An Atheistic Examination of the Culture of Death
The End of Faith - Mon, Sep 6, 2004
In The End of Faith, Sam Harris recommends a policy of zero tolerance toward religion. After seeing it trashed by a clueless agnostic at Salon, I'd lost all hope of reading a fair appraisal of that most excellent book. But yesterday the New York Times published a review a by its house atheist, Natalie Angier. All I can say is "Amen":
It's not often that I see my florid strain of atheism expressed in any document this side of the Seine, but ''The End of Faith'' articulates the dangers and absurdities of organized religion so fiercely and so fearlessly that I felt relieved as I read it, vindicated, almost personally understood. Sam Harris presents major religious systems like Judaism, Christianity and Islam as forms of socially sanctioned lunacy, their fundamental tenets and rituals irrational, archaic and, important when it comes to matters of humanity's long-term survival, mutually incompatible. A doctoral candidate in neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, Harris writes what a sizable number of us think, but few are willing to say in contemporary America: ''We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common, we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad,' 'psychotic' or 'delusional.'
Angier anticipates for the firestorm that's likely to be sparked by her review with a classic understatement: "You may also think it inappropriate that a mainstream newspaper be seen as obliquely condoning an attack on religious belief." But, as she immediately notes, "[t] hat reaction, in Harris's view, is part of the problem":
Criticizing a person's faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person's ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not.
By coincidence, I bought the book on Friday night, and was particularly impressed with what Angier describes as Harris' "particular ire for religious moderates." He nails it right on the head:
The problem that religious moderation poses for all of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said about religious literalism. We cannot say that fundamentalists are crazy, because they are merely practicing their freedom of belief; we cannot even say that they are mistaken in religious terms, because their knowledge of scripture is generally unrivaled. All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. This is not a new form of faith, or even a new species of scriptural exegesis; it is simply a capitulation to a variety of all-too-human interests that have nothing, in principle, to do with God. Religious moderation is the product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance�and it has no bona fides, in religious terms, to put it on a par with fundamentalism.
The first chapter, "Reason in Exile", is available online here. It's well worth reading, especially the subsection The Myth of "Moderation" in Religion, from which the above-quoted language is taken.
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The Raving Atheist » Comments on: The End of Faith
TRA, I came across a review on Amazon (by Curt Purcell) that had this to say:
"The first thing that anyone should realize about END OF FAITH before they buy it, before they begin to read it, and certainly before they praise or criticize it, is that it is an extended argument for BUDDHISM, *not* for atheism or naturalism. The marketing copy and jacket blurbs shrewdly pitch this as a "red meat for atheists" kind of book. The first chapter reinforces that impression, and admittedly even satisfies that expectation quite well. But the scathing arguments presented there narrowly target the biblical religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), and although they are presented as if from an atheistic or secular point of view, their purpose is ultimately to clear the way for Buddhism. Make no mistake--despite the initial pretence of skepticism, Harris is a True Believer, and he doesn't come clean with his own strongly-held religious convictions until the very final chapter.
Attentive readers may pick up on hints along the way, such as his early, offhand mention of "a body of data attesting to the reality of psychic phenomena, much of which has been ignored by mainstream science" (?), and a footnote that cites "some credible evidence for reincarnation" (?!?), but Harris saves his all-out evangelistic pitch for the very end, which may explain why so many of these five star reviews don't indicate any awareness of it whatsoever. On top of this stealth tactic, Harris defends his Buddhist views by resorting to arguments from ignorance: "But the truth is that we simply do not know what happens after death. . . . Consciousness may be a far more rudimentary phenomenon than are living creatures and their brains. And there appears to be no obvious way of ruling out such a thesis experimentally." This is absolutely despicable; it's the very lowest sort of apologetics, always retreating to the as-yet-unknown and possibly unknowable, and hiding behind the ever-shrinking margin where science and human understanding haven't yet come to satisfying answers. "
[Edit] September 6, 2004
Sorry, that link again. (TRA, could you add formatting buttons to the comment page?)
[Edit] September 6, 2004
Thank-you for that link, MadMan. I hope people will read all of Curt Purcell's review. He quotes Harris as saying: 'Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.' Harris, according to Purcell, also approves of torture, at least if Americans are doing the torturing. It seems to me that his ideas are as dangerous and frightening and as untrue as the religious ideas he despises.
I also doubt that Harris can be trusted to get his facts right. For instance, a well-educated Christian of the fourteenth century would not have believed that the earth is flat.
[Edit] September 6, 2004
Hah. That seems to happen a lot. Somebody writes a rip-roaring dissection of Christianity... and I'm enjoying it, and then they spout some line about "the sacred science of astronomy", and not sarcastically, and then I get disappointed.
This happened with "The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold". Turns out the stupid woman is a neo-pagan, and she wanted us to return to the roman/pagan religion.
First four chapters were good though.
[Edit] September 6, 2004
His take on religious moderation seems myopic. Fundamentalists, besides being savants with scripture, are also often constitutionally unable to understand the complexity of the whole thing. They seem, e.g., to take certain passages as being more special than others, certain interpretations as dogmatically correct, or prefer an Old Testament view of God (malicious, jealous, avenging) rather than a New (loving, merciful, sacrificing). Moderates I know simply disclaim the ability to root through all of that and arrive at a dogmatic answer, being content with a more vague but spiritually fulfilling "truth" that promises hope.
I mean, how many fundamentalists flog Revelation to death?
[Edit] September 6, 2004
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