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Comment11
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Reason Home Page
A review of Sam Harris'
"The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason"
(August
28, 2005)
Religion in one form or another has been with
us for tens of thousands of years, ever since humanity began to be
overwhelmed by awareness of the unknown. For all of its life it has
been
based on ignorance, fear, superstition and pure wishful thinking.
Social and scientific progress has largely been accomplished in spite
of it. But in the opening years of the 21st century it has reached a
kind of critical mass which makes it a danger not only to further
progress but to our very survival. Islamic terrorism has come into its
own, and may well be in sight of getting hold of nuclear weapons; in
the hands of those who are willing and eager to die in the cause of
destroying the
infidel and establishing an Islamic world state, they threaten the
survival of civilization, for all-out war and catastrophe would
certainly result.
But Islam is not the only threat. Christian fundamentalism in the
United States is also reaching a critical mass. It threatens to destroy
two centuries of enlightened democratic government, halt social and
scientific progress, and rend American society in the cause of
establishing a regressive Bible-based fascism. Its policies will be
governed by the Book of Revelation, and its science and human rights
will revert to a medieval state. It, too, has its audacious
ambitions, envisioning world conquest for Christ and an apocalyptic
upheaval accompanying his return.
When two such forces
are let loose in the modern world, each with its own fanatical
convictions and
irrational bases, mutually exclusive and incapable of reason and
accommodation, we are all in very deep trouble.
This recognition of crisis prompted Sam
Harris to write The End of Faith,
and a powerful piece of writing it is. The book is a courageous
analysis of what religion is based on, what it has produced and what it
threatens to produce in the near future. None of it is pretty.
While Harris offers no easy or magical solution, an awareness and
fearless
examination of the problem would put us halfway there, and one can only
hope that books like this will eventually lead us to that halfway
point.
But The End of Faith is more
than just an indictment. In analysing why the pitfalls of the human
condition have brought us to these destructive and perilous straits,
Harris
gives us much in the way of understanding, and perhaps even a sense of
how we can escape our own traps. The cover design of the hardcover
edition, behind
the author and title words, conveys a hopeful, if mixed, message. It is
almost entirely black, with a sliver of light off in the distance
entering a short way into the blackness, like a beckoning open doorway
at the end of a dark narrow hall. There is a way out, but can it be
reached? And can it be reached in time?
I am not going to say too much by way of analysis,
but mostly let Harris speak for himself. He is a brilliant writer, a
master of vocabulary and imagery, with a very fresh and readable style.
The book is a page turner, though the disturbing subject matter
prevents it from being what one would call an enjoyable read. Yet the
latter part of the book manages to lift our spirits. Certainly, its
insights into the nature of ethics and consciousness open up new vistas
and new
hope. Perhaps the 'end of faith' lies not too far in our future, simply
because we face disaster if we do not recognize that the
irrationalities
of religion have brought our species to a tipping point. Our choice is
either their abandonment or the abyss.
From Chapter One:
Reason in Exile
Our situation is this: most of the people
in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a
book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each
making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to
organize themselves into factions according to which of these
incompatible claims they accept—rather
than on the basis of language,
skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism.
Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and
practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in
perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however:
"respect" for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an
attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here
and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every
religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error
or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to
every creed. Once a person believes—really
believes—that
certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its
antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves
might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty
about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
[p.13]
The only reason anyone is "moderate" in
matters of faith these days is that he has assimilated some of the
fruits of the last two thousand years of human thought (democratic
politics, scientific advancement on every front, concern for human
rights, an end to cultural and geographic isolation, etc.). The doors
leading out of scriptural literalism do not open from the inside. The moderation we see among
non-fundamentalists is not some sign that faith itself has evolved; it
is, rather, the product of the many hammer blows of modernity that have
exposed certain tenets of faith to doubt. Not the least among these
developments has been the emergence of our tendency to value evidence
and to be convinced by a proposition to the degree that there is
evidence for it. Even most fundamentalists live by the lights of reason
in this regard; it is just that their minds seem to have been
partitioned to accommodate the profligate truth claims of their
faith....Religious moderation springs from the fact that even the least
educated person among us simply knows
more about certain matters than anyone did two thousand years ago—and
much of this knowledge is incompatible with scripture. [p.18-19]
With each passing year, do our religious
beliefs conserve more and more of the data of human experience? If
religion addresses a genuine sphere of understanding and human
necessity, then it should be susceptible to progress; its doctrines should
become more useful, rather than less. Progress in religion, as in other
fields, would have to be a matter of present
inquiry, not the mere reiteration of past doctrine. Whatever is true
now should be discoverable
now, and describable in terms that are not an outright affront to the
rest of what we know about the world. By this measure, the entire
project of religion seems perfectly backward. It cannot survive the
changes that have come over us—culturally,
technologically, and even
ethically. Otherwise, there are few reasons to believe that we will
survive it. [p.22]
The point is that most of what we currently
hold sacred is not sacred for any reason other than that it was thought
sacred yesterday. Surely, if
we could create the world anew, the practice of organizing our lives
around untestable propositions found in ancient literature—to say
nothing of killing and dying for them—would be
impossible to justify.
What stops us from finding it impossible now?
[p.24]
Our world is fast succumbing to the
activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species
on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education. That
so many of us are still dying on account of ancient myths is as
bewildering as it is horrible, and our own attachment to these myths,
whether moderate or extreme, has kept us silent in the face of
developments that could ultimately destroy us....Give people divergent,
irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death,
and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The
result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire.
If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient
taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of
mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a
recipe for the fall of civilization. [p.25-26]
What can be said of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan
if their divergent religious beliefs are to be "respected"? There is
nothing for religious pluralists to criticize but each country's poor
diplomacy—while, in truth, the entire conflict is
born of an irrational embrace of myth. Over one million people died in
the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India
and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars,
suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now
poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because
they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names
of Santa's reindeer. And their discourse is such that they are capable
of mustering a suicidal level of enthusiasm for these subjects without evidence. Their conflict is
only nominally about land, because their incompatible claims upon the
territory of Kashmir are a direct consequence of their religious
differences. Indeed, the only reason India and Pakistan are different
countries is that the beliefs of Islam cannot be reconciled with those
of Hinduism....When will we realize that the concessions we have made
to faith in our political discourse have prevented us from even
speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of
violence in our history? [p.26-27]
From Chapter Two: The
Nature of Belief
Let's say that I believe that God exists,
and some impertinent person asks me why.
This question invites—indeed,
demands—an answer
of the form "I
believe that God exists because..." I cannot say, however, "I believe
that God exists because it is prudent to do so" (as Pascal would have
us do)....Nor can I say things like "I believe in God because it makes
me feel good." The fact that I would feel good if there were a God does
not give me the slightest reason to believe that one exists. This is
easily seen when we swap the existence of God for some other consoling
proposition. Let's say that I want to believe that there is a diamond
buried somewhere in my yard that is the size of a refrigerator. It is
true that it would be uncommonly good to believe this. But do I have
any reason to believe that there is actually
a diamond in my yard that is thousands of times larger than any yet
discovered? No. Here we can see why Pascal's wager, Kierkegaard's leap
of faith, and other epistemological ponzi schemes won't do. [p.62-63]
This demonstrates that faith is nothing
more than a willingness to await the evidence—be it the
Day of
Judgment or some other downpour of corroboration. It is the search for
knowledge on the installment plan: believe now, live an untestable
hypothesis until your dying day, and you will discover that you were
right. But in any other sphere of life, a belief is a check that
everyone insists upon cashing this side of the grave: the engineer says
the bridge will hold; the doctor says the infection is resistant to
penicillin—these
people have defensible reasons for their claims about
the way the world is. The mullah, the priest, and the rabbi do not.
