Fortunately, these are exactly the sorts of issues that Sam Harris confronts in The End of Faith. Harris is a doctoral student in neuroscience at UCLA, yet the nice thing is that there is still something of the undergraduate about him. Everyone knows the type, the smart aleck in the back of the room who isn't afraid to raise questions that everyone else is too polite to ask, questions like: If bad ideas lead to bad acts, then why should we allow individuals to entertain ideas that are incorrect? If a friend mistakenly believes he is dying of cancer, shouldn't we disabuse him of the notion so that he doesn't do something drastic, like throw himself under a train? If he believes, similarly, that unbelievers are destined for hell, shouldn't we disabuse him of that so he isn't tempted to speed the process by shooting or blowing them up? Harris recounts the tale of a thirteenth-century bishop of Toulouse, who, on hearing that an old woman had fallen victim to the heresy of Catharism, had her carried in her sickbed to a nearby field and burned alive. Considering all those souls who would have been robbed of their chance of salvation had the infection been allowed to spread, the good bishop felt he had no choice. On the basis of the fiery prose in The End of Faith, it is evident that Harris believes we should root out heresy--defined from a modern, rationalist, scientific point of view, of course--with no less vigor.

I agree and would happily nominate him for the job of rationalist Grand Inquisitor if The End of Faith did not suffer from some serious intellectual shortcomings.

Harris is proof that Trotsky's famous "law of combined and uneven development" does not apply only to czarist Russia. Harris is well informed in some areas, but embarrassingly bereft in others. While he knows a fair amount about religion and philosophy, he has little feel for politics and even less for the ironies of historical development. Religion, as he sees it, is a bad idea that has lodged itself under the human skull and must be driven out. "It is difficult to imagine a set of beliefs more suggestive of mental illness than those that lie at the heart of many of our religious traditions," he writes. Perhaps. Yet he fails to understand the process by which ancient thinkers, struggling to understand the cosmos, would come up with hypotheses that seem ludicrous in our day but were nonetheless a significant advance in their own. Citing the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he wisecracks that not only can Jesus be "eaten in the form of a cracker" as a consequence, but that "a few Latin words spoken over your favorite Burgundy, and you can drink his blood as well." Yet transubstantiation was an attempt to make sense of Jesus' death, an event that Christians mistakenly believed had transformed the cosmos but that we now know merely helped to transform Western society. If Harris had any idea of the blood and passion expended over such doctrines, he might hesitate before engaging in low-brow, frat-house humor.

Like the Ayn Randians, The End of Faith is an example of how atheism can as easily propel one to the right as to the left. In his naïveté, Harris approvingly quotes various neocons and neolibs (Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis, Daniel Goldhagen, Fareed Zakaria, Paul Berman and so on) without any sense, so far as the reader can tell, as to why they might be considered controversial. Even worse, he advances a rationalist argument in support of Bush's jihad. His reasoning is all too simple: Osama bin Laden is the world's leading example of religion run amok. Whatever its shortcomings, the West is a paragon of reason by comparison. Therefore, whatever America does to rein in Islamic fundamentalism is worthy of support. If bin Laden and his ilk "cannot be captured," Harris writes, "otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at even greater cost to ourselves and innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world."

Bin Laden thinks the Koran is the word of God and has killed thousands. Bush thinks the same of the Bible and has so far killed several times more in Iraq. His top aides, according to Ron Suskind's recent article in The New York Times Magazine, are contemptuous of what they call "the reality-based community." So who is living in a more dangerous fantasy world? The times are so out of joint that even sound ideas like secularism and science lead people astray.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.