Book report: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris
Book report: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris
Sigh. This is yet another of those books about how great the world would be if only most of the people in it – in this case, the 5 billion or so who believe in God – didn’t exist.
Let me save you a little time (and 348 pages) by summarizing his main points:
1. All religious faith is nonsense.
2. Some of it is dangerous nonsense, because it encourages people to hurt or kill people (Spanish Inquisition, suicide bombers).
3. Especially Muslims, because martyrdom and jihad are prominent parts of Islam.
Luckily, he has some simple solutions to these problems:
1. Establish a world government to which all nations surrender their power.
2. Induce Muslims to reform Islam from within to remove all the violent elements.
3. Convert our societies to the use of alternative energies so that oil has no value and Muslim countries become impoverished.
No, I’m not kidding. Those are his solutions. He doesn’t mention wanting a pony, too, but I think we can assume that, also.
He starts his book – surprise, surprise – with a generic tale of a suicide bomber killing a busful of innocent people. I know: who saw that coming, right? He uses this tale to prove that all of Islam is evil. Here’s the syllogism:
All suicide bombers are bad.
All suicide bombers are Muslims.
Therefore, all Muslims are bad.
He immediately backpedals: of course all Muslims aren’t bad! Whoever would even think such a thing! Then he front-pedals again: well, actually, even the good Muslims are bad, because the good Muslims make it seem like being Muslim is okay, but it isn’t – because of the bad Muslims – so, really, the good Muslims are bad, too, because they’re good. Clearly, all this would be much simpler for him if all Muslims were actually suicide bombers, but they refuse to cooperate.
His remedy, of course, is that all Muslims – and anyone else who believes in God – must give that up for the Sake of Humanity. That’s right: to solve the problem of the fewer-than-1,000 asshole suicide bombers in the world – the less than one ten-thousandth of one percent of Muslims – the other 5 billion or so people on Earth have to change. You can’t get more practical than that!
He asserts that each religion cannot tolerate every other religion, which is absolutely true. For example, I’m a Congregationalist and my neighbor is a Catholic infidel, and I can’t wait to end the Romanist abomination of his papish heresy. Note to self: first, return the ladder he loaned me to put up my Christmas lights.
As usual with these kinds of books, where there isn’t something real he can be outraged at, he makes it up and is outraged at that. Quote: “A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world WOULD SURELY yield similar results…” (PS, you forgot Buddhists! Oh, wait, you like Buddhists! Never mind!) Also as usual, he pulls numbers out of nowhere to support his claims. Quote: “MILLIONS among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and MILLIONS MORE, it seems, are willing to kill for them.” I would like to have listened in on the highly scientific telephone poll he must have used to determine this: “Excuse me, sir, are you extremely willing to kill for your unjustified beliefs, slightly willing, neither willing nor unwilling, slightly unwilling, or extremely unwilling?”
Similarly, faith is “the most prolific source of violence in our history.” Um, not really. Actual historians, as opposed to writers who cherry-pick historical tidbits to support their own opinions, judge that the worst religious conflict in history, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), isn’t even in the top ten of most violent wars. He seems also to be unaware of the historical fact that violence of all kinds has declined in the world. He should read Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, which is a good example of actual scholarship and research.
His sloppy scholarship extends to science, where he selects a howlingly inappropriate example of what he considers a non-faith belief: “water is really two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.” As anyone who has labored to try to teach science knows, the ONLY way that 99.9 % of people would ever come to this belief is through their Absolute Faith in Sacred Texts That Cannot Be Questioned: namely, science books. This information is far beyond the vast majority of people to obtain evidence about themselves. They must accept the truth of this on faith from their shamans, er, science teachers. Of course, he also changes his definition of the word “belief” about every three pages, presumably because a moving argument is much harder to hit.
He peculiarly suggests that, if the Shroud of Turin were found to date from the time of Jesus, that Christians would seize on it as proof of the veracity of the Gospels. Actually, no they wouldn’t, because it’s obvious to anyone who’s actually read the Gospels that the Shroud of Turin is not the burial shroud of Jesus. But I don’t expect anyone to read the books they object to. It takes so darn long!
