Fighting Faith

I am about two-thirds of the way through "The End Of Faith" by Sam Harris. I may not finish it. It is one of those books that should have been an essay: an interesting thesis that could have been fully expounded in 10,000 words but that the author felt compelled to expand to 277 pages by making the same point over and over again.

The thesis, though, is one worth thinking about.

Harris' starting point is a commonplace: that faith -- particularly but not exclusively religious faith -- has been and continues to be a source of enormous evil in the world. Indeed, he spends much of his book describing case after case after case s of faith-based evil. His primary targets are the 14th Century Christian Inquisition and the 21st Century Muslim Jihadism. However, he also touches on a litany of other religiously based evil and even takes on such secular "faiths" as National Socialism and Communism. In doing so, he makes, at least implicitly, the point that the evil springs less from what is believed than from the fact of belief itself.

A deeply held belief that I am right and you are wrong on any issue important to either of us inevitably builds resentments between us that can easily escalate into hatred and violence. This is all the more likely where our disagreement is over something that is both (a) profoundlyimportant to at least one of us (e.g. the prospects of and eligibility for an afterlife) and (b) inherently incapable of being proved or even examined in any rational way. These are exactly the characteristics of religious belief, and it is for this reason that the evil produced by religion dwarfs into insignificance anything perpetrated by the Nazis or the communists or the Khmer rouge or all of such secular beliefs combined. But the point is still the same: true believers are dangerous. It is just that religious true believers are most dangerous of all.

If this was all Harris had to say, the book would be trite. But while the point tends to get lost amid a nearly endless catalogue of evils perpetrated in the name of faith, Harris' real message is that it is time for the world to start naming the evil out loud. He rightly points out that in today's society it is pretty much unthinkable to challenge another person's religious beliefs. These are matters that are considered, in the West at least, to be so personal and private as to be utterly beyond criticism. We may, of course, criticize the person's acts or the positions he takes. But even when it becomes obvious that the person's actions or positions flow directly from his faith, we have no ability to attack the faith itself despite the contempt we have for the actions or positions. All we can do, if we are so inclined, is to get into a hermeneutic debate as to whether the undergirdings of his faith (e.g. the Bible or the Koran) really do mandate what he believes they do. At the point at which we have exhausted that avenue (usually very quickly since hermenuetics for most people is itself an act of faith) we simply grow quiet. We feel it is wrong somehow to tell the person or the world that his beliefs themselves are utter nonsense

It is this squeamishness Harris wants us to outgrow.

A belief in a proposition for which there is no evidence is lunacy. We have no difficulty accepting that principle when the things believed in are alien abductions, ouiji boards, seances, invulnerability to bullets; the healing power of the snake oil salesman; etc. But when it comes to the question, say, of whether there is a heaven or hell and who will be eligible for each, we feel compelled to "respect" any belief whatsoever. We are not required, obviously, to ourselves accept what the other believes, but we are constrained by our devotion to "freedom of belief" to forbear from telling the person that his beliefs qualify him as a lunatic. But they do. The psychotic who hears voices telling him he is God has more evidence for that belief that the religious have for their belief in an afterlife. At least the psychotic has the evidence of his own senses. The believer in an afterlife does not even have that. He is in the position of one who believes that the psychotic is God simply because the psychotic told him he was.

There are many lunacies we put up with because they don't do us any harm. If Joe Blow wants to believe he was abducted by aliens, we let him because it really doesn't make any difference to us what Joe Blow believes. But things change when Joe Blow starts recruiting others to blow up things because the aliens told him to. In that case, we have no compunction about telling the potential recruits that Joe is a lunatic. Yet, if Joe tells his recruits to blow up stuff because God commands it (and will reward them with paradise in the after life) our willingness to label Joe a lunatic is significantly vitiated. We may, and do, try to stop the recruits from acting on Joe's instructions. But our argument is always that Joe is misinterpreting scripture or God's commands or whatever. We are very reluctant to call the belief itself lunacy. For if we do, there is no stopping. If belief in propositions for which there is no evidence is a good working definition of lunacy, then all religious belief is lunacy and we have no basis for condemning Joe's particular brand of lunacy any more than we do the lunacy shared by more peaceful co-religionists. All we can condemn are his acts or the acts he is advocating. But this leaves Joe with his most dangerous weapon -- his faith -- unchallenged.

But what about all the good that has been done in the name of religion? First of all, religion hasn't done that much good. Mother Teresa is famous precisely because she is so exceptional. And, for every Mother Teresa there are dozens of pederast priests. Second, the good has been done in the name of religion is far outweighed by the evil that has been done in he same cause. Religion has killed far, far more people than it has saved (in the corporeal sense). Finally, there is (again) no evidence that religion has anything to do with whatever good that has been done by religious people. An equally plausible explanation is that the religious people who have done good have done it because of who they are and would have done the same thing whether or not they were religious. That is, it is at least as likely that the impulse to do good leads some people to be religious as it is that being religious leads some people to do good.

