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Table of contents
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- Arthur Miller and the Making of Willy Loman
- Comments (98)
Hell shall be their home: an evil fate.
True, there is one much-quoted line in the Koran that tells believers, "Do not destroy yourselves" - but it comes in the middle of fire-breathing calls to war against "the friends of Satan". At this point, many people would respond to Harris: Only religious extremists take these passages seriously. Surely the solution is to encourage religious moderation? Harris believes this is a profound mistake, arguing, "The very ideal of religious tolerance - born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God - is one of the principles forces driving us towards the abyss.
They even give them a friendly sheen, and encourage the sceptical to conclude that faith isn't so bad after all. Religious moderates are only moderate if they choose to ignore great slabs of their own holy texts. Few Christians today would seek to stone adulterers or execute gay people - but that's no thanks to religion. The doors leading out of spiritual literalism do not open from the inside," Harris explains. Indeed, if we accept religious moderation as an acceptable status quo, we end up in a trap.
All we can say, as religious moderates, is that we don't like the personal and social costs that a full embrace of scripture imposes on us. Thus Harris comes to the core problem we atheists have when looking at the religious moderates. The hard truth is that, whatever theological contortions well-meaning moderates put themselves through, religious extremists are simply straightforwardly obeying the commands of God as laid out in the Bible, Koran and Torah. He later says, "Religious moderation is a product of secular knowledge and scriptural ignorance.
But 'The End of Faith' then takes a strange and disturbing turn. Harris says starkly, "We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. Who is this 'we'? In the context of the chapter, he is clearly talking not about atheists but about the United States. But surely this is the country he has already identified as pickled in superstition, a nation where more people believe in the Virgin Birth than Darwinism?
Why are 'we' automatically on the side of an evangelical Christian President against in his formulation even the most moderate of Muslims? Harris' answer is patchy, and draws on some pretty dubious hard-right sources - Alan Dershowitz, Bernard Lewis, and Samuel Huntington, for example. He crosses a line here from condemning all religions for their gross delusions to claiming that Islam is a uniquely poisonous and evil system.
The Gentleman's Magazine (London, England) - Google Books
It is at this point that a crucial flaw in Harris' argument becomes clear. Although he does not state it explicitly, part of him clearly believes that religious moderates are as bad as fanatics; that there is little real difference, and even the most democratic and moderate of believers is "capable of anything". Militant atheist though I am, I can't follow him into this bog. The world is not currently experiencing a war between Islam and non-Muslims. No; what we are currently witnessing is a war within Islam between Muslim fanatics and Muslim moderates that is sometimes spilling across into the non-Muslim world.
Arthur Miller and the Making of Willy Loman
Bin Laden attacked America not because he wants to conquer the United States, but because he wants to topple the US-backed regimes that he sees as being in the corrupt, moderate Islamic camp. Since Harris does not really believe that religious moderation exists, he cannot see this. He clearly regards all believing Muslims as essentially insane and prone to suicide-murder - whereas I would say that the fanatics are insane and the moderates are merely horribly misguided.
Harris argues for a one-stage intellectual war to replace Islam with atheism. I believe this is both wildly impractical and a recipe for failure. Defining every single Muslim as a de facto al-Quaida supporter is not a recipe for the erosion of faith but for its inflammation. No; I believe we meaning all the potential victims of jihadism, both in Muslim countries and in the West must embark on a two-stage battle.
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The first step is to replace fanatical Islam with moderate Islam. This would, in itself, be a massive achievement, and it is currently a distant goal. The second step - and this is the work of centuries - is to persuade moderate Muslims of the case for atheism. Harris disregards moderate Islam as an essential intermediary stage because he cannot see how moderate religion would be any better.
This has lead him to write a chapter on Islam that is itself quite crazed, and even veers into bizarre speculation about circumstances in which a nuclear first strike would be acceptable against jihadists with a nuclear weapon.
Comments (98)
And then the book takes another strange turn. Having savaged the idea of religion for over a hundred pages, Harris suddenly announces that he wants to craft an atheist brand of "spirituality". He praises "the great philosopher mystics of the East" including the Buddha - and says that "spiritual experience is clearly a natural propensity of the human mind. Didn't the Buddha peddle notions just as absurd as the Christianity Harris has mocked?
Didn't he say that we have lived before as insects, and may live again as goats? Where is Harris' tide of scorn now? Thoughts may arise, but the feeling that one is the thinker of those thoughts has vanished. He tries to argue that this can be explored rationally and without falling back on faith, explaining, "The history of human spirituality is the history of our attempts to explore and modify the deliverances of consciousness through methods like fasting, chanting, sensory deprivation, prayer, meditation, and the use of psychotropic plants.
There is no question that experiments of this sort can be conducted in a rational manner. And yes, it is true that we can rationally investigate how people feel when, say, they don't eat for thirty days.
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But Harris then makes an unacceptable leap - one might call it a leap of faith - to argue that these altered mental states reveal something substantive about the nature of the universe, rather than simply revealing something about the set of chemical processes that occur in a body deprived of food. He says these "mystical" experiences "reveal a far deeper connection between ourselves and the universe than is suggested by the ordinary confines of our subjectivity" - but where is the evidence for this? Isn't he committing precisely the irrational leaps he condemned earlier?
Where is the critique of the layers of superstition and irrationality that coat Eastern religions just as surely as their Western cousins?
Harris plainly does not accept something I see as a basic tenet of contemporary atheism: that we live in a purely material world, and all human action must be justified within these terms. He flirts with the idea that we can connect with non-material realms at one point, he eccentrically claims there is evidence for "psychic phenomena" - which hardly seems to be a rational atheist case.
So ultimately, this provocative, occasionally brilliant book did not persuade me. True, he has some great lines; my favourite his description of faith as "what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse. I agree with him on all three, but they are quite a long way from any discussion of faith, and this is only a short book. Once he begins to digress from already-long digressions, you wonder if he is padding the book. There are also some sloppy errors: he claims that "millions" of Iraqi Shiites chose to "flagellate themselves" until "blood poured from their scalps and backs" as soon as they were liberated.
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