He does present a wonderful thought experiment, wherein everyone on earth loses their memory of everything, and must re-learn everything again, presumably starting with how to get food and so forth. He asks: when people regain the ability to read existing books again, would they still think that books like the Bible or the Koran were sacred, or just books of stories? He concludes that they wouldn’t think them anything special, which supports his idea that devotion to ancient writing is idiotic. But, and this is typical, he doesn’t take the next logical step in his thought experiment, namely, asking the obvious question: would these people re-discover God even without any sacred books? Of course they would! People in all cultures at all periods in history do re-discover God. Which means that the books are not the actual point. Attack them if you want. Burn them if you want. People will still find God.
Quote: “The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved.” Um, yes, actually it is. The Old Testament faith requiring immense sacrifices and military conquests evolved into the more internal, personal, and tolerant faith of the New Testament. The stone-throwers evolved into the targets.
But then, he seems to think that all religion is in the past, and that people in the present do not have any religious experiences. Of course, this would be a distraction from his attack on sacred texts.
He tags the usual bases that these books always do. Religion exists because we fear death: check. Hair-raising quotes from Old Testament: check. Ludicrous examples of nonsense that only very few religious wingnuts do and believe: check. The Spanish Inquisition: check.
As with the comparable works of Dawkins, he is repetitive and redundant nearly beyond endurance. I think these people have so few points to make that they must reword them and repeat them every few pages to fill up a whole book. Unlike Dawkins, he is fairly restrained in his tone. I don’t think he uses the term “faith-head” once.
Again, as all these books do, he ignores all other possible causes of the violence he decries. Politics: nah. Poverty: nope. Ignorance: nyet. But excuse me, MISTER Harris, I can’t help but notice that all the bad people you mention in your book are men. Would investigating a gender-related line of inquiry possibly – okay, okay, sorry, I was just asking.
Eventually, he goes completely off the deep end. ALL VIOLENCE is the result of religion! What, you object, about Russia and China exterminating their own citizens, either deliberately (purges) or inadvertently (famines)? “Communism was little more than a political religion.” How about them pesky Nazis, out to eliminate everything non-Aryan? Why, that was due to “abject (and religious) loyalty to Hitler.” And that guy robbing the 7-11? I’ll bet he stepped inside a church once!
Unlike some other books of this kind, he does acknowledge that eliminating religious faith would leave a moral and ethical vacuum. (This kind of implies that religious faith currently has some moral and ethical value, but he never admits this.) He spends a pretty esoteric chapter trying to cobble together an ethics that has nothing to do with religious precepts. After a lot of obfuscating big words, all he really comes up with are some vague notions about intuition and not hurting living things. Astonishingly, he avoids mentioning how many faith-founded schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, and orphanages there are actually helping the people of the world. In the US alone, 9 of the top 10 charitable organizations are faith-founded (the exception being the American Cancer Society). If there’s a food pantry helping the hungry in your area, it’s probably staffed by volunteers from local churches, temples, and, yes, mosques. If there’s an AA meeting in your area, it’s probably in the basement of a church, not a philosophy department or a country club.
Also unlike other books of this kind, he does acknowledge the value of spirituality – which he identifies with transcendent states of consciousness – in human life. However, he focuses purely on Buddhist-style meditation, which is an amazing coincidence given his own background and training in Hindu and Buddhist meditation. No other spiritual disciplines of any other faith traditions are worth pursuing, including contemplation, devotions, prayer, scripture meditation, serving, fasting, solitude, silence, or personal reflection.
The sad thing is, he has a valid point: some people use religious faith as their justification for reprehensible deeds, and some let strict literal adherence to ancient writings blind them to the truth. But, if it is his genuine desire to see change, is this book the way to do it? These writers love humanity, but have no clue about people. When you say to someone, “Look at how stupid you are for thinking what you think,” do they ever say, “Wow, you’re right! I will certainly change myself immediately. Thanks for pointing that out!” Or are they more likely to dig in their heels and oppose you? Instead, what might work is for him to approach people of faith with caring and understanding for their beliefs, and gently lead them along the path he thinks is best. He’s not interested in that, though. He’d rather be right than effective, and ends up being neither.
Recommendation: if you don’t like religion, this is the book for you (if you can stomach all the violence he mentions). If you value religious faith at all, get ready for a two-by-four to the head.
