One night when I was about eight, I decided that I would not conclude my bedtime prayer with “Amen.” I thought that praying was like making a phone call, with a ritualized beginning (“Our Father…”) and ending (“Amen”). Only between those two incantations could God hear me — like opening a channel to the away team. I decided that if I didn’t say “Amen” I could leave that channel on and thus make my whole life one unending paean to the Almighty.
Of course being eight years old I pretty much forgot about this the next time something profound happened, like getting a new Trapper Keeper. The next clear theological memory I have is from one afternoon in CCD when I asked how we knew that the Bible was true. The instructor, some poor girl a decade younger than I am now, answered that we didn’t know for sure but instead relied on our faith. At the time I found that unsatisfying. I was looking for some corroborating scientific evidence, having recently learned what science was. Of course, her answer was the only possible one.
Harris’s book is an attack on this and all other forms of faith. Although his examples of the damage caused by religion include obvious cases like the Inquisition and the Holocaust, he’s obviously not writing to convince 16th century Spaniards or Nazis. His targets are contemporary practitioners, especially well-meaning liberal Westerners who want to have it both ways: taking comfort in the history and tradition of Abrahamic religions but discarding the contradictory or flat-out unpleasant messages in its texts.
In my Catholic high school, someone once asked if Gandhi and Buddha were in heaven. “They are,” we were told, because their teachings were in the spirit of Jesus’s message. That same year we were subjected to a guest speaker on abstinence, and part of her routine included massive amounts of misinformation about birth control. I remember thinking then, as Harris does now: why do modern Catholics politely ignore prohibitions about belief in false gods but obsess over premarital sex (a topic which did not seem to especially interest Jesus anyway)? If Gandhi’s going to heaven anyway, why not be a Hindu? The food’s better.
The End of Faith can be a difficult read, even for an atheist. He explicitly rejects any “sensitivity” towards religious belief — in fact he considers this one of the West’s greatest internal threats — and it’s astonishing how transgressive this language can be. Dismissing religion as the ravings of primitive humans is just not how people talk (outside of the internet) even if some atheists do privately. Most of us, I think, try to be considerate of our friends and family. Harris is mad at us too.
Harris has been criticized by atheists, surprisingly, for not going far enough. He claims outright that paranormal phenomena have been shown to exist, and invokes Terence McKenna more times than a scientific rationalist should (i.e., ever). The book ends with a discussion on meditation, and while I get where he’s coming from (that rationalism does not equate to spiritual emptiness or the absence of wonder), it closes on an unpleasant New Age note.
There’s something seductive — and therefore, history tells us, dangerous — about thinking you’re on the correct side of a religious argument. It doesn’t matter from which end of the political spectrum you approach the book; Harris is neither right- nor left-wing. For him it’s equally true that Islam sanctions terrorism as Christianity promotes misogyny and persecution. (Actually it’s pretty much okay to equate every organized religion with misogyny.) His great fear is that these doctrines, codified when foul weather and disease were caused by God’s wrath, now influence people with access to nuclear weapons. In Harris’s worldview, only an unwavering support (I almost said belief) for strict rationalism will save us. And hey, guess what? I’m a strict rationalist. Now I feel great.
I’m not sure that’s right either, but I don’t have a better answer.