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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONThe Temple Of Reason
Sam Harris On How Religion Puts The World At Risk
The complete text of this selection is available in our print edition.
Sam Harris is a brave man. In a country where 90 percent of adults say they believe in God, he has written a bestseller condemning religion. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Norton) has won numerous awards for its meticulous and far-reaching arguments against the irrationality of religious belief. Harris has also drawn criticism from all sides, endearing himself to neither religious moderates nor fundamentalists, and even irritating atheists. His latest book, Letter to a Christian Nation (to be published this month by Knopf), is a bold attack on the heart of Christian belief. Clearly, this is someone who is not afraid to speak his mind.
As a teenager in the eighties, Harris became fascinated with Buddhism and Hinduism, and he made several trips to India and Nepal, where he participated in many silent meditation retreats. He later studied philosophy at Stanford University and came to see the more dogmatic teachings of both faiths as, in his word, “nonsense.” He’s currently completing his doctorate in neuroscience, researching what happens in the brain when we experience belief, disbelief, and uncertainty.
Harris began writing his first book almost immediately after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. He was dismayed by how quickly public discussion turned from pointing the finger at Islamic fundamentalism to calling for religious tolerance. As he saw it, 9/11 should have exposed the dangerous irrationality of religious belief, but instead it pushed the United States even deeper into its own religiosity. And so he began work on The End of Faith, whose central tenet is that religion — and religious tolerance — perpetuates and protects unjustifiable (not to mention just plain silly) beliefs. In an age of nuclear proliferation and jihad, Harris says, religion paves the way for violent destruction on a terrifying scale.
Harris goes after religious belief with a mixture of humor and deadly seriousness. “Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him,” he writes, “or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.” Unlike some atheists who cast clever barbs at all spirituality, Harris sees value in what he calls the “contemplative experience” and views his own Buddhist-inspired meditation practice as an evidence-based, rational enterprise.
Since the publication of The End of Faith, Harris has appeared in the documentary The God Who Wasn’t There, as well as on various cable-television programs, including The O’Reilly Factor on FOX News and Comedy Central’s news-lampoon show The Colbert Report. Though busy working on his new book, Harris made time to talk to me twice. He was charming and witty — joking, when I talked to him the second time, that he had converted to Islam since we’d last spoken — but also tough. His arguments are tight and well rehearsed, and, like a politician, he can stay “on point” and turn a question on its head. I sometimes found it frustrating to discuss life’s deepest mysteries in scientific terms. As one respondent wrote on Harris’s website (www.samharris.org): “As far as trying to rationally prove that God exists, I don’t even try. . . . So how do I know God exists? . . . I FEEL him.” This is the kind of faith Harris would like to see the end of.
Saltman: Do you think religious identity is always destructive?
Harris: Yes, insofar as people believe that such identities matter. Sure, we can all point to people who call themselves Christians or Muslims or Jews but who don’t really take their religion seriously. Obviously I’m not lying awake at night worrying about these people. But where people think there is a profound difference between being a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew, I think those identities are intrinsically divisive. Devout Muslims generally think that the Christians are all going to hell, and devout Christians return the favor. And the difference between going to hell and going to heaven for eternity really raises the stakes in their disagreements with one another.
Saltman: How is religious identity different from ethnic or national or racial identity?
Harris: I think it’s similar in the sense that they are tribal identities of a sort, and it’s across these tribal lines that human conflicts tend to occur. The problem with religion is that it is the only type of us/them thinking in which we posit a transcendental difference between the in-group and the out-group.
So the difference between yourself and your neighbor is not just the color of your skin or your political affiliation. It’s that your neighbor believes something that is so metaphysically incorrect, he’s going to spend eternity in hell for it. And if he convinces your children that his beliefs are valid, your children will spend eternity in hell. Muslim parents are genuinely concerned that their children’s faith is going to be eroded, either by the materialism and secularism of the West, or by Christianity. And, obviously, our own fundamentalist communities in the West are similarly concerned. So if you really believe that it matters what name you call God, religion provides far more significant reasons for you to fear and despise your neighbor.
Saltman: What about someone who, say, identifies as Jewish and wants to preserve that tradition, but isn’t really worried about what other religions are doing?
Harris: Well, that’s easier in Judaism than in most religions, because Judaism does not tend to be particularly concerned about what happens after death and focuses more on living well in this life. It also tends to be more of a cultural identity than a faith-based one. That said, the extreme forms of Judaism are quite divisive. There are, I’m sure, Orthodox Jews who are waiting for the Temple to be rebuilt in Jerusalem, and once that happens, they’ll be eager to live out of the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy and kill people for adultery or for working on the Sabbath — because that is what those books say you should do.
Saltman: Isn’t religion a natural outgrowth of human nature?
Harris: It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think of arguing that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it’s a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in a twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas.
Traditionally, religion has been the receptacle of some good and ennobling features of our psychology. It’s the arena in which people talk about contemplative experience and ethics. And I do think contemplative experience and ethics are absolutely essential to human happiness. I just think we now have to speak about them without endorsing any divisive mythology.