Nothing could change about this world, or about the world of their
experience, that would demonstrate the falsity of many of their core
beliefs. This proves that these beliefs are not born of any examination
of the world, or of the world of their experience. (They are, in Karl
Popper's sense, "unfalsifiable.") It appears that even the Holocaust
did not lead most Jews to doubt the existence of an omnipotent and
benevolent God. If having half of your people systematically delivered
to the furnace does not count as evidence against the notion that an
all-powerful God is looking out for your interests, it seems reasonable
to assume that nothing could. How does the mullah know that the Koran
is the verbatim word of God? The only answer to be given in any
language that does not make a mockery of the word "know" is—he doesn't. [p.66-67]
It takes a certain kind of person to
believe what no one else believes. To be ruled by ideas for which you
have no evidence (and which therefore cannot be justified in
conversation with other human beings) is generally a sign that
something is seriously wrong with your mind. Clearly there is sanity in
numbers....Jesus Christ—who, as it
turns out, was born of a virgin,
cheated death, and rose bodily into the heavens—can now be
eaten in
the form of a cracker. A few Latin words spoken over your favorite
Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well. Is there any doubt that
a lone subscriber to these beliefs would be considered mad? Rather, is
there any doubt that he would be
mad? The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal
human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy. Because each new generation
of children is taught that religious propositions need not be justified
in the way that all others must, civilization is still besieged by the
armies of the preposterous. We are, even now, killing ourselves over
ancient literature. Who would have thought something so tragically
absurd could be possible? [p.72-73]
From Chapter Three: In
the Shadow of God
The Holy Inquisition formally began in 1184
under Pope Lucius III, to crush the popular movement of
Catharism....There seems, in fact, to have been nothing wrong with
these people apart from their attachment to certain unorthodox beliefs
about the creation of the world. But heresy is heresy. Any person who
believes that the Bible contains the infallible word of God will
understand why these people had to be put to death....The question of
how the church managed to transform Jesus' principal message of loving
one's neighbor and turning the other cheek into a doctrine of murder
and rapine seems to promise a harrowing mystery; but it is no mystery
at all. Apart from the Bible's heterogeneity and outright
self-contradiction, allowing it to justify diverse and irreconcilable
aims, the culprit is clearly the doctrine of faith itself. Whenever a
man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition,
without evidence—that
unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the
blood of infants—he becomes
capable of anything. [p.83/85]
With passage of the Nuremberg laws in 1935
the transformation of German anti-Semitism was complete. The Jews were
to be considered a race, one that was inimical to a healthy Germany in
principle....And it is here that we encounter the overt complicity of
the church in the attempted murder of an entire people. German
Catholics showed themselves remarkably acquiescent to a racist creed
that was at cross-purposes with at least one of their core beliefs: for
if baptism truly had the power to redeem, then Jewish converts should
have been considered saved without residue in the eyes of the church.
But, as we have seen, coherence in any system of beliefs is never
perfect....But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its
willingness to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby
enable them to trace the extent of a person's Jewish
ancestry....Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic
was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, "after committing
crimes as great as any in human history." This is really an
extraordinary fact. Throughout this period, the church continued to
excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for holding unorthodox
views and to proscribe books by the hundreds, and yet not a single
perpetrator of genocide—of whom
there were countless
examples—succeeded
in furrowing Pope Pius XII's censorious brow.
