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It is ironic that Sam Harris begins his book with a description of a young man bombing a bus in the heart of a city. Though published in 2004, the description appears to fit very well the recent London transit bombings. And this is precisely why this book demands our attention in this time of growing radical, religious fundamentalism of whatever variety.
Sam Harris presents as a quiet, thoughtful, reflective person in television interviews and public presentations. His background is in philosophy and he is now completing his doctorate in neuro-science. He presents his analysis of religion in a deliberate, careful, rational manner. Yet the result is powerful.
The book his two major themes. The first part is comprised of a critique of the irrational basis of religious faith and the often terrible consequences of these beliefs.
This is not a tentative or hesitating criticism. At a time when the negative effects of religion and religious thinking are becoming increasingly visible, this book serves notice that making accommodations to religious thinking serves only to allow it to perpetuate its destructive influence. A belief that killing innocent people is responding to the will of one's God is not an idea to be given credence. And yet it flows directly from religious ideology and scripture.
After surveying the current effects of religious beliefs, Harris then explores the nature of belief and how it relates to reason by providing an excellent review of the criteria and process of determining truth--or what in philosophy is called epistemology.
Building on this analysis, he then reviews the effect of irrational belief in the history of Christianity with the Inquisition, the Cathar persecution, the witch hunts and finally the Holocaust. His point is that the moderation and toleration that is generally accepted today is not a result of the religious belief itself, but the modulating influence of the Enlightenment and the political separation of church and state that followed. This is followed by a detailed chapter analyzing the rise of radical and violent Islam. But lest we think we are immune from the effect of religious fundamentalism, he points out its current effect over issues such as the Ten Commandments controversy, the role of "faith-based" legislative efforts, the attempt to legislate what had previously been areas of private freedom, the movement to control embryonic stem cell research, and, of course, the abortion debate.
Harris is particularly critical of what he calls the "myth of moderation" which flows from the postmodern viewpoint that all ideas are relative and none can be held truer or better than others.
Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word "God" as though we know what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of the world--to say, for instance, that the Bible and Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish--is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.
The second part of the book is what makes it so significant This is not just another attack on the irrationality of religious faith. Harris acknowledges the legitimacy of the issues that religion attempts to address.
What makes one person happier than another? Why is love more conducive to happiness than hate? Why do we generally prefer beauty to ugliness and order to chaos? Why does it feel so good to smile and laugh, and why do these shared experiences generally bring people closer together? Is the ego and illusion, and, if so, what implications does this have for human life? Is there life after death? These are ultimately questions for a mature science of the mind. If we ever develop such a science, most of our religious texts will be no more useful to mystics than they are now to astronomers.
First he addresses ethics. What kind of ethics is possible without a faith in a supernatural God? One based in reason and that incorporates our growing knowledge of ourselves at the level of the brain. Where currently there is little consensus on moral issues, a sustained inquiry will force the convergence of various belief systems as it has done in other sciences. Moral relativism will no longer make sense ("we can't really judge the suicide bomber") because we will have developed verifiable criteria for moral and ethical behavior. Harris explores a number of contemporary issues from this perspective including terrorism, torture and pacifism. Furthermore, ethics is intimately connected with spirituality.
In the next chapter he reframes the entire arena of spirituality from the religious to the scientific in the newly emerging field of consciousness studies. He is hesitant to use the words spirituality or mysticism because "neither word captures the reasonableness and profundity of the possibility that we must now consider: that there is a form of well-being that supersedes all others, indeed, that transcends the vagaries of experience itself". Specifically he refers to those traditions that identify spirituality with consciousness itself--with the observer of content rather than the content itself, which frees us from the vicissitudes of experience.
Our spiritual traditions suggest that we have considerable room here to change our relationship to the contents of consciousness, and thereby to transform our experience of the world. Indeed, a vast literature on human spirituality attests to this. It is also clear that nothing need be believed on insufficient evidence for us to look in this possibility with an open mind.
It is tempting to quote whole sections of this final chapter in which Harris rescues spirituality from religion. He explores the nature of consciousness and the various efforts within traditional religions to change the nature of consciousness through sustained introspection and the refinement of attention. He applies this to an analysis of the nature of the self--how it arises, what sustains it and how it can be transcended. He compares Eastern to Western philosophy and religion and questions why the Eastern analysis appears to be so much more sophisticated. And finally he describes meditation as a form of introspection in a section which can serve as a primer to meditative practice. All of this is done from an empirical perspective informed by modern studies of consciousness rather than from religious doctrine.
The only lack in this book is the omission of the psychodynamic explanation for faith as originally proposed by Freud and more recently in the book The Psychological Roots of Religious Belief by M.D. Faber. Harris takes a more cultural and societal perspective.
Few books describe more clearly the transition to a post-religious era and establish so clearly why it is of such importance.
The days of our religious identities are clearly numbered. Whether the days of our civilization itself are numbered would seem to depend, rather too much, on how soon we realize this.
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- Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2005
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- Varghese Vayalamannil DevasiaReviewed in India on June 22, 2018
Faith ruins human reasoning
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