Harris acknowledges a profound difference between 21st Century Christians and 21st Century Muslims. Rarely do you see Christians blowing themselves up in pursuit of their faith (although the actions of Christian fundamentalists shooting abortion doctors and bombing abortion clinics in the name of God seems different only in degree). But, he argues, convincingly I think, that the reason for the general differences between Christians and Muslims today is that Western Christians have largely moved beyond the principles of their faith, at least as those principles are set out in the Bible while the Muslims have not. There are whole swaths of the Bible that most modern Christians would find abhorrent if they ever bothered to read it. If you don't believe me, try reading Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Joshua some day. Indeed, most modern (i.e. non-fundamentalist) Christians see the entire Old Testament as being something of an anachronism in a religious sense. How half of the inerrant Word of God could become anachronistic over time without shaking people's faith in the rest of it is something that is hard to fathom. But it is a commonplace in modern Christian churches for the faithful to blithely dismiss the Old Testament as having been "superseded" by the New. What? The infallible deity changed his mind?

But even if we accept that convenient little sleight of hand, the New Testament itself has more than enough in it to make the modern Christian uncomfortable. Take Revelations for a starter. All of this creates enormous cognitive dissonance for the modern Christian. Yet rather than questioning his faith, he handles the dissonance by simply ignoring the "bad parts" and concentrating on the "good parts": the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, the Psalms, etc.

There is some of this going on in the Muslim world today. Western Muslim clerics and believers repeatedly stress that Islam is a religion of peace. But Harris makes a pretty good case for the conclusion that they can do this only by ignoring much of the Koranic text and/or by putting on that text "interpretations" that bear little resemblance to the actual language. This is what Christians have also done over the 600 years since the Inquisition. But this civilizing process is not (yet perhaps) taken root in the larger Muslim world. The Muslim masses still believe all of it. And they believe that the words mean what they appear to mean. So, when the Koran says that the reward for dying in the battle against the infidel is eternal salvation (and unlimited sexual promiscuity) that actually believe that. So they go out and blow themselves and their "enemies" to smithereens. Lunacy indeed. Yet the fact that Western Christians do not today share a correlative lunacy has more to do with the fact that Western Christians are today simply more willing to ignore more of their holy text than Muslims are. That was not always the case, though. Witness the Inquisition. And it may not always be the case. As much as we might hope that Islam is headed for its own Enlightenment, it seems at least as likely that Christianity is in the process of a retrograde movement toward Islam. Indeed, American fundamentalists appear to be proving Harris' point: the more believers come to truly believe that the Bible (or the Koran or any religious text) is actually true, the more intolerant, violent and dangerous they become. If we are to stop this, Harris argues, we have to be willing to go beyond condemning the acts and condemn the lunacy that produces them.

I'm not sure where all this leaves me. On a macro scale, much of Harris' thesis is hard to dispute. The historical evidence is just too overwhelming. And, if there is any merit to the injunction to "speak truth to power" perhaps Harris is right to suggest that we all ought to be telling James Dobson and anyone else who listens that he is a lunatic, not just for his positions but for his beliefs.

But when one comes down to the individual level, things get dicier. I have often said that my mother-in-law, Margaret, is probably the one "true" Christian I have ever met. She is profoundly religious yet never have I seen her faith impel her to condemn anyone, even me, her lost sheep. Is there really a need for me to confront Margaret with the fact that her faith is lunatic? Even if I did, she would just smile and say, "Oh Billy. You don't really mean that." Or some such. The fact of the matter is that, religious faith exerts a positive force in the lives of some, perhaps many, people. They recognize that portions of the Bible are problematic, but they just choose to believe that those parts are part of the inscrutable mystery of God. Our problems with the "bad" parts is not a problem with the Word; it is a reflection of our inability to fully understand. While I find this sort of faith hard to understand and impossible to practice, do I really wish that, even if I had the power to do so, I could take that faith from them. In the case of Margaret, at least, the answer is clearly no. Even if it is lunacy, it is a lunacy that is at the very worst harmless and at best a positive force in her life and the lives of those with whom she interacts.

So in the end, the problem Harris has identified -- that much evil is done in the name of faith -- is clearly true, but trite, and the solution he proposes fails because it is overbroad. It is not faith per se that is the problem. The problem lies in what people do with that faith. And, one cannot condemn all faith simply because some of the faithful use their faith for evil purposes.

Thus Spake Zarathustra.