[p.102-4]
From Chapter Four: The Problem with
Islam
Of course, like every religion, Islam has
had its moments. Muslim
scholars invented algebra, translated the writings of Plato and
Aristotle, and made important contributions to a variety of nascent
sciences at a time when European Christians were luxuriating in the
most abysmal ignorance. It was only through the Muslim conquest of
Spain that classical Greek texts found their way into Latin translation
and seeded the Renaissance in western Europe. Thousands of pages could
be written cataloging facts of this sort for every religion, but to
what end? Would it suggest that religious faith is good, or even
benign? It is a truism to say that people of faith have created almost
everything of value in our world, because nearly every person who has
ever swung a hammer or trimmed a sail has been a devout member of one
or another religious culture. There has been simply no one else to do
the job. We can also say that every human achievement prior to the
twentieth century was accomplished by men and women who were perfectly
ignorant of the molecular basis of life. Does this suggest that a
nineteenth-century view of biology would have been worth
maintaining?...The fact that religious faith has left its mark on every
aspect of our civilization is not an argument in its favor, nor can any
particular faith be exonerated simply because certain of its adherents
made foundational contributions to human culture. [p.108-9]
To convey the relentlessness with which unbelievers are vilified in the
text of the Koran, I provide a long compilation of quotations below, in
order of their appearance in the text. This is what the Creator of the
universe apparently has on his mind... [There follows over five pages of direct
quotes from the Koran, from God consigning unbelievers "to the Fire" to
directives to "Slay them wherever you find them."] ...On almost
every page, the Koran instructs observant Muslims to despise
non-believers. On almost every page, it prepares the ground for
religious conflict. The Koran's ambiguous prohibition against
suicide—[the Koran
contains a single ambiguous line, "Do not destroy
yourselves" (4:29)]—appears to
be an utter non-issue. Surely there
are Muslim jurists who might say that suicide bombing is contrary to
the tenets of Islam (where are these jurists, by the way?) and that
suicide bombers are therefore not martyrs but fresh denizens of hell.
Such a minority opinion, if it exists, cannot change the fact that
suicide bombings have been rationalized by much of the Muslim world
(where they are called "sacred explosions')....The bottom line for the
aspiring martyr seems to be this: as long as you are killing infidels
or apostates "in defense of Islam," Allah doesn't care whether you kill
yourself in the process or not. [p.117-124]
It should be of particular concern to us that the beliefs of Muslims
pose a special problem for nuclear deterrence. There is little
possibility of our having a cold
war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A
cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat
of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic
that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a
century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What
will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere
mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear weaponry? If
history is any guide, we will not be sure about where the offending
warheads are or what their state of readiness is, and so we will be
unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to destroy them. In
such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a
nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an
unthinkable crime—as it
would kill tens of millions of innocent
civilians in a single day—but it may
be the only course of action
available to us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an
unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the
Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a
genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing could make it so: this very
perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim
state
that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All of this
is perfectly insane, of course: I have just described a plausible
scenario in which much of the world's population could be annihilated
on account of religious ideas that belong on the same shelf with
Batman, the philosopher's stone, and unicorns. That it would be a
horrible absurdity for so many of us to die for the sake of myth does
not mean, however, that it could not happen. Indeed, given the immunity
to all reasonable intrusions that faith enjoys in our discourse, a
catastrophe of this sort seems increasingly likely. We must come to
terms with the possibility that men who are every bit as zealous to die
as the nineteen hijackers may one day get their hands on long-range
nuclear weaponry. The Muslim world in particular must anticipate this
possibility and find some way to prevent it. Given the steady
proliferation of technology, it is safe to say that time is not on our
side. [p.128-9]
From Chapter Five: West of Eden
The degree to which religious ideas still
determine government policies—especially
those of the United
States—presents a
grave danger to everyone....For many years U.S.
policy in the Middle East has been shaped, at least in part, by the
interests that fundamentalist Christians have in the future of a Jewish
state. Christian "support for Israel" is, in fact, an example of
religious cynicism so transcendental as to go almost unnoticed in our
political discourse. Fundamentalist Christians support Israel because
they believe that the final consolidation of Jewish power in the Holy
Land—specifically,
the rebuilding of Solomon's temple—will usher
in
both the Second Coming of Christ and the final destruction of the Jews.
Such smiling anticipations of genocide seem to have presided over the
Jewish state from its first moments: the first international support
for the Jewish return to Palestine, Britain's Balfour Declaration of
1917, was inspired, at least in part, by a conscious conformity to
biblical prophecy. These intrusions of eschatology into modern politics
suggest that the dangers of religious faith can scarcely be overstated.
