Product Description

This important and timely book delivers a startling analysis of the clash of faith and reason in today's world. Sam Harris offers a vivid historical tour of mankind's willingness to suspend reason in favour of religious beliefs, even when those beliefs are used to justify harmful behaviour and sometimes heinous crimes. He asserts that in the shadow of weapons of mass destruction, we can no longer tolerate views that pit one true god against another. Most controversially, he argues that we cannot afford moderate lip service to religion - an accommodation that only blinds us to the real perils of fundamentalism. While warning against the encroachment of organised religion into world politics, Harris also draws on new evidence from neuroscience and insights from philosophy to explore spirituality as a biological, brain-based need. He calls on us to invoke that need in taking a secular humanistic approach to solving the problems of this world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8579 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Observer
'An eminently sensible rallying cry for a more ruthless secularisation of society'

Independent
'A bold and exhilarating thesis . . . A brave, pugilistic attempt to demolish the walls that currently insulate religious people from criticism'

Richard Dawkins, Guardian
'A genuinely frightening book about terrorism, and the central role played by religion in justifying and rewarding it'

Customer Reviews

Provocative but timely
To call this book provocative is something of an understatement - it's an attack on ideals held very dear by many, from the sanctity of religious faith through to the desirability of religious tolerance. It's also highly persuasive, and a timely wake-up call to anyone who dislikes religion but believes that private beliefs should go unchallenged.

Harris's key concern is pragmatic: there are religious fundamentalists happy to kill both themselves and others on the basis of their faith in particular holy books, and we must find the best way of stopping them. Harris's view is that the way to do so is to undermine all religion, not just that of the fundamentalists.

He notes that "religious tolerance", the liberal consensus which minimises conflict between believers and non-believers, and between moderates and radicals, allows fundamentalism to flourish because it creates a climate where only actions can be challenged, not the beliefs that cause them. Harris (with some tendency to exaggeration) downplays the political causes of terrorism which other writers focus on, and concentrates on the central absurdity that makes acts like suicide bombing possible - belief in reward in the afterlife.

Harris rarely minces words. The book is filled with quotable invective, which depending on your perspective you'll either find inspiring or apalling. As a rant, it's highly articulate and very well-argued.

Harris pours scorn particularly on Islam and Christianity, enumerating the false beliefs to be found in their holy books and devoting a chapter each to their flaws. Judaism gets off more lightly, and he clearly has more sympathy for Israel than its neighbours. Eastern mysticism such as Buddhism gets off most lightly of all, on the grounds that it is to some extent a tradition of empirical investigation, not just a compendium of antiquated superstitions.

There are very interesting chapters that discuss the philosophical arguments against faith - one on the nature of belief and another on ethics. Many of his arguments (e.g. in favour of torture under certain circumstances) are initially repellent, and some of his ideas are unfairly contradictory (particularly a support for Western bombing of civilians while criticising Islamic support for the same - although his grounds are reasonable, if you accept his argument that the West would avoid "collateral damage" if it could, while Islamic terrorists actively seek it out, he remains far from even-handed).

The flaws are hardly relevant, as there's no need to agree with everything here to get the main point - that only by challenging all irrational religious views can we hope to create a future free from murderous extremists.

Provocative, necessary but flawed - be careful
In The End of Faith, Sam Harris passionately argues against faith (not just religion) and wants reason and rationality to govern virtually all human decisions. His principle problem with faith is that of evidence, contending that there is no evidence for God, and that the Bible or Koran or any other scripture whose tenets derive from revelation and are corrupted by inaccuracy, time and translation cannot possibly be vessels for truth - they are, to Harris, unjustified.

Harris also wheels out the old atheist argument that religion is responsible for a unique amount of suffering and death in the world, citing everything from The Crusades to modern Islamic Jihad in support of his case. He picks out passages from Deuteronomy and Koranic verses which instruct the believer to kill infidels, and on this basis riles against the seemingly unjustified and bizarre conduct of those who believe in the truth or even morality of it. The traditional counter-argument (in fact mentioned by one of the other reviewers here) that Stalinism and Maoism, both atheistic movements, were responsible for countless atrocities and mass murder proves violence is human, not religious, is dismissed by Harris with relative ease, and not without justification: "although these tyrants paid lip service to rationality, communism was little more than a political religion." (p.79)

Harris' principle aim is to demonstrate the destructive nature of unjustified belief, of which the major religions are the most virulent forms, and that if people were rational, considered evidence and did not merely accept fanciful, supernaturalistic explanations from authority for the way the world works, things would be better all round. It is clear that Harris believes ridding the world of religion would be of benefit, and his motive is to make the world a more humane place.

