The End of Faith...

[fajrdrako]

I just finished reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris. I found it a moving, insightful and well-expressed book. I kept wanting to copy quotes from it, and I will.

His basic premise is that religion is the root of the worst evils in the world today - all the nastiest wars, all the worst bigotry, all the worst oppression of women or minority groups, all the suicide bombing and violence. His two polarities are reason and faith and it's reason that enhances human happiness, faith which causes suffering and misery.

Of course, Sam Harris was preaching to the converted where I am concerned, and many of his comments are things I have long believed and said - for instance, that any religion based on a book is suspect because it codifies a world-view that is one or two thousands years out of date and not only irrelevant to our world, but dangerous for it; and, moreover, religions based on books prohibit what should be the spiritual duty of every single person - to think for themselves. And the best information in this book, where I, personally, am concerned, is that spirituality need not be tied to religion to be viable.

Sam Harris states it all more clearly and more strongly than I ever have, and though I agree with most of his conclusions - that rationality is not incompatible with spirituality, and is the potential salvation of our species - I don't agree with them all. He thinks pacifism is immoral - and seems to see no middle ground between killing the enemy and letting the enemy kill us: he proclaims categorically that pacifism is immoral. But when a wild animal comes into a city, we don't kill it, these days - we drug it and return it to the wild. Surely some such middle ground is possible when the wild beasts are human?

Harris has some lines that made me laugh out loud with the twisting of ideas; others that I reread because I was so impressed by the ideas expressed. He isn't afraid of semi-colons or colons or footnotes, making him my stylistic hero. The book is not only fascinating, it's gripping - though the passages about the history and explicit nature of religion in historical terms make for some grim and gruelling chapters.

What is new and interesting about Harris is that he rejects the notion of religious tolerance or religious moderation, which merely perpetuates and condones the crimes of religion. He believes we cannot afford to be tolerant of those who would destroy the world (in all senses) for the sake of their faith - not as a perversion of their faith, but as a basis of it. But religion is so closely tied to culture, and how does one destroy culture without destroying those born into that culture?

In subjective terms, the search for the self seems to entail a paradox: we are, after all, looking for the very thing that is doing the looking. Thousands of years of human experience suggests, however, that the paradox here is only apparent: it is not merely that the component of our experience that we call "I" cannot be found; it is that it actually disappears when looked at in a rigorous way." - pp. 213-214

Mysticism is a rational enterprise. Religion is not. - p. 221

While I do not mean to single out the doctrine of Islam for special abuse, there is no question that, at this point in history, it represents a unique danger to us all, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. - p. 28

Consider it: every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose eerything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?- p. 226

Man is manifestly not the measure of all things. This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. - p. 227

To say that a person is "color-blind" or "achromatopsic" is now a straightforward statement about the state of the visual pathways to his brain, while to say that he is "an evil psychopath" or "lacking in moral fibre" seems hopelessly unscientific. This will almost certainly change. If there are truths to be known about how human beings conspire to make each other happy or miserable, there are truths to be known about ethics. - p. 175.

There are sources of irrationality other than religious faith, of course, but none of them are celebrated for their role in shaping public policy. - p. 165

Saving a drowning child is no more a moral duty than understanding a syllogism is a logical one. We simply do not need religious ideas to motivate us t live ethical lives. Once we begin thinking seriously about happiness and suffering, we find that our religious traditions are no more reliable on questions of ethics than they have been on scientific questions generally. - p. 172

It is clear that we have arrived at a period in our history where civil society, on a global scale, is not merely a nice idea; it is essential for maintenance of civilization. Given that even failed states now possess potentially disruptice technology, we can no longer afford to live side by side with malign dictatorships or with the armies of ignorance. - p. 150

We should, I think, look upon modern despotisms as hostage crises. Kim Jon Il has thrity million hostages. Saddam Hussein had twenty-five million. The clerics in Iran have seventy million more. It does not matter that many hostages have been so brainwashed that they would fight their would-be liberators to the death. They are held prisoner twice over - by tyranny and by their own ignorance. - p. 151