I have had to read Sam Harris’ book "The End of Faith" for a project I am doing. My (then) publisher urged a proof copy on my in 2004, saying that I should see what was being said about religion. It didn’t seem from the blurb to have any novelty in it, so I read something else instead. But as part of a more serious piece about the new atheism, I thought I should have a go at it now, and rather than simply write "crap" or "???" where it’s needed in the margins – they are hardly large enough – I thought I would blog my adventures.
The book opens as it means to go on, with a story about a suicide bomber on a bus, blowing up an innocent middle-aged couple. All the details are left anonymous, and, he writes, we can know almost nothing about the young man except that "it is so easy – you-could-almost-bet-your-life-on-it-easy to guess the young man’s religion."
There is a nice irony to this: the book was written in about 2003, when the preponderance of suicide attacks in the world were in fact performed by Hindu/Marxist Tamil Tigers. The only detail that suggests this bomber was a Muslim is the identity of his victims – they have just brought a refrigerator, and are wondering how it will fit into their kitchen.
This sets the tone for his treatment of fact, historical and otherwise.
Let’s see: on the next page, we learn that "criticising a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture" – this is so true that Harris has sold 186 thousand copies of his latest book, Dawkins half a million of his, Hitchens nearly 400,000 of his …
"the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error, or, at best, dangerously incomplete." [my italics, his definite article] ; Curious how, in my copy of the Bible, when Jesus is asked what the commandments are, the original verse "Remember you’re smarter and better than those other bastards" has been replaced by the commandments to love God and your neighbour. The text must have been corrupted by believers. That’s the only explanation.
"When a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents in a Jerusalem street the role that faith played in his action sis invariably discounted". God, I can hardly remember the last time I heard a politician associate Islam with suicide bombing.
The next big theme of the book appears on the next page. This is an extraordinary grandiosity, which puts me in mind of an old joke about the Lone Ranger. He and Tonto are riding along in the middle of nowhere when a horde of yelling apaches appears on the horizon and they have to flee down a canyon. After a mile or so of breathtaking chase the apaches are getting closer and closer. They can be heard baying for the blood of the white man. "Tonto", says the Lone Ranger, "I think we’re done for." Tonto looks at him. "Who ‘we’, white man?" he asks.
Who ‘we’, indeed? This is a central question in a book whose argument moves from the immorality and inhumanity of religion to the necessity of torturing religious believers, because a truly scientific morality demands this. It is also, I think a question whose answer explains its popularity. "We" are the people threatened by Islam, and to some extent by fundamentalist Christianity, as indeed genuinely middle class Americans feel that they must be. "We" are also an omnipotent construct, who can put the whole world right if only we have the will.
For instance, "We" can extirpate not just fundamentalism, but all forms of religious belief. Indeed we have no choice: "One of the central themes of this book is that religious moderates are themselves the bearers of a terrible dogma the imagine that the path to peace will be paved once each of us has learned to respect the unjustified beliefs of others. I hope to show that 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 principal forces driving us toward the abyss."
Having thus established that religious tolerance is a luxury "we" can’t afford, he goes on, immediately, to argue that religions are obnoxious because they are necessarily intolerant.
"We can no longer ignore the fact that billions of our neighbours believe in the metaphysics of martyrdom, or in the literal truth of the book of Revelation, or any of the other fantastical notions that have lurked in the minds of the faithful for millennia … words like ‘God’ and ‘Allah’ must go the way of ‘Apollo’ or Baal’ or they will unmake our world."
How little time it seems since the possessors of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons were a threat to "us" because they were godless communists.