The End Of Faith is a frustrating book, mixing important facts and keen insight with misinformation, appeals to fear, insults, and almost willful misunderstanding. Harris’s fundamental thesis is that faith by his definition — the willingness to believe something in spite of a lack of evidence or even an abundance of counter-evidence — is irrational, and that irrational people currently have the technology to cause wanton destruction if their beliefs inspire such actions (chapters 1-2). His secondary theorem is that the major religions of the world can indeed inspire violence, that they have done so frequently in the past, and that they are continuing to do so in the present (chapters 3-5). The corollary is, of course, that the continued existence of the world as we know it depends on faith in these religions and anything else being abandoned. The remainder of the book sets forth a proposal that Buddhism and other spiritual practices that are not belief-based can provide the benefits of religions without their drawbacks.
The second part of the first claim is undeniable; there do indeed exist weapons with which a single moderately wealthy person can threaten the lives of billions, and enough of these weapons in existence to destroy all remnants of modern civilization. The first part is also fairly straightforward, although the lines between what is believed due to personal experience (acorns fall from oak trees), what is believed due to consensus among people who claim to have directly observed them (all matter is made of atoms), and what is believed because it has been passed down through many generations from those who claimed direct observation (a man named Noah, his extended family, and the livestock they took into their boat were the only land-borne survivors of an ancient flood) is quite fuzzy. Harris admits that most of what we “know” must be taken on faith in a sense, because no person can possibly experience everything (pages 73-77). However, he makes a reasonable distinction between those things that have been independently verified by large numbers of people and those that could not possibly be verified by anyone currently living. He also points out that beliefs not supported by evidence need not be religious in the usual sense, and also include everything from the superiority of Aryans to UFO sightings (pages 241-242).
My complaint is primarily with the second theorem, regarding the tendency of the major faith-based religions to inspire violence in their followers. At times Harris places the blame not on any specific belief but on the general concept of the supernatural, as in “Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.” (page 13) In other parts he looks at specific scriptural references, such as the 13th chapter of Deuteronomy (page 18), a text common to all of his favorite punching bags: Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Indeed, it is difficult to reconcile this commandment to put to death anyone who attempts to lead one from his religion with what claim to be religions of love and peace. What Harris and no doubt many others fail to do is to understand the passage within its proper context. If the early Israelites had not dealt so harshly with such people, it seems highly unlikely that they would exist today as an ethnicity, religion, or even footnote in a history book. Whether this cultural cohesion was worth the lives it likely cost is an interesting question, but the important point is that no one with authority in any mainstream religion interprets this passage as a practice that should be continued today.
In fact, Harris uses this to push the idea that religious moderation — which to him means holding religious beliefs without going on a murderous rampage — is a result of either ignorance of religion, or a lack of real faith. See page 17, “Moderates in every faith are obliged to loosely interpret (or simply ignore) much of their canons in the interests of living in the modern world.”, or page 21, “Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.”. Actually, religious moderation is the product of understanding religious texts rather than simply assuming an interpretation that furthers your own world view. In fact, Harris finds that our scriptures are almost entirely inflammatory, as seen on page 35: “God has given us far more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek” and 78: “A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages. It is only by the most acrobatic avoidance of passages whose canonicity has never been in doubt that we can escape murdering one another outright for the glory of God.”
He then goes on to describe several specific instances of people behaving badly due to their faith. In chapter 3 he starts with the Inquisition of heretics and trials of suspected witches in Medieval Europe. The first is indeed a black mark on the history of the Catholic church, and a lesson we would do well to avoid forgetting. The second was, I believe, a largely secular phenomenon. It does require belief in the supernatural to believe that someone has put a curse on you or otherwise use supernatural powers in a way that is destructive to society. Based on the scientific understanding held by the common people at the time, however, I am not sure that their conclusions were not reasonable. One needs only to look as far back as McCarthyism to find a similar case of a fearful populace sacrificing some of their members for what they think will be the good of the whole, and the HUAC had no religious affiliation.
