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End of Faith

End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (Free Press £12.99; paperback £7.99 from NSS) is reviewed by Stephanie Merritt in the Observer, 6 February 2005 and by Craig Harrison-Smith in NSS Newsline, 1 April 2005.

Stephanie Merritt

During the recent debate occasioned by religious protests against artists' freedom of expression – Sikhs at the Birmingham Rep and evangelical Christians at the BBC – it was disappointing not to hear a more robust argument put forward for the abolition of blasphemy laws altogether … Blasphemy, after all, is a charge of libel against someone who doesn't objectively exist and shouldn't be equated with religious violence or discrimination: there is a world of difference between beating someone up because they're wearing a turban and a comedian joking that a figure who died two millennia ago might have been 'a bit gay'.

Referring to Harris's book, Merritt continues:

In a radical attack on the most sacred of liberal precepts – the notion of tolerance – Harris blames religious moderates for perpetuating a climate of acceptance that nurtures extremism. It is not good enough, he argues, for moderates, or even liberal atheists, to insist that governments should accommodate freedom of personal belief, because beliefs are directly responsible for actions. … we in the West only have the luxury of indulging those who claim to have absolute knowledge about the afterlife because we have been fortunate enough to live in a society that separates church and state. Those, such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, who have encouraged a 'loving concordat' between faith and reason could not afford to do so if the church had real political influence, as is increasingly the case in Bush's America.

… a modern society should subject those [religious] beliefs to the same principles that govern scientific, medical or geographical inquiry – particularly if they are inherently hostile to those with different ideas. It's easy to laugh at the man who believes aliens are sending him messages through his hairdryer, but we don't let him run schools or make public broadcasts as if his view were anything other than a delusion. It's less amusing that international policy is decided by men who believe that the book beside their bed was written by an invisible deity and is above doubt or questioning."

Craig Harrison-Smith

In a world that is clamouring for moderation and tolerance of religious faith, Harris strongly argues for the opposite. Atheists should be angry and fight irrational religious faith before it is too late. It is not only the extremist that threatens their fellow man, says Harris but also the moderate. Although much of the book looks at the dangers of radical Islam and the religious right in America, the more controversial target is religious moderates and tolerant atheists. In an attack so vicious that it may alienate many people, Harris derides religious moderates as “traitors to reason and their faith”, leaving no ground for woolly liberalism towards any form of faith.

His points are compelling. Moderation, Harris argues, is the result of secular ideas and does not stem from texts such as the Bible and Koran. In a particularly chilling section Harris lists line after line of blood curdling incitement to violence against non-believers from the Koran and Bible: believe a moderate in spite of their religion, not because of it.

The caricature of the Christian with the “The End is Nigh” sandwich board-carrier may be more telling than we think. Harris sees a world where people are divided by religion. When this is mixed with the horrors of modern weapons of mass destruction, humanity as a whole is in peril.

Harris, whose academic field is philosophy and neuroscience, also looks at the perversion of ethics and secular law by leftover religious morality. Harris argues that laws against stem-cell research, abortion, drug use and sexual behavior in consenting adults, among others, have no foundation in rational thought and should be questioned at every turn. He also looks at the growing role that science has in the study of ethics.

The End of Faith is well written, relevant and passionate. Harris pulls no punches, and this book will offend anyone who believes that moderation and tolerance are the best answers to the world’s current religious conflicts.

Islam is attacked very specifically as a threat to the rest of humanity, and moderate Christians are derided as creating an atmosphere in modern society that gives far too much credence to irrational religious faith. Overall, Harris's polemic will gain few converts to those that don't share his world view; for those that do, his clear writing style and simply delivered arguments will add ammunition to the belt of any atheist who found their anger hard to channel in to an articulate rebuttal to irrational religious faith and tolerance of moderation.