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| November 15, 2005 |
REVIEW: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
 We often take it as indisputably obvious that religious tolerance is good, that a pluralism of belief is a recipe for cooperation and prosperity. When people argue that religion is its own evil they are marginalized only slightly less than those who argue that science is the Devil's playground.
So it is certainly a tempting read when an author pipes up and pens an entire book on why religion really is bad, science really is better, and we should abandon our dogmatic faith in favor of an empirical rationalism. In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason Sam Harris gets kudos for his willingness to put his arguments out there in stark detail, utterly without sugar coating. Mary Poppins he ain't.
But kudos only go so far, and Harris perhaps could have used a dose of sugar somewhere in the process of writing this mess of overgeneralizations and uninformed libel against the believers of our world. It goes without saying, of course, that absolute belief that denies even what our rational senses tell us is a path towards disaster. Those who, in the words of one reviewer, "do not fear death for themselves, and who also revere ancient scriptures instructing them to mete it out generously to others" are a problem without question.
Harris falls down by imagining that all of religious belief either subscribes to such a worldview or tacitly endorses it by promoting supernatural dogma in the absence of proof. One wonders if the author wouldn't have been well served to read another book reviewed here, The Measure of God. Had he done so, he might have stumbled across the Gifford Lecture of one William James, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience. That lecture took place in the first years of the 20th century, and one-hundred-plus years later its insights are as informative as ever.
Most significantly, James eloquently showed something that Jewish proponents of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) had articulated long before, that religion can do more than coexist with reason; religion often relies upon it.
Harris, on the other hand, is overly blunt and hyperbolic in his disdain for religious faith, so much so that he fails to fully understand that which he is denouncing. If he did, perhaps his prose would be better tempered and much more effective. As it is, he generalizes to the point of absurdity -- Publisher's Weekly cited the following line: "mysticism is a rational enterprise; religion is not" -- and that is a shame. The underlying question of how much mainstream religious faith excuses fundamentalist interpretations is one deeply in need of being addressed with seriousness and without polemics.
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