The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Harris argues that the men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were neither cowards nor lunatics in the ordinary sense. “They were men of faith–perfect faith, as it turns out–and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.”
Two centuries later we have even less need. We understand how wonderfully complex living things developed through natural selection and other evolutionary processes, not by supernatural intervention. That people have imperfections–our bodies have appendixes and occasionally grow more teeth than the human jaw can accommodate–looks more like the work of a rough-and-ready process such as natural selection than of an omniscient designing mind. We’re close to understanding why some people get cancer while others don’t, without having to invoke God’s will. Half a millennium of scientific advances have shredded one tenet of faith after another–and confirmed none.
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The basic tools of science–see for yourself when possible, be open to new evidence, and when necessary rely on authorities who do the same–apply in all spheres of life, whether you need to know how to dig a hole or how to cope with the death of the person going into it. It may be true, for instance, that hospital patients get better after praying, or meditating under a Zen master, or viewing old episodes of Baywatch. Such possibilities can and should be investigated just as conventional medicines are. If confirmed, they should be incorporated into good medical practice and daily living; if not, there’s no particular respect due to those who cling to them anyway, no more than to those who consult their horoscopes daily.
The Bible is a book of absolutes, leavened by few if any doses of moderation. (Don’t even get Harris started on the Koran.) It has little to say about recent innovations such as political freedom, democracy, the middle class, scientific knowledge of anything, or the value of allowing people to hold mistaken opinions. The famous King James Bible phrase “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18) has nothing to do with sitting around a table and striking a compromise. God speaks these words only as a prelude to commanding total obedience. In Revelation 3:16-17, an angel admonishes the church in Laodicea for its complacency and moderation: “Because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” If this cocksure, bullying, black-and-white worldview reminds you of George W. Bush, you can see why Harris is so worried.
Afterward, Boren told the minister it was unfair to criticize a person in public when he couldn’t answer back, and asked him not to do so again. Perhaps believing that unfairness was a small price to pay for salvation, the minister repeated his prayer the next Sunday. In midprayer the family stood up and walked down the aisle and out of the sanctuary, never to return. They eventually became Unitarians.
Harris’s obliviousness to recent history isn’t his only problem. His notion that all faith is lethal won’t make a lot of sense to readers either. Fundamentalists may be gaining ground, but most people who attend church, synagogue, temple, or mosque are still moderates. Many of them give to the needy and comfort the afflicted. A few even afflict the comfortable. They don’t countenance torturing those who think God and Jesus are different entities, stigmatizing children born out of wedlock, or flying airplanes into office towers.