Sigh. This is yet another of those books about how great the world would be if only most of the people in it – in this case, the 5 billion or so who believe in God – didn’t exist.
Let me save you a little time (and 348 pages) by summarizing his main points:
1. All religious faith is nonsense.
2. Some of it is dangerous nonsense, because it encourages people to hurt or kill people (Spanish Inquisition, suicide bombers).
3. Especially Muslims, because martyrdom and jihad are prominent parts of Islam.
Luckily, he has some simple solutions to these problems:
1. Establish a world government to which all nations surrender their power.
2. Induce Muslims to reform Islam from within to remove all the violent elements.
3. Convert our societies to the use of alternative energies so that oil has no value and Muslim countries become impoverished.
No, I’m not kidding. Those are his solutions. He doesn’t mention wanting a pony, too, but I think we can assume that, also.
He starts his book – surprise, surprise – with a generic tale of a suicide bomber killing a busful of innocent people. I know: who saw that coming, right? He uses this tale to prove that all of Islam is evil. Here’s the syllogism:
All suicide bombers are bad.
All suicide bombers are Muslims.
Therefore, all Muslims are bad.
He immediately backpedals: of course all Muslims aren’t bad! Whoever would even think such a thing! Then he front-pedals again: well, actually, even the good Muslims are bad, because the good Muslims make it seem like being Muslim is okay, but it isn’t – because of the bad Muslims – so, really, the good Muslims are bad, too, because they’re good. Clearly, all this would be much simpler for him if all Muslims were actually suicide bombers, but they refuse to cooperate.
His remedy, of course, is that all Muslims – and anyone else who believes in God – must give that up for the Sake of Humanity. That’s right: to solve the problem of the fewer-than-1,000 asshole suicide bombers in the world – the less than one ten-thousandth of one percent of Muslims – the other 5 billion or so people on Earth have to change. You can’t get more practical than that!
He asserts that each religion cannot tolerate every other religion, which is absolutely true. For example, I’m a Congregationalist and my neighbor is a Catholic infidel, and I can’t wait to end the Romanist abomination of his papish heresy. Note to self: first, return the ladder he loaned me to put up my Christmas lights.
As usual with these kinds of books, where there isn’t something real he can be outraged at, he makes it up and is outraged at that. Quote: “A survey of Hindus, Muslims, and Jews around the world WOULD SURELY yield similar results…” (PS, you forgot Buddhists! Oh, wait, you like Buddhists! Never mind!) Also as usual, he pulls numbers out of nowhere to support his claims. Quote: “MILLIONS among us, even now, are quite willing to die for our unjustified beliefs, and MILLIONS MORE, it seems, are willing to kill for them.” I would like to have listened in on the highly scientific telephone poll he must have used to determine this: “Excuse me, sir, are you extremely willing to kill for your unjustified beliefs, slightly willing, neither willing nor unwilling, slightly unwilling, or extremely unwilling?”
Similarly, faith is “the most prolific source of violence in our history.” Um, not really. Actual historians, as opposed to writers who cherry-pick historical tidbits to support their own opinions, judge that the worst religious conflict in history, the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), isn’t even in the top ten of most violent wars. He seems also to be unaware of the historical fact that violence of all kinds has declined in the world. He should read Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, which is a good example of actual scholarship and research.
His sloppy scholarship extends to science, where he selects a howlingly inappropriate example of what he considers a non-faith belief: “water is really two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.” As anyone who has labored to try to teach science knows, the ONLY way that 99.9 % of people would ever come to this belief is through their Absolute Faith in Sacred Texts That Cannot Be Questioned: namely, science books. This information is far beyond the vast majority of people to obtain evidence about themselves. They must accept the truth of this on faith from their shamans, er, science teachers. Of course, he also changes his definition of the word “belief” about every three pages, presumably because a moving argument is much harder to hit.
He peculiarly suggests that, if the Shroud of Turin were found to date from the time of Jesus, that Christians would seize on it as proof of the veracity of the Gospels. Actually, no they wouldn’t, because it’s obvious to anyone who’s actually read the Gospels that the Shroud of Turin is not the burial shroud of Jesus. But I don’t expect anyone to read the books they object to. It takes so darn long!