The second half of chapter 3 discusses anti-Semitism and, absurdly, lays the blame for the Holocaust at the feet of the Christian church (page 79). It is certainly true that followers of Christianity and Judaism have not always been charitable toward each other, and that the Christian church is largely at fault for that. Why has this been the case? On pages 92-93 Harris asserts that it is endemic to Christian doctrine: “Anti-Semitism is as integral to church doctrine as the flying buttress is to a Gothic cathedral … anti-semitism is intrinsic to both Christianity and Islam; both traditions consider the Jews to be bunglers of God’s initial revelation. Christians generally also believe that the Jews murdered Christ …”. The first part of this is at least partly true: Christians do believe that their religion is the continuation of Judaism, and that non-Messianic Jews are missing the most important thing to have ever happened in their religion. The second part, however, requires a complete and utter lack of understanding of theology. According to Christian doctrine, Christ chose to die so that He could mitigate the justice required by the sins of every man, woman, and child ever born. It happens that the people who had the authority to have Him arrested and who convinced the Roman authorities to execute Him were Jews, but that does not place blame for the act on every Jewish person ever born. Even if it did, it would only mean that all Jews are responsible for assisting in the greatest miracle of Christianity.
This is not the only case in which Harris’s understanding of the fundamentals of Christianity is severely flawed. On page 95 he mentions in passing that the doctrine that Jesus was born to the virgin Mary causes the church to view sexuality as sinful. There is a kernel of truth here: Christianity does generally hold that sexuality can be used in sinful ways, such as adultery. If Christian thought holds that sex itself is sinful, however, the continued growth of the population would demonstrate that the church takes its position rather lightly. In fact, this is far from the truth. More important, however, is the ridiculous assertion that any hostility toward sexuality would have arisen as a response to the virgin birth. The reason that Jesus was to be born of a virgin is quite clear, and it has nothing to do with sex being immoral. Rather, it was important to demonstrate the belief that Jesus was the offspring of both God and man.
On page 97 he continues to misinterpret, taking a quotation from John 8 in which Jesus was speaking to a group of Jews (being a Jewish person living in a Jewish land, this described pretty much any conversation He ever had), and acting as though it applies to all Jewish people throughout time and space. In any case, it is the portrayal of the Holocaust as a situation created by Christianity that is most galling. In general, his thesis rests on the proposition that the Nazis would not have been able to convince the general populace to support their murderous schemes if centuries of religious anti-Semitism had not conditioned them to already hate people of Jewish faith. I am not qualified to discuss the extent to which this may be accurate, but even if it is true Christianity is still neither the proximate nor the ultimate cause of the Holocaust. It is true that people around the world in general and Christians in specific were callously negligent in their unwillingness to held European Jews, and that may be the saddest part of the whole terrible affair.
Chapter 4 continues by moving from Christianity through history to Islam in the present day. I am much less capable of pointing out the errors regarding Islam in the book, but I have little doubt that it is equally replete with them. I hope to find a Muslim scholar to analyze Harris’s statements here as I have done for chapter 3. I do know that when Harris claims that religious differences are the root cause of Middle East violence (page 109) he has much to explain. It would certainly be easier if Jews and Muslims did not both consider Jerusalem sacred, but the political and economic challenges in the region are significant enough that it seems very unlikely that violence is caused solely, or even primarily, by religion. He similarly claims that The Troubles in Northern Ireland were a primarily religious phenomenon (page 26). Again, I am no expert in these matters, but I must disagree. The factions that terrorized Northern Ireland did split on religious lines, but the battle was about political ties to Britain and age-old hatred and mistrust, not theology. Consider also the conflict between Sunni and Shiite Muslims in present-day Iraq. Is this really about the succession of Muhammad’s relatives, or is it more likely about two groups that fear political marginalization by the other and have centuries of such history to guide them?
Chapter 5 discusses how religion, and particularly Christianity, are currently affecting the United States. There have been a great deal of legislation passed in misguided attempts to force everyone to follow the morality of Christianity or to otherwise restrict the actions of people outside the mainstream. Blue laws, the war on drugs, bans on stem-cell research, and “protection of marriage” laws all fall more or less into this category and, for the most part, I have been a bitter opponent of each of them. I cannot deny that Christians have been the primary supporters of these laws, but nor can I see how they are a real reflection of a Christian worldview.
Chapter 6, entitled “A Science Of Good And Evil”, is about as scientific as intelligent design, and I will not discuss it further. The final chapter discusses consciousness, mysticism, and the supernatural, and proposes that all of the good things that have been found coincident with religion are actually a result of spirituality. He goes on to say that spirituality is the process of escaping the self, and that ancient Eastern philosophy allows us to have this experience without requiring any particular beliefs about the world. I have little to comment about this either.