduate major in philosophy). The combination of his youth and the cosmic scope of his subtitle would seem to define him as an amateur; and so he is. But Voltaire and most of the philosophes were amateurs too, so that doesn't necessarily disqualify him. His work, in fact, is uneven; but it also has the clarity, colloquial vigor, and argumentative bite of the haute vulgarisation that the French used to be so famous for.

The idea that religion is folly and a bane goes back at least as far as Epicurus, and was emphatically summed up in Lucretius' axiom: Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. The example chosen by the great Roman poet to illustrate such evils was Agamemnon's slaughter of Iphianassa (Iphigenia) to placate the goddess Artemis. Without acknowledging Lucretius, Harris likewise blames religion for motivating bigoted massacres down through the ages, from the Crusade against the Cathars to the Spanish Inquisition to the torture and execution of "witches" to the Holocaust to the recent surge in Islamist terrorism.

We've all heard that song before, more or less: The problem starts with the invention of a violent and vindictive deity ("The God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man"), whose supposed infallible utterances are both nonsensical and--unlike rational beliefs--impervious to falsification. Once systematized into faith, religion (theistic religion anyway) leads its followers to dehumanize non-believers and heretics, to ignore or even enjoy their pain, to devalue earthly life and fantasize about a delusional afterlife. "Moderate" believers (who assume that "the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others") may refrain from, or actually condemn, overt insanity of this sort; but Harris still dismisses them as aiders and enablers of lethal fundamentalism.

In carrying on and updating the tradition of "Ecrasez l'Infame!" Harris displays flashes of blasphemous wit (Eucharist hosts are "defenseless crackers," Muhammad's Paradise resembles an "al fresco bordello," the New Testament ends with "the all-consuming rigmarole of Revelation"), and he scores any number of direct hits on deserving targets. How many thoughtful persons nowadays need to be convinced that genocide is monstrous, that clitoridectomy is horrible, or that Prohibition (like its offspring, the War on Drugs) was absurd.? The crucial question here, of course, is exactly what part does religion play in "persuading" believers to do wrong? For Harris the only acceptable answer is "an overwhelming one," and he essentially takes it for granted.

To his credit, Harris is willing to cite contrary views, such as Fareed Zakaria's in The Future of Freedom that, "The trouble with thundering declarations about Islam's 'nature' is that Islam, like any religion, is not what books make it, but what people make it. Forget the ranting of fundamentalists, who are a minority. Most Muslims' daily lives do not confirm the idea of a faith that is intrinsically anti-Western or anti-modern." But, having allotted some air-time to the opposition, Harris goes steam-rolling ahead. His line of attack, like all good propaganda, has a beautiful simplicity and cogency to it; but it largely discounts the monumental factors of history, culture, gender, and psychology. Having caught a lot of criminal religious maniacs red-handed, Harris spends next to no time on perpetrators who don't fit his scheme. Stalin? Mao? Hitler (insofar as he engineered the murder of tens of millions of gentiles)? Wars prompted by politics or race or ethnicity rather than religion? Religion is often taken for believers' be-all and end-all; but how many believers behave as they do strictly because they fear hell and hope for heaven (neither of which they have ever experienced)? If Harris's thesis were true, it would require a meta-thesis to explain why so many billions of people have swallowed and continue to swallow such dreadful poison with such obvious relish. The truth is far more complex and baffling than Harris's hydraulics of evil would suggest.

Still, he has produced a handy primer for contemporary secular humanists. The religionless ethics he preaches is balanced and compassionate. He spares at least Jainism, Buddhism, and non-dogmatic mysticism from his hanging-judge strictures. He makes lavish, agreeable use of current events, eye-opening statistics, and personal anecdotes to illustrate his case.

And so, despite a critical apparatus that takes up nearly a third of the text, The End of Faith isn't scholarship, but a sermon. It's all very well, up to a point, to foreshorten and oversimplify your opponent's position in order to heighten your own rhetorical pizzazz and percussiveness. But in presenting his one-dimensional versions, not just of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but of religious liberalism, pragmatism and pacifism (which he blasts as "flagrantly immoral," without ever considering that there might be such things as selective pacifists), Harris goes too far. Nevertheless, as sermons go, this is a good one; and Harris would make a much more articulate and thoughtful contributor to the Op-Ed pages and TV roundtables on religion-and-public-events than the usual array of banal pundits. There's a little too much going on here, but better that than too little.