He does present a wonderful thought experiment, wherein everyone on earth loses their memory of everything, and must re-learn everything again, presumably starting with how to get food and so forth. He asks: when people regain the ability to read existing books again, would they still think that books like the Bible or the Koran were sacred, or just books of stories? He concludes that they wouldn’t think them anything special, which supports his idea that devotion to ancient writing is idiotic. But, and this is typical, he doesn’t take the next logical step in his thought experiment, namely, asking the obvious question: would these people re-discover God even without any sacred books? Of course they would! People in all cultures at all periods in history do re-discover God. Which means that the books are not the actual point. Attack them if you want. Burn them if you want. People will still find God.
Quote: “The moderation we see among nonfundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved.” Um, yes, actually it is. The Old Testament faith requiring immense sacrifices and military conquests evolved into the more internal, personal, and tolerant faith of the New Testament. The stone-throwers evolved into the targets.
But then, he seems to think that all religion is in the past, and that people in the present do not have any religious experiences. Of course, this would be a distraction from his attack on sacred texts.
He tags the usual bases that these books always do. Religion exists because we fear death: check. Hair-raising quotes from Old Testament: check. Ludicrous examples of nonsense that only very few religious wingnuts do and believe: check. The Spanish Inquisition: check.
As with the comparable works of Dawkins, he is repetitive and redundant nearly beyond endurance. I think these people have so few points to make that they must reword them and repeat them every few pages to fill up a whole book. Unlike Dawkins, he is fairly restrained in his tone. I don’t think he uses the term “faith-head” once.
Again, as all these books do, he ignores all other possible causes of the violence he decries. Politics: nah. Poverty: nope. Ignorance: nyet. But excuse me, MISTER Harris, I can’t help but notice that all the bad people you mention in your book are men. Would investigating a gender-related line of inquiry possibly – okay, okay, sorry, I was just asking.
Eventually, he goes completely off the deep end. ALL VIOLENCE is the result of religion! What, you object, about Russia and China exterminating their own citizens, either deliberately (purges) or inadvertently (famines)? “Communism was little more than a political religion.” How about them pesky Nazis, out to eliminate everything non-Aryan? Why, that was due to “abject (and religious) loyalty to Hitler.” And that guy robbing the 7-11? I’ll bet he stepped inside a church once!
Unlike some other books of this kind, he does acknowledge that eliminating religious faith would leave a moral and ethical vacuum. (This kind of implies that religious faith currently has some moral and ethical value, but he never admits this.) He spends a pretty esoteric chapter trying to cobble together an ethics that has nothing to do with religious precepts. After a lot of obfuscating big words, all he really comes up with are some vague notions about intuition and not hurting living things. Astonishingly, he avoids mentioning how many faith-founded schools, colleges, universities, hospitals, and orphanages there are actually helping the people of the world. In the US alone, 9 of the top 10 charitable organizations are faith-founded (the exception being the American Cancer Society). If there’s a food pantry helping the hungry in your area, it’s probably staffed by volunteers from local churches, temples, and, yes, mosques. If there’s an AA meeting in your area, it’s probably in the basement of a church, not a philosophy department or a country club.
Also unlike other books of this kind, he does acknowledge the value of spirituality – which he identifies with transcendent states of consciousness – in human life. However, he focuses purely on Buddhist-style meditation, which is an amazing coincidence given his own background and training in Hindu and Buddhist meditation. No other spiritual disciplines of any other faith traditions are worth pursuing, including contemplation, devotions, prayer, scripture meditation, serving, fasting, solitude, silence, or personal reflection.
The sad thing is, he has a valid point: some people use religious faith as their justification for reprehensible deeds, and some let strict literal adherence to ancient writings blind them to the truth. But, if it is his genuine desire to see change, is this book the way to do it? These writers love humanity, but have no clue about people. When you say to someone, “Look at how stupid you are for thinking what you think,” do they ever say, “Wow, you’re right! I will certainly change myself immediately. Thanks for pointing that out!” Or are they more likely to dig in their heels and oppose you? Instead, what might work is for him to approach people of faith with caring and understanding for their beliefs, and gently lead them along the path he thinks is best. He’s not interested in that, though. He’d rather be right than effective, and ends up being neither.
Recommendation: if you don’t like religion, this is the book for you (if you can stomach all the violence he mentions). If you value religious faith at all, get ready for a two-by-four to the head.
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