To make his thesis comprehensive, Harris attempts to show that religion (and unjustified beliefs in general) have impacted on the world in a multitude of ways, and his book spans topics as diverse as the legalisation of drugs, abortion, politics in the middle east, spirituality and even some epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge); he argues against relativism and pragmatism (a long footnote at the back of the book has a hack at Rorty, for example).

Harris also covers some scientific theories and tries to demonstrate that they are preferable to the completely inaccurate and half-baked testimony found in religious texts. As he puts it: "the God of Abraham is not only unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man."

But this book is not hard to read. Although it is dense with discussion, it reads like a well-oiled polemic in the tradition of Bertrand Russell; a sort of pop-philosophy, designed with the layman in mind, and far more interested in conveying the seriousness and gravity of the situation than with intricate philosophical detail (although his footnotes sometimes manage it).

It is obvious that Harris is a very clever man.

However, there are some very deep problems with his book. Harris is, at root, a mild (perhaps medium) reductionist, seeking out ways in which to highlight religion's blame for various human travesties, sometimes to the point where he neglects at all to accept alternative ideas or even to consider them. Politically, his stance is that fundamentalism, being chiefly a product of the middle-eastern Islamic faith, is largely if not wholly responsible for the upheaval in that region. He rejects outright alternative theories, such as that western imperial campaigns have resulted in both increased fanatic militancy and a deterioration in economic (amongst other) conditions in the middle-east. Harris makes a point of attacking Noam Chomsky, the veteran American political gadfly, by trying to show flaws in his moral calculus. Specifically, Harris takes the example of a pharmaceutical plant struck by US bombers in Sudan in 1998. The official US administration position was that the plant was taken to be a chemical weapons factory. In fact, the blow killed innocent workers and depleated the supply of vital drugs in the region. Chomsky, who sees this as an example of the moral callousness of western tactics (see his little book "9/11"), equates such crimes with those whom are called "terrorists" over here. But Harris argues that the strike was justifiable, perhaps in part, as part of a campaign to eliminate Islamist madmen bent on destroying democracy. They were, of course, motivated solely by their fundamentalist religious precepts, and not, as other more balanced analysis suggests, also a factor of foreign aggression.

Harris is therefore a blend, politically speaking. He sounds hawkish and determined to strike the irrational fundamentalists by force, if necessary: "all reasonable men and women have a common enemy...Our enemy is nothing other than faith itself...the West must either win the argument or win the war." (p.131) On the other hand, he rages against the Christian right in the US, against the illegalisation of marijuana, abortion and euthanasia (in certain situations). He is not easily categorized in traditional left vs right terms.

Further problems with his book is his idea of truth, which he posits can only come by rationally comparing data about the world "out there" with hypotheses - he would like a scientific approach to everything, it would seem. This deep dependence on rationality makes one uneasy, however. Particularly so since Harris is almost willing to be militant about it (pacifism is another position he tries to argue against - although for some reason he criticizes only Gandhi, rather than pacifism as a whole). The unchecked acceptance of reason in all walks of life have deep problems (see Pirsig's "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" for a brilliant discussion of this). Harris, therefore, in my view, edges very close to a position he is arguing against: fundamentalism. He seems to me to be nearly a rationalistic fundamentalist, and his book doesn't explain some deeply important problems. Harris does discuss spirituality to some extent, and puts forward ideas about how it could be pursued, especially along the lines of meditation. But his limited approach to the topic did not satisfy me that he had considered all of the ramifications of rejecting irrationality without exception. For instance, his description of love is also stunted, expressed in terms of mutual benefits for people who share their lives - but what of the irrational, maddening, kind of love in the romantic, sensuous, heart-fluttering sense? That is not rational in the Harris sense, yet he omits to mention experiences as important as this very often.