Millions of Christians and Muslims now organize their lives around
prophetic traditions that will only find fulfillment once rivers of
blood begin flowing from Jerusalem. [p.153-4]
Lieutenant
General William G. Boykin was recently appointed deputy undersecretary
of defense for intelligence at the Pentagon. A highly decorated Special
Forces officer, he now sets policy with respect to the search for Osama
bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the rest of America's enemies in hiding. He
is also, as it turns out, an ardent opponent of Satan. Analyzing a
photograph of Mogadishu after the fateful routing of his forces there
in 1993, Boykind remarked that certain shadows in the image revealed
"the principalities of darkness...a demonic presence in that city that
God revealed to me as the enemy." On the subject of the war on terror,
he has asserted that our "enemy is a guy named Satan." While these
remarks sparked some controversy in the media, most Americans probably
took them in stride. After all, 65 percent of us are quite certain that
Satan exists. [p.156-7]
Men eager
to do the Lord's work have been elected to other branches of the
federal government as well. The House majority leader, Tom DeLay, is
given to profundities like "Only Christianity offers a way to live in
response to the realities that we find in this world. Only
Christianity." He claims to have gone into politics "to promote a
Biblical worldview." Apparently feeling that it is impossible to say
anything stupid while in the service of this worldview, he attributed
the shootings at the Columbine High School in Colorado to the fact that
our schools teach the theory of evolution. We might wonder how it is
that pronouncements this floridly irrational do not lead to immediate
censure and removal from office. [p.157]
From Chapter Six: A Science of Good
and Evil
A rational approach to ethics becomes
possible once we realize that questions of right and wrong are really
questions about the happiness and suffering of sentient creatures. If
we are in a position to affect the happiness or suffering of others, we
have ethical responsibilities toward them—and many
of these
responsibilities are so grave as to become matters of civil and
criminal law. Taking happiness and suffering as our starting point, we
can see that much of what people worry about under the guise of
morality has nothing to do with the subject. It is time we realized
that crimes without victims are like debts without creditors. They do
not even exist. Any person who lies awake at night worrying about the
private pleasures of other consenting adults has more than just too
much time on his hands; he has some unjustifiable beliefs about the
nature of right and wrong. [p.170-1]
The
pervasive idea that religion is somehow the source of our deepest ethical
intuitions is absurd. We no more get our sense that cruelty is wrong
from the pages of the Bible than we get our sense that two plus two
equals four from the pages of a textbook on mathematics. Anyone
who does not harbor some rudimentary sense that cruelty is wrong is
unlikely to learn that it is by reading—and,
indeed, most scripture
offers rather equivocal testimony to this fact in any case....Concern
for others was not the invention of any prophet....We simply do not
need religious ideas to motivate us to live ethical lives. Once we
begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that
our religions traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics
than they have been on scientific questions generally. [p.172]
Rather than find real reasons for human
solidarity, faith offers us a solidarity born of tribal and tribalizing
fictions. As we have seen, religion is one of the great limiters of
moral identity, since most believers differentiate themselves, in moral
terms, from those who do not share their faith. No other ideology is so
eloquent on the subject of what divides one moral community from
another. Once a person accepts the premises upon which most religious
identities are built, the withdrawal of his moral concern from those
who do not share these premises follows quite naturally. Needless to
say, the suffering of those who are destined for hell can never be as
problematic as the suffering of the righteous. If certain people can't
see the unique wisdom and sanctity of my religion, if their hearts are
so beclouded by sin, what concern is it of mine if others mistreat
them? They have been cursed by the very God who made the world and all
things in it. Their search for happiness was simply doomed from the
start. [p.176-7]
[M]any intellectuals tend to speak as
though something in the last century of ratiocination in the West has
placed all worldviews more or less on an equal footing. No one is ever
really right about what he
believes; he can only point to a community of peers who believe
likewise. Suicide bombing isn't really wrong, in any absolute sense; it
just seems so from the parochial perspective of Western culture. Throw
a dash of Thomas Kuhn into this pot, and everyone can agree that we
never really know how the world is, because each new generation of
scientists reinvents the laws of nature to suit its taste. Convictions
of this sort generally go by the name of "relativism," and they seem to
offer a rationale for not saying anything too critical about the
beliefs of others. But most forms of relativism—including
moral
relativism, which seems especially well subscribed—are
nonsensical.
