3. Islam is no more amenable to violence than any other religion is. The violence we see in the Muslim world is the product of politics and economics, not faith.
The speciousness of this claim is best glimpsed by the bright light of bomb blasts. Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? They, too, suffer the daily indignity of the Israeli occupation. Where, for that matter, are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more cynical and repressive than any that the United States or Israel has ever imposed upon the Muslim world. Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do not exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference lies in the specific tenets of Islam. This is not to say that Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can, and it has (Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the apologists for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard to justify such barbarism. One need not work nearly so hard as a Muslim.
Recent events in Iraq offer further corroboration on this point. It is true, of course, that the Iraqi people have been traumatized by decades of war and repression. But war and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the United Nations, foreign workers, and Iraqi innocents. War and repression would not have attracted an influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. The Iraqi insurgents have not been motivated principally by political or economic grievances. They have such grievances, of course, but politics and economics do not get a man to intentionally blow himself up in a crowd of children, or get his mother to sing his praises for it. Miracles of this order generally require religious faith.
There are other confounding variables here, of course-state sponsorship of terrorism, the occasional coercion of reluctant suicide bombers-but we cannot let them blind us to the pervasive and lunatic influence of religious belief. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific doctrines about martyrdom and jihad that now directly inspire Muslim terrorism. Unless the world's Muslims can find some way of expunging a theology that is fast turning their religion into a cult of death, we will ultimately face the same perversely destructive behavior throughout much of the world. Wherever these events occur, we will find Muslims tending to side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This is the malignant solidarity that religion breeds. It is time that sane human beings stopped making apologies for it. And it is time for Muslims-especially Muslim women-to realize that nobody suffers the consequences of Islam more than they do.
4. The End of Faith is not a truly atheistic book. It is really a stalking horse for Buddhism, New-Age mysticism, or some other form of irrationality.
As almost every page of my book is dedicated to exposing the problems of religious faith, it is ironic that some of the harshest criticism has come from atheists who feel that I have betrayed their cause on peripheral issues. If there is a book that takes a harder swing at religion, I'm not aware of it. This is not to say that my book does not have many shortcomings-but appeasing religious irrationality is not among them.
Nevertheless, atheists have found much to complain about in the book, especially in the last chapter where I attempt to put meditation and "spirituality" on a rational footing. "Meditation," in the sense that I use the term, merely requires that a person pay extraordinarily close attention to his moment-by-moment experience of the world. There is nothing irrational about doing this. In fact, it constitutes the only rational basis for making detailed claims about the nature of our subjectivity.
Through meditation, a person can come to observe the flow of his experience with remarkable clarity, and this sometimes results in a variety of insights that people tend to find both intellectually credible and personally transformative. As I discuss in the final chapter of the book, one of these insights is that the feeling we call "I"-the sense that we are the thinker of our thoughts, the experiencer of our experiences-can disappear when looked for in a rigorous way. This is not a proposition to be accepted on faith; it is an empirical observation, analogous to the discovery of one's optic blind spots. Most people never notice their blind spots (caused by the transit of the optic nerve through the retina of each eye), but they can be pointed out to almost anyone with a little effort. The absence of the "self" can also be pointed out with some effort, though this discovery tends to require considerably more training on the part of both teacher and student. The only faith required to get such a project off the ground is the faith of scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is this: If I use my attention in a certain way, it may have a specific, reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to happen) along any path of "spiritual" practice must be interpreted in light of some conceptual scheme, and everything should be open to rational argument.
I have also taken considerable heat from atheists for a few remarks I made about the nature of consciousness. Most atheists appear to be certain that consciousness is entirely dependent on (and reducible to) the workings of the brain. In the last chapter of the book, I briefly argue that this certainty is unwarranted. The fact is that scientists still do not know what the relationship between consciousness and matter actually is. I am not suggesting that we make a religion out of this uncertainty, or do anything else with it. And, needless to say, the mysteriousness of consciousness does nothing to make conventional religious notions about God and paradise any more plausible.
Since The End of Faith was first published, current events have remained a running confirmation of its central thesis. There are days when almost every headline in the morning paper attests to the social costs of religious faith, and the nightly news seems miraculously broadcast from the fourteenth century. One spectacle of religious hysteria follows fast upon the next. Sanctimonious eruptions announcing the death of the pope (a man who actively opposed condom use in sub-Saharan Africa and shielded frocked child molesters from secular justice) are soon followed by other outbursts of religious lunacy. At the time of this writing, Muslims in several countries are rioting over a report that U.S. interrogators desecrated a copy of the Koran. Seventeen people are dead and hundreds injured. The response of the U.S. government has been to offer up some lunacy of its own. No less a spokeswoman than the Secretary of State has assured the righteous hordes that "the United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran." What form our government's intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.
