I’m trying to alternate fiction with non-fiction, so after reading the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, an amazing story of her crazy, periodically homeless childhood, I picked up The End of Faith by Sam Harris, and I’m now more than halfway through. The book’s premise is that the world is being destroyed by religion, and only by actively criticizing religion and faith can we move forward to a world in which reason trumps unreason.
Despite the seemingly indefensible premise (honestly, in a world this religious, does his argument even have a chance?), the book is fairly persuasive for the first 75 pages. I found myself involuntarily cringing and internally protesting to the most basic assertions, only to find that my rational mind agreed with them. The book would benefit from a less snarky tone – all the “Obviously”s and “Needless to say”s are grating. When I was in law school, I was taught not to use such phrases in my analyses – if an idea was so self-evident, then there would certainly be no lawsuit. In the same vein, if religion were indeed so silly and stupid, we wouldn’t have so darn many people willing to die for it.
But the premise is clear – one day people will look back on us with the same wonder that we have when we look back on Ancient Rome and their Gods. He uses a hypothetical example of an excerpt from a Bush speech where he replaces all the references to God with the word “Zeus”. He points out that in an election for the American presidency, a devout Christian man with no experience in any sphere of government would win in a landslide over an agnostic statesman with a degree in rocket science. He continually hammers away at the point that there are many religions, almost all of which place “belief” at their center, with no justification for themselves other than that they make people feel better. Most of these religions also call upon their followers to kill unbelievers and truly believe that they are going to hell, or some form of hell.
Unlike other critics of religion, Harris posits that there is no such thing as a religious “moderate” – there are people who believe in their religion, and there are people who have been persuaded away from their religion as a result of exposure to reason. A moderate is someone who entertains a perfect kind of cognitive dissonance – I believe a man watches over me and protects me and will someday let me into his kingdom ,where I will meet everyone I love – but I also believe in a series of secular precepts that contradict the order of my “faith”.
It’s difficult to write about this book without creating a book report, but I feel I have to give some background before commenting.
What I’m getting so far is this:
I personally have been an on-again off-again Catholic for several years. Sometimes I go to church because church fills me a sense of peace and calm, but most of the time I stay away from it because the organized church itself fills me with dread and anger. I think to myself, “if only the church would accept X,Y,Z, then I would be religious again.”
But this book is making me re-think that assumption. Where is my sense of calm coming from when I walk into church? The sense of community, of friendly people willing to shake my head for no other reason than to express unity? From the synapses in my brain that were wired at age 6 and up in Catholic school to regard church as the only refuge from a loud, frightening, nonsensical world? Yes, most likely. So why do I feel that I must raise my own children to be wired to this irrational belief system, when they could easily join a volunteer group and be friendly with people, and meditate to feel that there is refuge from the world? Why do I feel bad for people who don’t have a connection to “God”, but instead have connections to actual principles of right and wrong, or the natural order of things?
I am beginning to think the answer is that I was brainwashed.
But back to the book:
There are numerous problems with this book – the first and most obvious is that he is clearly “out to get” Islam above all other religions, and it waters down his effectiveness as it comes off more like a vendetta than a well-thought-out assertion. About 2/3 of the book is devoted to notes, but he only has one note to support his assertion that the Israelis are a peaceful people besieged by Arabs – it’s a note from Alan Dershowitz’s book on the Case for Israel. That’s pretty pathetic scholarship. Don’t get me wrong – Harris criticizes Jews too, especially for their insistence that they are the “chosen people”. He’s criticizes everybody except the Jains and the Cathars. But it’s clear that he is really interested in whipping up fervor about Islam being especially militaristic, more than any other religion, and he specifically targets the Muslim world for being just like the fourteenth century Christian world.
There is certainly some real evidence that makes this analogy seem accurate – murders in the town square, rejoicing when throats are slit and when people are murdered for Allah, the subjugation of women (and sorry super-liberal folk, it’s not just a different world-view – it’s subjugation). But he gives no reason for dismissing the best explanation for this – that the Arab world was in fact on its way to becoming just as secular and cosmopolitan as the rest of the world, until Middle-Eastern governments came upon virtually unlimited resource wealth, no longer had to tax the people, and therefore no longer had to care about what they felt or thought. They set up government sponsored religious schools, created a generation of illiterate terrified women, and now in 2006 we are reaping the rewards of this disastrous political evolution. Harris insists that without religion, people never would’ve stood for this. But wouldn’t the government have come up with some other idolatry instead? Worship Mao? Harris calls communism a “political religion” – an easy way to get out of explaining how to keep people from following irrational leaders and philosophies in general. I don't buy the idea that Islam is especially violent when compared to Christianity. Christians have been awful and have used the Good Book to justify the Rack. In general, ferociously religious despots have used all religions as power-grabbing tactics, excuses to be indescribably cruel.
The best thing that could come out of this book for society in general is the assertion that it’s ok to criticize people for their religious beliefs. Harris correctly points out that there is no other sphere of public life that is as intensely guarded as the dogma of religion. It’s all right for people to justify their actions by saying “I believe this is what God wants me to do”, but we are not allowed to question them or their God. This is patently ridiculous. If religion is so important to people and the world, it’s necessary to question religion and force religion to evolve. Otherwise, people will riot over cartoons, as we saw recently, and the West will have no answer other than “Um, sorry we offended you.” It’s not acceptable to kill people over cartoons. It may be politically incorrect to say that, but it’s rationally correct.
One of the examples Harris gives of the absurdity of religion is also one of the things I’ve always had trouble with as a Catholic: the miracle of transubstantiation. This was something invented by papal decree in 1216 (and until hundreds of years later, it was illegal to own a bible – I never even knew that…) in which the Church represented that the communion wafer turned into Jesus’ body and the wine turned into his blood, and all the congregants had to drink it. This still happens in Catholic Church today, of course. The Catholic religion insists that a true Catholic must believe this happens. So everybody’s standing around eating Christ… now if someone came up to you and told you that their candy bar was actually a piece of Nicole Kidman, you would have them locked up. But because MANY people believe that the cracker is Christ, they’re not crazy. The only difference between sanity and insanity is whether your beliefs are held by the many or the few. What’s even better is that Harris points out that thousands of people were subsequently put to death by the Church for “desecration” of the host – because there are actually things worse than eating Jesus??
In short – good, thought-provoking book, many flaws, but still worth reading. It makes you want to read more about philosophy, the cognitive process of “belief” and action, and political and religious history. It also makes you wonder if maybe you should lose your religion…