And dangerously so. Some may think that it is immaterial whether we
think the Nazis were really wrong
in ethical terms, or whether we just don't like their style of life. It
seems to me, however, that the belief that some worldviews really are
better than others taps a different set of intellectual and moral
resources. These are resources we will desperately need if we are to
oppose, and ultimately unseat, the regnant ignorance and tribalism of
our world. [p.178-9]
To treat others ethically is to act out of
concern for their happiness and suffering....[W]e experience happiness
and suffering ourselves; we encounter others in the world and recognize
that they experience happiness and suffering as well; we soon discover
that "love" is largely a matter of wishing that others experience
happiness rather than suffering; and most of us come to feel that love
is more conducive to happiness, both our own and that of others, than
hate. There is a circle here that links us to one another: we each want
to be happy; the social feeling of love is one of our greatest sources
of happiness; and love entails that we be concerned for the happiness
of others. We discover that we can be selfish together. [p.186-7]
Consider the practice of "honor killing"
that persists throughout much of Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast
Asia. We live in a world in which women and girls are regularly
murdered by their male relatives for perceived sexual
indiscretions—ranging
from merely speaking to a man without permission
to falling victim of rape. Coverage of these atrocities in the Western
media generally refers to them as a "tribal" practice, although they
almost invariably occur in a Muslim context. Whether we call the
beliefs that inspire this behavior "tribal" or "religious" is
immaterial; the problem is clearly a product of what men in these
societies believe about shame and honor, about the role of women, and
about female sexuality....In these parts of the world, a girl of any
age who gets
raped has brought shame upon her family. Luckily, this shame is not
indelible and can be readily expunged with her blood....The girl either
has her throat cut, or she is dowsed with gasoline and set on fire, or
she is shot. The jail sentences for these men, if they are prosecuted
at all, are invariably short. Many are considered heroes in their
communities....Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky
girls, rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to
retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to
teach their inhabitants many other things—like how
to read. Not
learning how to read is not another style
of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is
not another style of ethics. It is a failure
of ethics. [p.187-190]
From Chapter Seven: Experiments in
Consciousness
Inevitably, scientists treat consciousness
as a mere attribute of
certain large-brained animals. The problem, however, is that nothing
about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, declares it to be a
bearer of that peculiar, interior dimension that each of us experiences
as consciousness in his own case. Every paradigm that attempts to shed
light upon the frontier between consciousness and unconsciousness,
searching for the physical difference that makes the phenomenal one,
relies upon subjective reports to signal that an experimental stimulus
has been observed. [p.208]
Our
spiritual possibilities will largely depend on what we are as selves. In physical terms, each of
us is a system, locked in an uninterrupted exchange of matter and
energy with the larger system of the earth. The life of your very cells
is built upon a network of barter and exchange over which you can
exercise only the crudest conscious influence—in the
form of deciding
whether to hold your breath or take another slice of pizza out of the
fridge. As a physical system, you are no more independent of nature at
this moment than your liver is of the rest of your body. As a
collection of self-regulating and continually dividing cells, you are
also continuous with your genetic precursors: your parents, their
parents, and backward through tens of millions of generations—at which
point your ancestors begin looking less like men and women with bad
teeth and more like pond scum. It is true enough to say that, in
physical terms, you are little more than an eddy in a great river of
life. [p.210]
The sense
of self seems to be the product of the brain's representing its own
acts of representation; its seeing of the world begets an image of a one who sees. It is important to
realize that this feeling—the sense
that each of us has of appropriating,
rather than merely being, a
sphere of experience—is
not a necessary feature of consciousness. It is, after all, conceivable
that a creature could form a representation of the world without
forming a representation of itself
in the world. And, indeed, many spiritual practitioners claim to
experience the world in just this way, perfectly shorn of self. [p.222]
It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that
the feeling that we call "I" is one of the most pervasive and salient
features of human life: and its effects upon the world, as six billion
"selves" pursue diverse and often incompatible ends, rivals those that
can be ascribed to almost any other phenomenon in nature. Clearly,
there is nothing optimal—or even
necessarily viable—about our
present form of
subjectivity. Almost every problem we have can be ascribed to the fact
that human beings are utterly beguiled by their feelings of
separateness. It would seem that a spirituality that undermined such
dualism, through the mere contemplation of consciousness, could not
help but improve our situation. Whether or not great numbers of human
beings will ever be in a position to explore this terrain depends on
how our discourse on religion proceeds. There is clearly no greater
obstacle to a truly empirical approach to spiritual experience than our
current beliefs about God. [p.214]
Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. The mystic has
recognized something about the nature of consciousness prior to
thought, and this recognition is susceptible to rational discussion.