In part the problem with this book is that it tries to do too much all at once. Harris should probably have published far more detailed analyses of the individual topics he discusses. As it is, his effort is not bad, and very hypnotic: but it suffers from trying to stretch across too many disciplines without enough detail. I think this is a function of the audience Harris is aiming at, but this book in the end may have the converse effect to Harris' intention; it may give people "a little knowledge", which as we know is a "dangerous thing".

In summary the book is ambitious, provocative, easy to read but intelligently written, enjoyable, spans a wide range of topics, doesn't have enough detail, makes an ultimately reductionist argument, contains a mixture of political opinions, reserves special levels of vitriol for Islam (which some may be offended by), and probably qualifies as a very important argument to consider. (Of its 336 pages, only 227 is the actual main text, the rest is footnotes). It is worth buying, but not necessarily buying into - be cautious about how Harris rejects certain ideas and how much evidence HE gives, and what in turn he fails to consider!

Incisive, alarming and irrefutable
Mum always insisted; "Don't discuss politics or religion!" These days the two are too thoroughly intertwined to avoid discussing one without the other. Sam Harris thinks so, and is emphatic that we need to recognise that. He doesn't like religion - there are too many illogical and inconsistent expressions of it. He's particularly concerned about how religions manifest themselves in politics. In this challenging and provocative book, he urges us all to be aware about what the "faithful" learn about their gods, and how they express that learning. He finds the situation dangerous, threatening enough that immediate action is overdue to correct the peril we face. This cry of alarm must be heeded, and Harris has done a thorough job of explaining why we must act.

In the West, he notes how religious tolerance, after a long struggle to gain acceptance, poses a conundrum. Tolerance means acceptance, but the faithful in the three extensive monotheistic religions, preclude tolerance. "The Book", accepted if not admired universally, demands the diminution, if not the destruction of "heresy". He's particularly scathing of Islam's own "Book", the Qur'an in its insistence on rooting out infidels. Thus, there is no "border" to the Islamic world short of the planet itself. This, he argues, is a tangible threat. We've experienced one of its most diabolically conceived acts in the destruction of the Twin Towers. This, he argues, is but the first of a series of acts that will grow increasingly severe with the passage of time. Those in the West stressing that the suicide bombers are "fanatics" and "fundamentalists" are deluding themselves. It is clear, Harris says, that Islam "must find a way to revise itself".

Harris recapitulates the history of the Christian churches, with their extensive campaigns of expunging their own heretics and the Jews. With both religions driven by divine commands, as expressed in the "Books", the gods insist on obedience by all people. Those "chosen" to carry out that dictation are, of course, the faithful. Those insisting on "tolerance" are reading the "Books" selectively. To Harris, this is a shortsighted approach. Others see The Books as divine ordinances that must be obeyed. Christianity's long, bloody record is vividly presented, from the Inquisition through baptising Indian children before immediately executing them, the hunting of witches and other obscenities. Nazism, often portrayed as the mindless expression of a few adherents, Harris argues, is simply another form of mainstream religion. It certainly had the tacit approval of the Papacy. The injunction to "purify" is still with us in many guises - even if only at the level of banning "Harry Potter" as endorsing witchcraft and wizardry, expressly condemned in Christianity's "Book". Our enemy, Harris notes, is faith itself.

As a neuroscientist, Harris arrives at an unexpected solution to the ills of a religious societies. To Harris, the bizarre logic of Christianity - you can mutter a few words over your favourite Burgundy to render it into "Christ's blood" - must be shelved. So, too, must be the religion that claims to be the "chosen" of a desert deity. One that can condemn a man to death for writing fiction is morbidly irrational. Since all these concepts are but symptoms of "normal people embracing madness as something holy" a fresh means must be found. He's studied the various ideas of consciousness and discovered our notion of it can be abandoned. Harris argues that the Eastern mystics provide the solution. By abandoning the old faiths and learning the lessons mystics have acquired, the need for eliminating other humans for their derelictions of faith would evaporate. Although a rational recommendation, it remains difficult to envision how such transformation would be effected. The current technique of using "smart bombs" and imposed cultures is clearly inadequate, not to say unreasonable.

Harris's book is a must read for everyone. How else could the issues be confronted? His history is sweeping, if necessarily brief. His denunciation of religions is fully justified for their past and present practices, let alone the flawed foundations on which they rest. What is needed is a campaign strategy - the only shortcoming this book exhibits. Read it and make one of your own. [stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]