Such perfect visions of unreason have been punctuated by the more ordinary trespasses of faith: daily reports of pious massacres in Iraq, of evangelical ravings against the evils of a secular judiciary, of widespread religious coercion in the U.S. Air Force, of efforts in at least twenty states to redefine science to include supernatural explanations of the origin of life, of devout pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control, of movie theaters refusing to show documentaries that report the actual age of the earth, and on and on and onward ... to the fifteenth century.
For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion persuades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense. The End of Faith represents my first attempt to call attention to the dangers and absurdities inherent in this situation. I sincerely hope that readers will continue to find the book useful.
Sam Harris
New York
May 2005
Notes
Chapter 1 Reason in Exile
1 As we will see in chapter 4, the chances
are decidedly against the possibility that he comes from the lowest strata of society.
2 Some readers may object that the bomber in question is most likely to be a member of the Liberations Tigers of Tamil Eelam-the Sri Lankan separatist organization that has perpetrated more acts of suicidal terrorism than any other group. Indeed, the "Tamil Tigers" are often offered as a counterexample to any claim that suicidal terrorism is a product of religion. But to describe the Tamil Tigers as "secular"-as R. A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, and others have-is misleading. While the motivations of the Tigers are not explicitly religious, they are Hindus who undoubtedly believe many improbable things about the nature of life and death. The cult of martyr worship that they have nurtured for decades has many of the features of religiosity that one would expect in people who give their lives so easily for a cause. Secular Westerners often underestimate the degree to which certain cultures, steeped as they are in otherworldliness, look upon death with less alarm than seems strictly rational. I was once traveling in India when the government rescheduled the exams for students who were preparing to enter the civil service: what appeared to me to be the least of bureaucratic inconveniences precipitated a wave of teenage self-immolations in protest. Hindus, even those whose preoccupations appear to be basically secular, often harbor potent religious beliefs.
3 I am speaking here of "alchemy" as that body of ancient and ultimately fanciful metallurgic and chemical techniques whose purpose was to transmute base metals into gold and mundane materials into an "elixir of life." It is true that there are people who claim to find the alchemical literature prescient with the most contemporary truths of pharmacology, solid-state physics, and a variety of other disciplines. I find the results of such Rorschach readings less than inspiring, however. See T. McKenna, The Archaic Revival (San Francisco]: Harper San Francisco, 1991), Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge (New York: Bantam Books, 1992), and True Hallucinations ([San Francisco]: Harper San Francisco, 1993), for an example of a bright and beautiful mind that takes such revaluations of alchemy seriously, however.
4 S. J. Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," Natural History, March 1997.
5 G. H. Gallup Jr., Religion in America 1996 (Princeton: Princeton Religion Research Center, 1996).
6 This is not to deny that there are problems with democracy, particularly when it is imposed prematurely on societies that have high birthrates, low levels of literacy, profound ethnic and religious factionalism, and unstable economies. There is clearly such a thing as a benevolent despotism, and it may be a necessary stage in the political development of many societies. See R. D. Kaplan, "Was Democracy Just a Moment?," Atlantic Monthly, Dec. 1997, pp. 55-80, and F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
7 Bernard Lewis, in "The Revolt of Islam," New Yorker, Nov. 19, 2001, pp. 50-63, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), has pointed out that the term "fundamentalist" was coined by American Protestants and can be misleading when applied to other faiths. It seems to me that the term has escaped into general usage, however, and that it now signifies any sort of scriptural literalism. I use it only in this general sense. The problems of applying the phrase to Islam in particular will be addressed in chapter 4.
8 C. W. Dugger, "Religious Riots Loom over Indian Politics," New York Times, July 27, 2002. See also P. Mishra, "The Other Face of Fanaticism," New York Times Magazine, Feb. 2, 2003, pp. 42-46.
9 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2003), 1.