The mystic has reasons for what he believes, and these reasons are
empirical. The roiling mystery of the world can be analyzed with
concepts (this is science), or it can be experienced free of concepts
(this is mysticism). Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in
place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once
full of hope
and full of fear—of the
vastitude of human ignorance....While
spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind,
we need not believe anything on insufficient evidence to actualize it.
Clearly, it must be possible to bring reason, spirituality, and ethics
together in our thinking about the world. [p.221]
From the Epilogue
This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas.
There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary
crimes—like blasphemy—and where the totality of a child's
education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of
religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost
every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same
societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced
weaponry. If we cannot inspire the developing world, and the Muslim
world in particular, to pursue ends that are compatible with a global
civilization, then a dark future awaits all of us. [p.224-5]
Religious violence is still with us because
our religions are intrinsically
hostile to one another. Where they appear otherwise, it is because
secular knowledge and secular interests are restraining the most lethal
improprieties of faith. It is time we acknowledged that no real
foundation exists within the canons of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, or
any of our other faiths for religious tolerance and religious
diversity. If religious war is ever to become unthinkable for us, in
the way that slavery and cannibalism seem poised to, it will be a
matter of our having dispensed with the dogma of faith. If our
tribalism is ever to give way to an extended moral identity, our
religious beliefs can no longer be sheltered from the tides of genuine
inquiry and genuine criticism. It is time we realized that to presume
knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever
conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have
lost the very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for
what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we
have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People
who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of
our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should
respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have
respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next. [p.225]
We are bound to one another. The fact that our ethical intuitions must,
in some way, supervene upon our biology does not make ethical truths
reducible to biological ones. We are the final judges of what is good,
just as we remain the final judges of what is logical. And on neither
front has our conversation with one another reached an end. There need
be no scheme of rewards and punishments transcending this life to
justify our moral intuitions or to render them effective in guiding our
behavior in the world. The only angels we need invoke are those of our
better nature: reason, honesty, and love. The only demons we must fear
are those that lurk inside every human mind: ignorance, hatred, greed,
and faith, which is surely
the devil's masterpiece. [p.226]
*
These are but sprinklings of the intelligence and wisdom that fill this
book. I spoke earlier about the "critical mass" that religion has
reached in our modern world. But perhaps we are reaching another
critical mass. The voice of reason has often been raised in many parts
of the world, from the days of Socrates on. It has been largely the
purview of individuals confronting the masses, met with censure,
rejection and even murder. But because religious faith has now reached
the point where it threatens to suffocate secular and scientific
expression and indeed to annihilate us all, a more collective voice of
reason may be about to emerge in response. Those individuals need to
become a movement, raising a unified voice unafraid to speak out
against the millstone that religion has become, dragging our planetary
society into the mud of ignorance and superstition, overpopulation,
divisiveness, hatred and death. In my Jesus Puzzle novel (posted
in its entirety on the Jesus Puzzle website), as part of the background plot, I
portrayed the formation of a broadly based organization called the Age
of Reason Foundation to openly combat religious irrationalities and
promote science and reason in society. I am convinced that this is the
sort of thing that is needed today. It will require courageous
politicians, outspoken academics, plucky writers, broadcasters and
filmmakers, as well as ordinary citizens game enough to champion reason
in their own social circles. There are parts of the world where this
would be extraordinarily difficult. In the United States of America, with its
long traditions of democracy, free speech and an enlightened
Constitution (now under siege), it should be as easy as standing up and
saying "No more!"
Earl Doherty
Age of
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