10 As Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 57-58, notes, we have caused far more chaos in Central America, Southeast Asia, and southern Africa. Those Muslim countries which have been occupied by foreign powers (like Egypt) are in many ways much better off than countries (like Saudi Arabia) which have not. Taking Saudi Arabia as an example, despite its relative wealth-which is due to nothing more than an accident of nature-this country lags behind its neighbors in many respects. The Saudis have only eight universities to serve 21 million people, and they did not abolish slavery until 1962. P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 16, also points out that most of our conflicts of recent years have been fought in defense of various Muslim populations: the first Gulf War was fought in defense of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and was followed by a decade of air protection for the Iraqi Kurds in the north and the Iraqi Shia in the south; the intervention in Somalia was designed to relieve famine there; and our intervention in the Balkans was for the purpose of defending Bosnians and Kosovars from marauding Christian Serbs. Our original support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan belongs in this category as well. As Berman says, "In all of recent history, no country on earth has fought so hard and consistently as the United States on behalf of Muslim populations." This is true. And yet the Muslim world-view is such that this fact, if acknowledged at all, is generally counted as a further grievance against us; it is yet another source of Muslim "humiliation."
11 Of course, the Sunnis would still hate the Shiites, but this is also an expression of their faith.
12 J. Bennet, "In Israeli Hospital, Bomber Tells of Trying to Kill Israelis," New York Times, June 8, 2002.
13 "[I]n 1994, at a village south of Islamabad, police charged a doctor with setting fire to the sacred Koran, a blasphemous crime punishable by death. Before he could be tried, an enraged mob dragged him from the police station, doused him with kerosene, and burned him alive." J. A. Haught, Holy Hatred: Religious Conflicts of the '90s (Amherst, Mass.: Prometheus Books, 1995), 179.
14 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
15 As many commentators have observed, there is no Koranic equivalent of the New Testament line "Render unto Caesar those things that are Caesar's, and render unto God those things that are God's" (Matt. 22:21). As a result, there appears to be no Islamic basis for the separation of the powers of the church and state. This, needless to say, is a problem.
16 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 20.
17 Just consider what would fill our newspapers if there were no conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, the Indians and the Pakistanis, the Russians and the Chechens, Muslim militants and the West, etc. Problems between the West and countries like China and North Korea would remain-but they, too, are often the result of an uncritical acceptance of a variety of dogmas. While our differences with North Korea, for instance, are not explicitly religious, they are a direct consequence of the North Koreans' having grown utterly deranged by their political ideology, their abject worship of their leaders, and their lack of information about the outside world. They are now like a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons. If the 29 million inhabitants of North Korea knew that they were unique among the world's basket cases, they might behave rather differently. The problem of North Korea is, first and foremost, a problem of the unjustified (and unjustifiable) beliefs of North Koreans. See P. Gourevitch, "Letter from Korea: Alone in the Dark," New Yorker, Sept. 8, 2003, pp. 55-75-
18 See, e.g., D. Radin, The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), R. Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind (New York: Crown, 2003), and R. S. Bobrow, "Paranormal Phenomena in the Medical Literature Sufficient Smoke to Warrant a Search for Fire," Medical Hypotheses 60 (2003): 864-68. There may even be some credible evidence for reincarnation. See I. Stevenson, Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1974), Unlearned Language: New Studies in Xenoglossy (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1984), and Where Reincarnation and Biology Intersect (West-port, Conn.: Praeger, 1997).
19 Yes, human beings can echolocate. We're just not very good at it. To demonstrate this, simply close your eyes, hum loudly, and pass your hand back and forth in front of your face. The sound reflect
ing off your hand indicates its position.
20 Witness John von Neumann-mathematician, game theorist, savant of national defense, and agnostic-converting to Catholicism while in the throes of cancer. See W. Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
21 The Nazis disparaged the "Jewish physics" of Einstein, and the communists rejected the "capitalist biology" of Mendel and Darwin. But these were not rational criticisms-as witnessed by the fact that dissenting scientists were often imprisoned or killed.
These facts notwithstanding, K. Peng and R. E. Nisbett, "Culture, Dialectics, and Reasoning about Contradiction," American Psychologist 54 (1999): 741-54, have argued that significant differences in reasoning styles exist across cultures. While the data appear to me to be inconclusive, even if Eastern and Western minds address problems differently, there is no reason why we cannot, in principle, agree about what it is ultimately rational to believe.
22 The emergence in 2003 of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in southern China is a recent example of the global implications of local health practices. China's mishandling o( the epidemic was born not of irrational medical beliefs but of irrational political ones-and the consequences, at the time of this writing, have not been catastrophic. But it is not difficult to imagine a culture whose beliefs relative to epidemiology could systematically impose unacceptable risks on the rest of us. There is little doubt that we would ultimately quarantine, invade, or otherwise subjugate such a society.